Sacrality Index: Hengistbury Head 2024

250 x 220 x 170cm

Plaster, jesmonite, resin, raw material, found objects, oil on canvas, photo transfers on fabric, cotton, wood.

Graduate degree show, Arts University Bournemouth.

'Sacrality Index: Hengistbury Head' is an interdisciplinary, site-responsive installation which presents an amalgamation of recorded and generated information from various fieldwork visits/pilgrimages to Hengistbury Head, while simultaneously envisioning the merging of boundaries between romance and research.

The installation consists of a large organic form made of plaster which organises and encases the displayed findings; an oil painting on canvas, jesmonite and raw material relief sculptural plaques, screens showing fieldwork footage and headphones playing an audio piece of collected sounds. Employing a blend of both devotional and academic processes, the work appears as both an index and shrine, containing remnants and symbols of sacred encounters during and extended time learning a historically, culturally and ecologically potent land local to Dorset: Hengistbury Head.

Through these mergings I am inviting a meditation on the religious impulse, and where our capacity for belief may reside in an increasingly technological and scientific world, where, simultaneously, further development is perhaps crucial to preserving the sacrality of the natural world.

These ruminations emerge from interrogating understandings of knowledge and land in academia, and what colonial foundations might underpin standardised forms of enquiry, and which practises are therefor excluded from the sphere of research. Ecofeminist critiques of modern science also inform these interrogations, while critiques of essentialism in ecofeminism have encouraged a dialectical approach in my methodology.