Crossing thresholds

Shifting Natural Worlds

The Fellfoot Forward landscape is very rural with a diverse geology lying beneath a unique range of habitats and wildlife. Climate crisis is already disrupting seasonal ecological cycles, leading to habitat loss, degradation, and a reduction in biodiversity. The Crossing Thresholds arts project aimed to build the emotional connection residents have with their shifting natural landscapes and wildlife, and provide a powerful way to spark a greater sense of local ownership, responsibility, and action.

Crossing Thresholds

Artist, curator, and researcher, Dominic Smith, worked with community groups, including Carlisle Youth Zone, to creatively document Geltsdale and examine its environmental change over time.

Dominic supported participants to create visual, written, and sonic narratives that playfully explore their landscape and how it has changed through time. The programme took an exploratory, ‘out in the field approach’, involving walking, recording interactions with the landscape using materials such as light sensitive paper (Cyanotypes), creative note taking, sound recording, and the use of magnetic audio material.

“Tindale Tarn is a site that proved to be the richest in terms of creative possibilities and opportunities for discovery. It’s undergone profound change, including mining, industrialisation and a return to an area of great natural beauty.

I worked collaboratively with groups to produce an exploded snapshot of the area as it stands in time. Each workshop produced a selection of images using light sensitive paper placed in direct contact with flora and fauna, providing an immediate record of the environment. Each group snapshot was exhibited as a grid viewed as a whole and/or formed the chapters of an artist’s book. This immersion in the landscape also led to a series of artists’ images exploring the landscape on a macro level which evolved into an exploration of composite organisms, such as lichen, by considering how the smallest, least visible organisms can alert us to much larger environmental change”.

The key concept that catalysed and focused this work was ‘Thresholds’. We find ourselves at a point of anxiety about the environmental thresholds we are crossing in terms of climate change, we turn on the news to learn about global conflicts over geopolitical borders. We struggle on a personal level with thoughts around class, education, how we present ourselves in different social situations and how we access services and culture as a result. These are all big and overwhelming subjects. Dominic’s creative engagements gently looked at how we approach thresholds, starting with local environmental change to help build resilience through understanding of types of change and how we manage it in our own lives.

The art project culminated in an exhibition at Hallbankgate Hub and an e-zine, which you can view by clicking on the image below.

Dominic Smith is an artist, curator and researcher developing art and technology-based projects in the UK and Europe. His practice reflects his interest in the collaborative nature of lens, audio and time-based based practices, digital platforms, digital material culture and developing experimental approaches to audience engagement via digital means and liveness. Dominic is based on the north east coast but was raised in Northumberland and had family that worked in the landscape across the county through agricultural and mining jobs.