Lily Tiger Tonkin-Wells was awarded the We are Water: Interconnections Across Land & Sea residency project based in the Pen Llŷn a’r Sarnau area with Gwynedd Council Environment Directorate and Marine Conservation Society (MCSUK).
This residency aimed to engage people in thinking about the relationship between terrestrial and marine and how their behaviours impact water quality and, in turn, the habitats of endangered marine species.
Dŵr yw Ein Tirwedd / We are Water sought to explore the deep heritage and historical traditions of water worship across the Pen Llŷn coastline while engaging with contemporary concerns and solutions around the protection of clean water in our rivers and seas on a global level.
Clay-based workshops formed a central part of my work on Natur am Byth!. Using raw clay from the Pen Llŷn coastline, participants engaged with Welsh water worship traditions while confronting contemporary concerns around the protection of clean water. Together, we created vessels from the clay to symbolically hold our thoughts and wishes, culminating in a ritualistic return of clay to the sea—imagining the sea as a great healing well in an effort to revive the ideology of water’s power and magic.
Over the project’s period, I engaged with school groups, museum visitors, support centres, a local walking group and a much wider network of water quality citizen scientists. In addition to clay workshops, the project involved an alternative psychogeographic pilgrimage, the creation of salt-and-ink biodiversity-inspired “quadrats,” and a stained glass window in the colours of nitrate and phosphate river samples gathered by over 600 volunteers across Wales.
The project emerged from conversation, collaboration, and creative research, and gave participants a chance to reflect on their relationship with water, and understand the importance of water quality for the health of the planet’s ecosystems.