Ghosts of the Restless Shore
From the mouth of the River Mersey to the Ribble estuary stretches England’s largest undeveloped dune system - the Sefton Coast.
The Sefton Coast is a transitional point between the known and unknown, a place in between danger and safety, between every day settlement and wilderness, in which its natural cycles work as both an obscuring and revealing force. It is landscape alive with special wildlife and its coastal waters are 'home' to famous shipwrecks.
'Ghosts of the Restless Shore: Space, Place and Memory' is an exhibition of new contemporary art by four artists (Tim Collier, Jake Campbell, Rob Strachan and Mike Collier) integrating visual, aural, historical and oral/written/textual experiences of the natural/social history of the Sefton Coast. The artists walked the Sefton Coastal Footpath together in the summer of 2014 and the work in the show is based around the experiences of that walk as well as a sustained period of research in 2014/15 undertaken by the artists into the social and natural history of the coast.
All the work in the exhibition examines, in one form or another, the way we (as culturally and socially informed people) interact with the natural environment, not just in terms of the way in which the landscape is experienced, but also the way in which it is interpreted and imagined.
For this project, Mike Collier used local, colloquial, dialect names integrated into a series of images. When he was a child, Mike used to walk with his brother, Tim, and his family, through these sand dunes and along the coast, and has incorporated illustrations and texts from historical family guide books about flora as well as drawing on, using, and displaying, specimens from the botanical archive of the flora of the coast held by the Botany Department at the World Museum, Liverpool.
I worked on six pieces in collaboration with Mike Collier working on typography, digitisation of hand rendered art work, colour, finish and print.
24 Birds of the Sefton Coast
Indicative Flora of the Sefton Coast
Everything Seen and Heard on Walk 1
Everything Seen and Heard on Walk 2
Everything Seen and Heard on Walk 3
Everything Seen and Heard on Walk 4
