Lydia Halcrow
Lydia Halcrow is an artist, researcher and educator whose practice based PhD was undertaken at Bath School of Art, UK. She is an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University and a tutor for the Open College of Arts. Her artistic research focuses on collaborative and experimental embodied processes that make with a place to form 'matter maps' that re-map a landscape in the context of the unfolding climate crisis. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally.
GROUND TEXTURE RECORDINGS
The work submitted for this show is an ongoing series called 'Ground Texture Recordings'. The work stems from an experimental and improvisation process that attaches metal plates to the base of each walking shoe to slow down my walking body and to make it strange within the landscape so that I am forced to tune into the traces of human and more-than-human worlds and my own impact on the earth underfoot through the scale of each and every footstep. The resulting work is made through collected local earth pigment that I make into printing ink to form experimental drypoint etchings with the aluminium plates underfoot.
I see this approach as a collaborative process to record the textural marks made between my walking body and the surface of the Taw Estuary in North Devon. It records 6 years of walks and close observation of the changes to this place - a place I knew well as a child as my Grandmother lived overlooking the Taw. Increasing storms and rising sea levels are eroding the coast and washing in plastic and other debris daily. The water is now too polluted to bathe in. The walks and the works mark onto the surface of each metal plate through abrasion our human abrasive relationship with this and other places. They also form 'matter maps' that re-map this place through a counter cartographical framework, offering an earthy/textural record of the surface of a place due to be underwater in my or my children's lifetimes.
