Holdfast Artist Statement

Wrack Series, Tang Series

“The foreshore is so dear to all supernatural beings; it is fixed, it shifts, it is present and absent, lending itself to magical thinking.”
— Dennison, W. T. (1995), Orkney Folklore & Sea Legends1

My practice explores who we are in relation to nature. I am drawn to the transcendent and transformative qualities of the natural world, its ability to create awe and its ability to ground us. Within each of my works is a note of solastalgia: the sadness of witnessing environments and creatures that we love begin to disappear.

For this exhibition, I have turned to seaweed as both subject and collaborator, asking who we have been—and who we might become—in relation to it. The works arise out of time spent on shorelines littered with giant kelp in Orkney, Scotland, and Arthur River in Tasmania. Engagement with Fremantle-based seaweed innovators further informed the works, along with a deep dive into the history of Mid-Victorian women who found scientific and personal empowerment through marine biology.

Seaweed has long sustained human life as food, fertilizer, medicine, cosmetic, and livelihood. On the island of Tiree in Scotland, generations of my husband’s family harvested tangle to supplement their crofting income. In Orkney, where my mother-in-law is from, seaweed also lives in story and superstition. The Nuckelavee, a horse-like sea creature said to bring disease and death, was believed to be provoked by the smell of burning seaweed. The Tangie, another sea spirit, could disorient wanderers, tangling them in phosphorescent confusion and drawing them toward the sea. In these stories, seaweed is not passive—it is animate, entangled with fear, survival, and imagination. Shorelines are liminal, shifting spaces—where we belong, yet never fully and it is easy to understand how such mythologies took hold.

Wrack comprises oil paintings built slowly through layers of transparent glaze. These works inhabit the instability of tide and flow, where forms emerge and recede. They evoke the embodied memory of swimming through weed—of plunging, entanglement. The repeated central motif of the larger works echoes the cyanotypes of botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Wrack invites reflection on fragility, freedom, and our shared future.

Tang extends this exploration through paintings made with seaweed and Asparagopsis macroalgae pigments, applied using brushes fashioned from seaweed and sticks. These works sit between observation and invention: depictions of real harvesting sites alongside imagined seaweed beings. In contrast to the monstrous figures of folklore, these forms suggest sensitivity, agency, and kinship. The accompanying sculptures further give presence to these beings, bringing the voice of seaweed into dialogue with our own.

Some of the pink pigment running through the works was developed by Fremantle-based innovators SeaStock, derived of macro-algae from locally sourced Asparagopsis. Beyond its visual qualities, this material carries the potential for carbon reduction, as well as applications in medicine, nutrition, and cosmetics—revealing seaweed as a quiet but powerful agent of change.

To acknowledge the presence of supernatural beings beneath the waves is not mere magical thinking, but an acceptance of interconnectedness—one that recognises that their survival, like our own, is bound to the health of the sea. In tending to what lives below the surface, we tend also to ourselves.