Art-science collaboration with Sara Dudman
CONVERGENCE 2024-2025
Convergence is anchored in and resourced from the geology of the South West of England. It confronts the dominant worldview of separation from the natural world.
Founded in 2024, following several years of working alongside and enriching one another’s practices, Convergence’s purpose is to explore a joint, post-disciplinary language to engender deepened connections with the Earth and each other, in this time of environmental and social crisis.
We’ve worked once again with filmmaker Hannah Earl who has documented the evolution of our collaboration in a film.
FLOW Summer 2023
I worked with artist Sara Dudman RWA on the FLOW exhibition at the Somerset Rural Life Museum in Glastonbury (May 20th - September 5th 2023). The exhibition brought together five artists, creating artwork across a range of media in order to celebrate Somerset’s amazingly diverse coast and waterways.
As part of Sara’s contribution to the exhibition, Sara and I engaged in a dialogue between artist and scientist to explore the landscape in new ways. We walked along the river Brue and waterways in the Somerset Levels from Glastonbury to Burnham-on-Sea, collecting earth pigments and stories.
Together, we explored the process of making paints from the soils of the Levels, unravelling the stories they contain about the history of the landscape, both geological and human. We ran a series of workshops with local community groups and schools. Their experience of their local landscape was incorporated into the exhibition through a collaborative artwork which was displayed in the museum.
Film-maker and musician Hannah Earl made this beautiful video of the FLOW project, including nomadic-sporadic walks and studio days.
Past events
Steps in Stone first started working with artist Sara Dudman on a community event at Brean Beach on the Somerset Coast in 2021, offering mud-painting sessions with locals and tourists using earth pigments collected along the coast. This way of engaging with the beach led to much creativity from participants, and many conversations around our interaction with the fragile ecosystem of the beach and broader climate crisis conversations.
Read this blog post for a description of the day: Mud Painting on Brean Beach