I am currently making a documentary art film called ‘Unimagined: Mothering Beyond the Flesh’, which involves creating a musical score. This is the main output of a three year practice-based PhD project of the same title, at The School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at The University of Leeds. Both the film and the thesis are due to be submitted and released in 2027.
For this project, I spent three months conducting fieldwork on the UNESCO biosphere island of Lanzarote (Spain), located off the northwest coast of Africa. My family and I lived in The Green Heart of Haría, a wildlife sanctuary and site of ecological significance in Europe.
My position as mother, artist and researcher was used to both presuppose and question a theory of maternal agency in the Anthropogenic landscape, using The Green Heart of Haría and other gardens and landscapes on the island as sites in which to question the role of caregiving within the wider realm of landscape theory. This fieldwork also included oral history projects with local residents, embedded creative practice and reflective processing of the site; repositioning and translating knowledge generated by engaging with the landscape through an auto-ethnographic and creative methodology.
The aim of this work is to explore and illuminate the historical roots of our ecological crisis, and the significance of the transformative processes of both the body during motherhood and the role of the caregiver.