The exhibition Our Wider Flesh charts the first year of my practice-based PhD project 'Mothering Beyond the Flesh', which investigates the relationships between landscape, maternal agency and creative practice. Situated in the post-industrial and semi-rural landscape of West Yorkshire - where I was born, raised and currently live with my two young children - the first year of this research has focussed on uncovering the historical and theoretical roots of my own separation from this landscape, and how maternal and creative practice can generate narratives that might illuminate ways in which to attend and re-attach ourselves to the immediate environment. In addition to the video Our Wider Flesh, the exhibition presents a series of ceramic works made with materials foraged from the mines and fields close to the artist's home, responding to the flesh of the land through intimate and performative sculptures, installations using projections, photography and auto-ethnographic writing. Engaging with maternal, phenomenological, ecofeminist and landscape theory, the works on display are meditations on placemaking, geological deep-time intimacy and the cyclical nature of dwelling and caregiving, becoming research artefacts that trace the convergence of these different practices.
The exhibition takes its name from an essay written by cultural ecologist David Abram, who describes the journeys of migratory animals such as the Monarch Butterfly and Sockeye Salmon using the sensory exchange that guides them across the surface of the Earth to reproduce. These animals navigate thousands of miles over land, through oceans and along rivers to exact locations with no 'internal map' or representational image projected outwards onto the world, guiding them to their destination. Instead, it is performed through the sensations of the landscape experienced through their bodies. As Abram suggests, the landscape becomes part of their 'wider flesh.'

Estacion de Guaguas (bustop), 11 clay sculptures, 2024
The sculptures were presented on plinths each at different heights and arranged in a snake-like sequence cutting diagonally cross the gallery space. They all incorporate materials foraged from different landscapes around Yorkshire where I take my children, including the National Coal Mining Museum, the beaches at Flamborough Head, and the fields around our home in Denby Dale. Coal, mine ochre, glacial deposits from the last ice-age discovered in landslides on the coast, and clay from fields used for farming were applied as slips and glazes for the sculptures.
The use of the word ‘Guagua’ to describe these sculptures is explained in an artist book created to accompany the vessels, highlighting how it is as a response to the convergence of storytelling, carrying babies inside and outside of the body, migration to and from the island of Lanzarote, and the methodologies involved in tending to clay (the flesh of the landscape) creating vessels that reflect the chaos of caregiving, attachment, and separation to both bodies and land, and the forms that emerge from this convergence of methodologies.

Shields, Doorways, Apertures, 16 digital prints on recycled paper, 2024.
The arch is a reoccurring shape I encounter daily with my children as we move through the landscape of our homeland. In many ways it is one of the very few enduring forms that continue to exist as the environment and architecture changes to accommodate our ways of dwelling, serving as a a symbol of defence, doorway or aperture that bears witness to the decline of spirituality and/or perhaps a certain disenchantment with the landscape.
The Maternal Stratum exhibition (2023) was one of the outcomes of the Develop Your Creative Practice grant I was awarded by Arts Council England in 2022, to research alternative printing processes which may allow me to begin working towards establishing a more sustainable and environmentally engaged creative practice. Throughout this research, situated in the landscape of my childhood and where I currently live with my own children, I have been primarily drawn to photography and its endless opportunities to play with light and surface, time and place, harnessing an alchemy of light-processing materials found within this environment. Along with making inks from plants, excavating clay from reservoirs, coal and ochre from local mines, I have also tried to confront the ubiquitous plastic spaces from the often inescapable toxic, consumerist culture that my children are exposed to. I view this work as the result of a practice embedded in where I dwell: a place of historical significance pertaining to the industrial revolution and subsequent ecological crisis. The alternative photographic processes I have been learning - such as soil chromatography, cyanotype and anthotype - serve as receptors for reconnecting with this landscape of the Anthropocene, both above and below the surface. The different works on display are fragments of newly discovered encounters with materials and entanglements within my immediate surroundings, sometimes transforming these into traces of voids that may appear. By illuminating this sense of loss that I experience with my children, my work hopes to open up a maternal dialogue about, what the Nigerian poet and writer Bayo Akomolafe describes as, becoming a 'citizen of grief' in the world.
This proiect and exhibition has been made possible through the DYCP grant awarded by Arts Council England. I would like to express gratitude to The Art House for their ongoing support, and the staff at The National Coal Mining Museum for valuable archive access and coal/ochre contributions.
The Spanish term sobremesa translates in English as ‘upon (or about) the table’, and is a tradition of sitting around the dining table and enjoying conversation after a hearty meal. Earlier this year, I printed the surface of my dining table and this felt like a gateway into bringing together the histories and materialities of two very different locations that are entangled in my life: West Yorkshire and Lanzarote. I became a mother in Lanzarote and feel embedded in its landscape, however, a series of unexpected events returned me back to my childhood home in rural West Yorkshire. Here, I live in an imaginary world of Lanzarote, exploring my relationship to both of these places from the position of motherhood and living in an epoch of time defined by climate crisis and the destruction of the natural world. I find the melancholy of this post-industrial landscape inescapable, and my work always seems to communicate a sense of loss, absence or dislocation, made manifest in the separation of the domestic from the wild and the isolation of late stage capitalism. Utopian ideas, simulations and fantasies fill these empty spaces. I feel the need to engage in a geological sensuality - perhaps a kind of romance or poetry - to recuperate and reconcile the different materialities and processes that contribute to a sense of place. There is an analogy to finding fossils or archeological artefacts buried in layers of strata akin to memories, sedimented and eroded through creative practice. I’m interested in the garden as a site of social and sculptural mediation between people, landscapes, ecology and systems of dwelling, nurture and preservation. I made this installation, Sobremesa, as a hybrid site for telling stories about encounters within my maternal stratum of the Anthropocene.

Sobremesa /The Night Sky
A relief print of my dining table, which has great significance for me since becoming a mother, as almost everything I do with my family and my creative practice happens there. Within this print, the trace of our different activities is exposed, like a document or family cosmology, and is also a window into an imaginary universe.