Commissioned by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Invisible Dust.

Hear about this project in my interview with BBC Radio York:

“After Anna: Blueprint Impressions from Today’s Seas”, cyanotype installations in public spaces, 2023.

In the summer of 2023 I launched the exhibition of the community art project I had been working on in the beginning half of the year. Commissioned by Invisible Dust and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as part of their Wild Eye art and nature project, I worked with different community groups and members of the public introducing them to the pioneering work of English botanist and artist Anna Atkins and the photographic process cyanotype, to make images using seaweed and litter collected from local beaches. Groups included Scarborough Sixth Form, Barrowcliff Primary School, Scarborough Disability Action Group, and Gallows Close Community Centre. The project, “After Anna: Blueprint Impressions from Today’s Seas” reflects on the important role of seaweed to help mitigate climate change as well as the problem of marine pollution. It references Atkins’s extensive study “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853), considered the first book to have been illustrated with photographic images, and reflects on how our seas have changed in the 180 years since it was first published, with several species of seaweed now lost and an ever increasing amount of plastic waste invading the marine ecosystem. The project resulted in an exhibition across two spaces in Scarborough: a shop window at 33 Newborough, where the original prints were exhibited, and large scale banners of a selection of the prints were displayed in the iconic Scarborough Market Hall.