The Problem of Being the Problem: creating practice-based fieldworking along climate vulnerable coastlines

Abstract

Focused on multisensory encounter with local semi-flooded sea caves and their communities in the crowded shores of Torbay’s Marine Conservation Zone, South West UK, this thesis questions how art and writing, made out of art-based practices of fieldworking (Crone et al., 2022), can respond to the threats posed to climate vulnerable coastal habitats from the global phenomenon of sea level rise. It asks, what is response, and how does an approach emerge from bodily encounters with fragile marine cave ecologies . Enquiring how acts of prolonged noticing can bear witness, the research considers what it means to be human in such a place, asking what advantage the disturbance that art making (through performative practices and immersion in the field) brings to the act of witnessing. Drawing on feminist posthumanities and feminist new materialisms, this thesis takes a critical position regarding the idea of ‘witness’ in science and art. Informed by Susan Schuppli’s concept material witness (Schuppli 2020) and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality (Alaimo, 2018), the work considers matter as archive and carrier. Further, it contends that biota and entities reliably bear witness.
In an interweaving of artwork and writing, and drawing on material-discursive practices, this thesis considers sea caves through their various enmeshed relationships as phenomena, following Karen Barad’s writings on agential realism (Barad, 2003). The field work involves regular, repeated approaches to the habitats of very local marine caves, keeping to the rhythms of the tides while being sensitive to ecosystem temporalities. The artworks created are guided, performative field trips, performance lectures and immersive film and sound installations which fold in and through each other in a remixing of field data. This data is gathered using alternative ways of sensing such as ritual, augury, conjuring and incantation, as well as methods designed for extended sensing. These strategies are developed as means of sympathetic attunement to coastal ecologies that have long become compromised by carbon-intense imaginaries. The immersive installations are proposed as ‘remote witnessing technologies’ which transcribe the material conditions of site into sensual atmospheres aimed at generating estranged, affective states that accentuate a radical sympathy designed to nurture sensitivity for emergent intertidal worlds.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Plymouth
Supervisor	Jane Grant (Director of Studies (First Supervisor)), Carole Baker (Other Supervisor), Heidi Morstang (Other Supervisor) & Sarah Blissett (Other Supervisor)