Most rivers have sacred personifications – in the form of tutelary deities. For the River Severn, this is ‘Sabrina’, or ‘Hafren’ in Welsh]. The project will seek to expand and deepen the ways in which water landscapes are encountered and understood – scientifically, artistically and socially. Layers of industry, agriculture, vegetation, soil, rock and water make up the territory of the Severn Estuary. Cultural layers of prehistory, history and story and myth are enduring sources of conjecture. All of these – together with the human and non-human communities – fuse to form the ecology of the estuary, which has the second-largest tidal range in the world. This residency project will initiate new conversations and involvements by developing film/sound/music-based artworks, extracting some of the hidden and intangible essences of this water landscape. As Artist In Residence, Antony Lyons will also draw on his own extensive previous work on water environment themes (pollution, climate-change, biodiversity, working water communities etc.), and link into CCRI research streams relating to ecosystem services, water/food security, landscape and community issues.

1. SABRINA DREAMING
Severn Estuary Tidelands
Antony Lyons
Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014

2. Sabrina Dreaming
This is a year-long artist residency hosted by the Countryside and Community
Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire and supported
by a Leverhulme Fellowship grant.
In conjunction with CCRI researchers and others, the residency project will
seek to expand and deepen the ways in which this water landscape is
encountered and understood - scientifically, artistically and socially.
New conversations and involvements will be initiated by developing film/
sound/sculpture-based artworks, extracting some of the hidden and intangible
essences of this coast, especially in the context of the pressing need for
anticipatory adaptation to climate-instability
Sabrina Dreaming
Many rivers have sacred personifications - in the form of tutelary deities. For the River
Severn, this is 'Sabrina' or 'Hafren' in Welsh. The Severn Estuary coast has the second largest
tidal-range in the world.
Potentially will involve CCRI research streams relating to ecosystem services, water/food
security, landscape and community issues.

3. The field areas for the residency
will be chosen from within this
estuarine coastal zone

4. photo: J Dearbergh

5. photo: J Dearbergh

7. Existing projects by Lyons on the estuary
Submerged (Drowned Lands)
(a sculptural installation project)
Transgression (Rising Waters)
(a short film)
Between The Tides
(a coastal cultural/artistic exchange)

8. Past involvements of Lyons with the estuary
Pollution control/regulation/planning: sewage, industrial effluents etc.
Landscape-based creative projects elsewhere on/near this coast Devon, North Somerset, Bristol (River Avon)

9. Eleven Minutes (Tide and Time), 2006

10. Eleven Minutes (Tide and Time), 2006

11. Eleven Minutes (Tide and Time), 2006

12. SHADOWS
AND
UNDERCURRENTS
‘Aliveness Machines’

13. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

14. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

15. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

16. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

17. ‘Aliveness Machines’, Devon, 2012

18. ‘Aliveness Machines’, Devon, 2012

19. ‘Aliveness Machines’, Devon, 2012

20. ‘Aliveness Machines’, Devon, 2012

21. ‘Aliveness
Machines’,
Devon, 2012

22. Working with the Ravilious (Beaford Arts)
Archive, Devon, 2012

23. The Severn Barrage - a recent ‘activist’ issue
Disconnection/ Separation
Narrow assessments - economic, technical, scientific
“People aren’t going to get excited by Save The Eel ! ”

24. "The Angler’s Trust estimate that 25% of all salmonid
spawning habitat in England and Wales lies upstream
of the proposed barrage, but the estuary is also a
migratory route for sea trout, sea lamprey, river
lamprey, allis shad, twaite shad and eel.”

25. AIR - Sabrina Dreaming : Activating the gap?
An attempt to provide a platform for more diverse
involvements, and to explore new transdisciplinary
responses to this place:
A geopoetic approach
- an interweaving of the rational and the imagination.
GEOPOETIC POSSIBILITIES AT THE ESTUARY

27. "The term geopoetry was first coined by geologist Harry
Hess in the 1960s to introduce his readership to the novel
idea of plate tectonics. He described his speculations as
geopoetry in order to induce his readers (mostly other
geologists) to suspend their disbelief long enough for his
observations about seafloor spreading, driven by magma
rising continuously from the mantle, to catch on. He
needed his audience, in the absence of much hard data, to
speculate imaginatively, as if reading poetry....a mental space
where conjecture and imaginative play are needful and
legitimate”
Don McKay, The Shell of the Tortoise, 2013

28. GEOPOETICS
mycelial, rhizomic
geologic
imagining multiple futures
sentimental
a tapestry
a weaving
resistance, challenging
shamanic, predictive, curative
bridging the gaps - art, science, environment, technology

29. rhizomic/
mycelial
embracing complexity

30. GeoPoetics
knowledge and imagination
people and place
“The geopoetic impulse seeks to connect
emotionally, holistically, a fusion of the rational,
the imagination, the physicality of materials and a
reaching out to the hidden within landscapes.”

31. DEEP MAPPING....and counter mapping
"Deep maps will be slow – they will naturally move at a speed
of landform or weather"
Clifford McLucas (Brith Gof)
"Deep mapping is part of the archaeology of the contemporary
past"
Michael Shanks
“Deep mapping aims to challenge the official management of
memory that fixes the value and uses of places.”
Iain Biggs

32. Geopoetics + Deep Mapping
projects that aim to re-connect people to place and processes
geopoetic sculpture/installation:eco-symbolic materials
data-augmented intermedia installations
(incorporating ‘aliveness machines’)
field methods:listening, walking, dialogues, stories
“subvert the dominant paradigm”/ empowerment

33. “The land unfolds for the geologist as he passes over it,
revealing an infinite number of perspectives that are
integrated and contrasted in his mind....these results are built
upon the intuitive use of judgement in which the geologist
selects and constructs a system of signs, and blends multiple
perspectives from a nearly infinite amount of potential data."
Robert Frodeman

37. Before and After

38. Before

39. After

40. TRANSGRESSION
‘‘a relative rise in sea level resulting in
deposition of marine strata over
terrestrial strata. The sequence of
sedimentary strata formed by
transgressions and regressions provides
information about the changes in sea
level during a particular geologic time’’

41. TRANSGRESSION - A FILM
Anticipatory Adaptation
‘Stilt Life’
Occupy the Intertide

42. ‘coastal squeeze’
‘hold the line’
‘managed retreat’

44. Transgression (Rising Waters)

46. Reminders of the Desert

47. Reminders of the Desert

48. TRANSGRESSION
"An exploratory geopoetic essay, derived from a series of walks undertaken
by artist-researcher Antony Lyons and Dr Iain Biggs at the Severn Estuary
coast during 2013. Speculations on the past, present and future of this lowlying coastal area.
We take as our starting point the definition of ‘Transgression’ as a geological
term describing an advance of the sea over land areas. Our essay is based on
fieldwork (walking, listening, recording), archival research, exploratory
conversations and production of intermedia collages.
In the context of climate-change and rising sea-levels, we use poetic
juxtaposition to creatively engage with anticipatory adaptation strategies.
This hybrid composition incorporates images, voice, musical composition
and recorded soundscapes. Touching on themes that include deep-time; landuse; building with nature; rewilding and the commons, we offer a provocative
meditation on a topic, not an argument (or if so - a gentle one).

49. Installation - Art+Science
Donegal, 2011

50. Donegal, 2011

51. Donegal, 2011

53. Portugal - Landscape, Community and Water, 2013

54. Portugal - Landscape,
Community and
Water, 2013

55. Portugal Landscape,
Community and
Water, 2013

56. Portugal - Landscape,
Community and Water,
2013

57. Portugal - Landscape,
Community and Water,
2013

58. In a recent landmark case, a court in New
Zealand conferred legal personhood on the entire
Whanganui River system.
The court ruling also postulates that the
indigenous iwi people have very specific
responsibilities for the river and watershed,
caring for the river as a person.

59. ”We shall never cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
T. S. Eliot,
Little Gidding, from Four Quartets

60. Project Blog
sabrinadreaming.blogspot.co.uk

61. Example of a soundart project on the
Severn, by Liminal
Black Water Brown Water began as a site-specific headphone
piece for the island that separates the river Severn from the
Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal at the Sourport Canal
Basins. The colour of these two water systems becomes a central
metaphor in the work, which is presented as a dialogue between
James Brindley, the great canal engineer and Sabrina, mythical
Goddess of the River Severn. The piece has subsequently been
re-worked into a number of other forms including a book, a radio
programme and a concert performance.
https://archive.org/details/RadiaSeason018190

62. Conceptual Influences on
Sabrina Dreaming
These 3 photos are all pilgrimages,
and all involve tidal situations
...and transformations...

64. This is probably the most famous photograph
from the Severn Estuary and represents a rupture
of sorts - the end of ‘mass’ intimacy with this part
of the tidally-affected coast. The Severn Bridge
opened later in 1966, making it possible to take
that passage from England to Wales cocooned
within a vehicle.
Any sense of the visceral unpredictability of this
coast is lost, as are the heightened polarised
emotions of attraction/reliance versus danger/fear.

67. Possibilities
An Open Observatory for Intimate Science
Intimate Science is
"coupling the virtual world to the physical",
"a new generation of artists is helping to make
science intimate, sensual, intuitive".
Roger Malina, Leonardo
67

69. Ghandi’s ‘Salt March’ arriving at the coast at Dandi, 1930:
The main point of his 240 mile long march to the sea was
political and subversive - a challenge to Britain's Salt Acts
which prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt. The
action formed a pillar of Ghandi’s “satyagraha,” or mass civil
disobedience. What the image also reveals is the age-old and
powerful human relationship to the coast in the form of
salt-harvesting.
Social Resistance - ritual disobedience - transgression

70. The Salt March was also called the White Flowing
River because all the people were joining the
procession wearing white khadi.
“Even our old aunts and great-aunts and grandmothers
used to bring pitchers of salt water to their houses and
manufacture illegal salt. And then they would shout at
the top of their voices: 'We have broken the salt law!”
“The whole concept of Satyagraha (Satya is truth
which equals love, and agraha is force; Satyagraha,
therefore, means truth force or love force) was
profoundly significant to me.” Martin Luther King

72. ‘Contemplating Joyce's
scrotum-tightening sea,
Sandycove, Dublin’
photo of Joseph Beuys,1974
The image holds and reveals (amongst other associations)
the Beuysian idea of ‘social sculpture’; the importance of
myth, soul, symbolism and ancient shamanic thought; the
Joycean epiphanies by the sea (at/near this location); or
even his ‘thinking like a river’, as in Finnegans Wake.

73. SOCIAL SCULPTURE (BEUYS)
Engaging with processes - ecological and social
Embracing what is unfinished rather than what is
complete, what seems unacceptable rather than
what reassures..
Transformativity
“fail again - fail better…”