Caroline Wright
- Current PhD student
- Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD
Drifting Ecologies: Can the practices of drawing, swimming and writing address the lived experiences of rapid coastal erosion?
On the Suffolk coast in the East of England, the foreshore holds an identity as a site of leisure and as a contested zone where political, social and economic factors are at play. This geographical area is subject to weather, tide, and longshore drift, creating a changing liminal profile that is regularly both dramatically and insidiously re-mapped, rendering a proportion of the local population at risk of losing their homes to the sea. Bearing witness to the destruction of nature, by nature, is emphasised by a prolonged connection with this location, borne of walking the unstable coastal path and sea swimming.
Foregrounded by considering bodies, experiences and behaviours in liminal space to seek out interstitial spaces of knowing, this research seeks to discover if drawing, swimming and non-fiction writing can illuminate and support an environmentally adaptive and productive relationship in a fragile context. Can and how do these productive processes of feeling change, and as a result a recognition of the challenges of preventing or controlling change, become a route to acceptance through these outputs and to what extent? Roger Ackling makes active material connections between natural forces and the body, translating time and tangible object in an inter-dependent relationship between found materials, and charred surface from directed, magnified sunlight. His use of material ingrained with histories ‘rescued from the edges of our everyday lives’ (anon., n.d.) with collaboration between the unpredictable and a carefully planned creative process reveals new ways to understand everyday shifts and forces. Working from Ackling’s investigations, I am proposing a fluid mode of production built on a pre-conceived plan, as a means to reveal place. I aim to discover what holding on to and fixing volatile forces can offer in the face of physical and psychological loss, and if and how drawing, swimming, and writing contribute to this process. Within this, I am seeking to recognise possibilities within art created out of insistent exchanges between body and natural world, to reveal ecosophical approaches to change and adaption to living with precariousness and loss.
Coastal erosion is characterised in Suffolk by patterns of loss and gain along the coastline. Arnold-de Simine (2013) and DeSilvey (2017) recognise altering archives, where memory offers a context for respecting and marking the past to meet the future. Continual revision of the Suffolk coast, an interrelational site of spatial and temporal encounter, challenges memory making to mark place as an enabler towards constructive futures. DeSilvey (ibid) notes that in inter-relational sites of spatial and temporal encounter, physical preservation of the status quo is fruitless. This part of the coastline is characterised by the presence of a number of locally mobilised actions to preserve and protect the foreshore, including those that are privately funded. Arguments placing human action and impact upon the world as defining the era known as the Anthropocene (Butzer 2015, Crutzen 2006) suggest humankind is at the centre of the earth. Contradictions surrounding the role of humanity where nature is situated on the one hand and the human on the other, a choice for or against anthropocentrism, a centre, or rather two, man and nature, between which one supposedly has to choose (Latour 2018) provides a useful frame for this enquiry.
Key details
Supervisors
Gallery
More about Caroline
Biography
Caroline Wright is an artist and practice-based researcher exploring the connections, entanglements and relationships of eroded coastal material and the sea swimming body where sensation and bearing corporeal witness to a disappearing coastline may articulate understanding of change and adaptation. She has exhibited work internationally and has completed commissions for festivals, galleries and universities including ITV, Cambridge University, Norfolk and Norwich Festival, London 2021, PSi19 @ Stanford University and The Scott Polar Museum.
Degrees
MA Fine Art, Norwich School of Art and Design 2002 (now known as Norwich University of the Arts), BA (Hons) Fine Art, Norwich School of Art and Design 2000
Experience
Programme Leader for Fine Art (post-and undergraduate), Open College of the Arts (Distance Learning) 2011-, Senior Fellow Higher Education Academy 2018. Lecturer and external examiner , various institutions inc. Liverpool Hope University, University Centre Colchester, University College London, Anglia Ruskin University, University of Greenwich.
Awards
Bryan Robertson Award Nominee, 2017
Trinity College Cambridge Fellowship Nominee, 2016
a-n Bursary, professional development award, 2016
Arts Council England Grants for the Arts/ Cambridge Science Festival 2016 (for Breath Control)
Firstsite Collectors Group Award, 2015
Arts Council England Grants for the Arts/ Performing Rights Society Award for Out of Water score and performance, Sasakawa Fund, Japan - travel & research grant, Asagaya School of Art Tokyo, 2010
Arts Council England Escalator Visual Artist, 2009
Turnstone Grant, 2009
Arts Council England, 2003
Artsadmin Artist’s Bursary, East England Award, 2003
Ray Finnis Charitable Trust Award, 1999
Exhibitions
Trellis3, researcher/artist collaboration with Dr Tim Adlam, Dr Ben Oldfrey, Dr Youngjun Cho and Maryam Bandukda, 2021-
Commission, International Fair Trial Conference Award (touring) 2021
Re-Frame: A nomadic response to W G Sebald [on Orford Ness] Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, UEA, National Trust 2019
Old Cold, research performance with Dr Carla Rees, Toynbee Hall, London 2019
Breath Control: Osmosis, performance & installation, The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill, London, produced by Artsadmin 2019
Temporal, Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge University 2018
Breath Control:Osmosis, performance, Latitude Festival, Suffolk 2017
Royal Ulster Academy Exhibition, guest artist, Northern Ireland 2017
Breath Control: Notes, Space to Breathe/Utopia, Somerset House, London 2017
Breath Control, performance, Cambridge Junction/Cambridge Science Festival 2017
Sawdust and Threads, exhibition, UCL Anthropology. Dept 2016, Breath Control, performance, le Collectif BLAST, Angers, France 2015
Sawdust and Threads, Norwich Castle Museum & Gallery, The Scott Polar Museum and University College London Museums and Collections 2014
My Home is my Museum, performance, online public collection, publication and public event for Curating Cambridge, Cambridge University Museums 2014
Out of Water, performance, (with Helen Paris), Escalator East to Edinburgh, Summerhall, Edinburgh Festival 2014
Impossible Changeling, installation, Undercurrent Festival, Shoreham 2014
Out of Water, performance, PSi19 Conference, Stanford University, USA 2013
The Inishlacken Project, invitation residency, Inishlacken Island, Galway, Ireland 2013
Publications
2016 Contributor to Rowles S, Professional Practice: 20 Questions: Interviews with UK Undergraduate Fine Art Staff Exploring How Students are Prepared for Life After Art School, Q Art London, 2016
2015 Chapter co-authored with Dr Helen Paris, Out of Water endings and beginnings: a DIY Love Letter to Performers, DIY Too, The University of Chichester
Conferences
Uses of Lament: a symposium around the Irish Famine & legacies of trauma, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, London 2019