Walking with… Artist and Birder Peter Driver

Last week I took a walk with Peter Driver, a fellow artist and birder, who I first met and exhibited with when I was an Associate Artist with CAS (Chapel Art Studios) in Andover around 10 years ago. Peter lives in Mortimer, a village in Berkshire edged by the Foudry Brook, a tributary of the River Kennet and not far from Reading (see this earlier Queer River walk with Tim Sykes by the Kennet), .

‘Working from his studio on a farm in West Berkshire, he occupies himself with printmaking, painting and scouring the local landscape for signs and wonders: a variety of responses to the beauty and brokenness of living in the world. He makes things, or makes things happen, primarily for aesthetic reasons; often incorporating pop culture, memory and natural forms to ‘sing into the void’ about the climate and nature crises and the common good.’

www.peterdriver.art

When I first contacted Peter about meeting up for a catch up and a Queer River walk, we wondered together where to meet. My two local rivers are now the headwaters of the Salisbury and Bristol Avons. As the Kennet and Avon Canal runs between Peter and I, connecting the Bristol Avon to the Kennet, that seemed like a good place to start, and Hungerford was roughly in the middle.

Starting out in Hungerford by the canal

I lived near the Kennet in the early 2000’s when my husband and I first moved back to Marlborough from Brighton, and although not now my local river, I’ve been planning on getting across to spend more time with it again. When I lived in Marlborough I worked on a couple of community engagement projects with ARK (Action for the River Kennet), the Rivers Trust for the Kennet and Pang catchments, and keep up with their work online.

In the end we focused on a smaller tributary of the Kennet, the River Dun, a gorgeous little chalkstream that runs begins in the Great Bedwyn area and joins the Kennet near Hungerford. The origins of the name Hungerford are apparently Saxon, meaning ‘ford leading to the poor lands’. We didn’t know this at the time, but land ownership, economic inequality and access to both land and rivers became a key thread within our conversation as we walked together.

Peter on a footbridge over the River Dun
Entering Freeman’s Marsh

I had made some simple, collaged cards to record our conversation onto and offered a few to Peter. As we followed the canal and then the Dun out of Hungerford, we entered an area called Freemans Marsh, a 72 acre site owned by the Town and Manor of Hungerford and Liberty of Sanden Fee, a charity that describes its aims as being to protect ‘the beautiful countryside, and a wonderful ancient set of rights, for the Commoners and people of Hungerford’. As we walked and talked we were surrounded by birds calling from the willows and scrub; Sedge, Cetti and one Grasshopper Warbler, Blackcaps, Wrens and Linnets. Peter shared with me some of the rhymes and stories he first used to identify and remember each bird’s song, for example. a Goldcrest counting its gold, calling out rapidly 1 and-a 2 and-a 3 and-a 4 and-a 5 Million! Similarly my Dad told me that that Wood Pigeons repeatedly chant I do love Lucy, I do love Lucy over and over again.

My notes on one of the collaged cards

Peter grew up in the fens of Cambridgeshire and can clearly remember when his fascination with birds and birdwatching began. Riding on a bus as a boy he looked out of the window and saw a Lapwing, with its crest blowing in the breeze. One of his favourite birds ever since, the sighting of the Lapwing led to him looking the bird up in his Dad’s Observer Book of Birds, and all the other birds he found there, soon receiving bird books himself as gifts from family, and going on to work at the Wildfowl and Wetlands reserve at Welney.

Oak tree next to the Dun

The fens were largely drained in the 17th Century, with the Duke of Bedford and others taking land for themselves and making money for the King, by hiring the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to design a drainage system that removed the water (and the wildlife that depended on it), exposing the rich peaty soil for agriculture.

The local villagers were fiercely opposed to the draining, believing it would deprive them of their traditional means of livelihood from wildfowling, fishing and reed cutting and would replace the fenland with arable land owned by strangers. The “Fen Tigers” tore down the dykes, ditches and sluices that had just been built and set the reedbeds on fire, so stopping work. But by the end of the 17th Century much of Vermuyden’s hugely ambitious project had been completed, with the Bedford River and New Bedford River carrying water more quickly northwards to the Wash.

A Brief History of the Great Fen

When I was carrying out an extraction-themed residency with Groundwork Gallery in Kings Lynn back in 2024 I read up on the drainage of the fens, as well as the historic hunting of wetland birds for their feathers, and beavers for their meat and castoreum, and created a wall-based installation exploring the past and potential future of the area, titled ‘The Beaver and the Whale’ (see photograph of detail below).

The Beaver and the Whale (detail)

One thing that gives me hope amongst the legacy of wetland drainage and extraction is the potential for rewilding and rewetting, from The Great Fen project, (‘an ambitious 50-100 year habitat restoration project, with 14 square miles of land restored to wild fen‘) to the potential future reintroduction of the Dalmatian Pelican, and the success of the reintroduction of the Eurasian Crane to the Somerset Levels. If this is your kind of thing, I’ll be contributing to a panel at a Water themed Into the Light at Heal Somerset this coming June, a rewilding gathering where I imagine there will be loads of people bringing a sense of Active Hope through regenerative land/water practices.

Long Tailed Tit (woodcut proof )- by Peter Driver

Some of Peter’s artwork directly references his love of birds and birding and some doesn’t. Birds have a stronger presence in Peter’s printmaking, but less so in his painting, although as he shared with me, a painting can sometimes include visual elements from his walks . A new project of Peter’s seeks to record 100 bird species within the parish boundary of Mortimer during 2026, and to create twelve woodcut prints of the red listed birds living there, starting with the Lapwing. These will feed into a new book with two collaborating artists/friends (the poet John Froy and artist, naturalist and writer Geoff Sawers), following on from Peter’s two previous books, A Walk for Stanley (a three-day, 39 mile walk from the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham to the Sandham Memorial Chapel) and Widdershins Walk (another collaboration with Geoff Sawers completing an anti-clockwise route around the circumference of Reading, divided into five walks  over the four seasons of 2024).

‘Mood for a Day (oil on paper)’ – Peter Driver

I’ve written previously about my interest in birdwatching and the ways that people record and respond to the birds that they notice (see the post How Do I Notice Birds?), including the relationship between birdwatching and neurodivergence. My Neuroqueer Ecologies research focuses on the value of sensory differences for ecological understanding, for example in noticing bird song or visual detail within a particular ecosystem.

I’m also fascinated by the personal histories that bring people to give their attention to particular plants or animals, like Peter’s Lapwing experience. As a child I visited the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Slimbridge reserve regularly with my Dad (who had his own watery passions including sailing), and took holidays with him on the Norfolk Broards, where I would fish with my brother and feel safe and happy moored out on the water surrounded by swans, geese and ducks. At home as a small child I had a copy of Tony Soper’s Bird Table Book from which I drew pictures of the birds inside, an Encyclopaedia of Animal Life which fed my enthusiasm for animal facts, and Gerald Durrell’s The Amateur Naturalist which gave practical advice of collecting and preserving specimens (e.g. dissecting owl pellets).

Back in Hungerford, Peter told me about a new Kennet Valley Wetland Reserve, which has now gained planning permission, and is due to be created over the next couple of years. ‘A centre of excellence for wetland ecology, environmental education and public recreation’, the Reserve will also offer flood relief to the town, seek to capture carbon through wetland creation and provide a new base for ARK (Action for the River Kennet).

River Dun

Peter has been involved in grassroots forms of wetland habitat creation closer to home, through the work of the Marshians community on Fobney Marsh near Reading (see more about the Marshians here on Adrian Lawson’s Rural Reading blog). The Marshians came together, without the landowner’s permission as a form of mass trespass, to create a wider range of habitats at Fobney, from the communal stomping of reeds and bullrush to create clearings, to clearing rubbish and – after asking ‘what would a beaver do?” – experimenting with different forms of leaky dams or Beaver Dam Analogues, to keep the marsh wet for wildlife.

As we continued our walk we talked about the work of the Trespass Movement, some of which we agree with and some not, and our various connections with it. The Book of Trespass was key in informing my understanding of the history of land ownership and financial privilege in the UK. The author Nick Hayes lives in the Reading area, and is a friend of the Marshians movement. The Marshians leader Adrian Lawson appears in Nick’s book Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, while I appear in its predecessor, The Trespasser’s Companion.

Sign in the River Dun

You can read an interview here with Nick Hayes, on a trespass that he and others led onto the Englefield Estate back in 2022. The Estate owns most of the woods and farmland around Peter’s village in rural Berkshire. His studio is on one of the estate farms, and the owner Lord Benyon of Englefield is also the patron of the proposed Kennet Valley Wetland Reserve. Peter admitted that he appreciated the Estate allowing open access to its woodlands, and the network of paths across the area. My and Peter’s conversation also took place the day after I had listened to the Absolute Units podcast from the MERL (Museum of English Rural Life) titled Who Owns England? with Guy Shrubsole, another member of the Trespass Movement and the author of a book and blog of the same name, that sought to uncover the truth about who owns were (you can also read about my involvement in the Queer Constellations exhibition at the MERL in this previous post).

Peter’s studio window

It’s a bit on a tangle of connections. My conversation with Peter was one of those where the more we talked, the more connections were uncovered, and I’m sure that still more lies just beneath the surface ready to be unearthed. From land ownership, commoning and trespass, to wetland creation and restoration, to the construction and demise of the canal system and its relationship to slavery (see an earlier walk here with Andy Marks). And the birds of course, along with the other animal and plant species that hang on in there (or fade away) as we humans develop and redevelop the land,

A disused nest, found on the towpath
Making notes as we walked

I said to Peter that I had wanted to walk together because I had respect for his work and its ethos, I feel a connection with the role that walking plays in his practice, his love of birds and his belief in equality and fairness, especially as a LGBTQIA+ ally. I was reminded as we walked of Andy Marks’ comment to me when we had walked along the Kennet and Avon Canal in Devizes, that through Queer River I am creating a community one conversation at a time. I’m thankful to have had the chance to walk and talk with Peter and to share our conversation here, and am looking forward to more Kennet wanders together soon.

Kennet and Avon Canal outside Hungerford

Walking with… Artist Lydia Halcrow

I met with Artist Lydia Halcrow in Bradford-on-Avon last week, to take a walk along the Bristol Avon. My first memory of Lydia must be from around 15 years ago, walking and talking together about climate breakdown, our anxieties, and the ways we hoped to address them in our work. Since then our paths have crossed multiple times, from exhibiting together (including A Gathering of Unasked Possibility, Bristol in 2019), to carrying out residencies alongside each other with Groundwork Gallery in Norfolk in 2024.

Thick mud on the path
Trees reflected in the Avon

Lydia is a Bath-based artist, who exhibits widely, and whose practice explores ‘ ways of collaborating with a place through my walking body.’ Much of Lydia’s work in the past has taken place with river estuaries. In the introduction to her doctoral thesis she describes her research project as ‘...the culmination of six years of frequent walks along the Taw Estuary in North Devon.’

‘… the work and the contextual writing explores multiple strands that weave together and meander in forms that echo the experience of walking, the estuary itself and my childhood memories of this place. All are inextricably entangled with my experience of the Taw, the residue of the estuary on my walking body, and the trace of my body within the estuary.’

I often bring a way of recording the place and our conversation to these Queer River walks, and this time I brought us each a ‘pack of cards’, blank, torn pieces of white cartridge paper held in an old wage packet, on which to rub found pigments and make notes. I first started using this method back at art college in the early 1990s, partly influenced by the work of Herman de Vries, and sometimes buried them afterwards, before digging them up again weeks or months later, to see if the place had anything else to add.

My pack of cards

They seemed appropriate in light of Lydia’s own work with walking, found pigments and multiples. Looking back, the wage packet also connected serendipitously with our conversations around artist’s pay. My cards now have a rough rectangle of colour on one side, and key words that I scribbled onto the other as we walked, just enough to remind me of our conversation.

Cards inside a wage packet

Our walk together took place on a dry day, along a path that was thick with mud after weeks of almost constant rain. I parked in the railway station car park, and a minute’s walk from my car, on the way to the Tithe Barn where we were meeting, I had already spotted some obvious signs of beavers. I hadn’t necessarily planned for beavers to feature in this walk, but I had been wondering just how active they were in the area. Walking on to meet Lydia and her dog Milo at the barn, we started off along the River Avon.

We were meeting at a time when my own PhD proposal (see more here) was very much on my mind (I’m currently rewriting it for another try at getting funding), and the day after I had watched two out of three episodes of the Dirty Business docudrama on Channel 4, a ‘shocking real-life drama of victims, whistleblowers and England’s water companies…’ The other thing that I couldn’t erase from my mind that morning, was a mental image from last Summer when I visited Bradford-on-Avon with family, peered into the river in the centre of town and saw a big pile of wet wipes and sanitary towels in the reeds. The water level had dropped, and the remains of the untreated sewage that previously been pouring directly into the river water, was now left high and dry.

Milo
Lydia sampling the mud

We were walking out of town this time, and our conversation soon turned, as it has with every artist I’ve met recently, to the state of arts funding and artists pay in the UK right now, and the amount of unpaid work that is asked of artists in the form of open calls. There’s plenty online about this at the moment, including the huge number of applications organisations are receiving for each role advertised, so I’ll not go into depth on it here, only to say that with a number of articles I’ve read recently calling for artists and cultural workers to ‘stand up and take action ‘ in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises, the economic survival of artists who are trying to do exactly that needs to be addressed. The arts in schools have long been under attack, whilst whole departments have been axed within universities, and the ‘trickle down’ funding given to arts organisations just isn’t reaching artists on the ground.

Turkey Tail Fungus
Beaver felled tree

As we slipped and squelched along the footpath, we talked about flooding and sewage, and saw evidence of both caught up in tree branches along the river’s banks. Lydia dipped blotting paper into puddles and I rubbed leaves and different coloured soils onto my set of cards, whilst Milo seemed to be catching the scent of beavers.

Lydia has recently signed up to be a Water Guardian with We Are Avon, which will involve regularly testing her stretch of the river water. as part of an initiative covering the Avon bioregion. On a related note I’ll be working with Guardians of the River Itchen in Southampton in May to run a hands-on session for young people and their families, exploring the relationship between marine pollution and wildlife in the Itchen Estuary, building on my Pop-Up Studio residency with the John Hansard Gallery last year.

An aspect of Lydia’s practice that really interests me is the way she adapts her body and clothing to receive information from her environment:

‘I use my body as a recording mechanism for my walks in a place, adapted walking boots capture the textures of the ground underfoot to become drypoint etchings printed with collected earth. Adapted gloves record the textures felt by my hands along the walk to become drypoint etchings printed with collected pigments. These form an archive of the textural surface as experienced on foot and by hand over time…’

Artwork by Lydia Halcrow

I’ve long been interested in portable, interactive artworks that facilitate an engagement with place. My own experiments have leant more towards portable collections of objects, materials and information. These inform what I provide in the packs of resources I gift to participants on socially engaged walks, and the development of backpack-based interpretation, for example with Andover Trees United, for use by local people in engaging with the River Anton and its chalk stream tributaries.

There are some obvious similarities between my and Lydia’s approach to making work, although the ‘end product’ can look quite different. We both make work that maps embodied experiences of places that are changing due to climate breakdown. Each of our practices values a slowness of engagement, and takes a closer look at the everyday detritus that is left behind on beaches and riverbanks, either by processes of erosion and decay, or the release of plastics into wetland ecosystems.

I also see a connection here between my recent Walking Pages that document a search for beavers, and record my sensory experience of the wider ecosystem, including litter and industrial waste, and Lydia’s Residues series:

Artwork by Lydia Halcrow
Artwork by Lydia Halcrow

‘Much of the work is made with ancient earth pigment Bideford Black as a way to hold a residue of materials discovered during walks. Many work with ghost nets foraged between the tides, and with experimental approaches to record the textures of each walk underfoot.’

Now that I’ve walked here with Lydia, I’m planning to return soon and continue this series with Bradford’s beavers, building on last year’s walks along the Bristol Avon from Trowbridge and Chippenham (see Walking Out).

Mapping my embodied experience of beaver wetlands is a key part of my PhD proposal, and although not wanting to dominate the conversation, it was really useful for me to be able to air my frustration at the knots that I had tied myself in after countless edits. Lydia’s approach to using embodied approaches to receive knowledge from the ‘more than human’ world is very much aligned to my own, and I really appreciated hearing her perspectives on mapping and counter-mapping within practice-based research. from her experience with her own PhD.

Lydia’s blotting paper experiment
Orange Peel Fungus

Our conversation wove together other threads, relating to our children’s experiences of the UK education system and the relationship between beavers’ use of materials sustainably harvested from where they live and much human construction, where extraction may take place many miles away, with damaging impacts remaining unseen. We also wondered about the impact of digital media on a sense of place, especially when screen-based media can be used as a means of escape from the worsening state of the planet, divorced from the material and ecological reality, resulting in what Lydia described as ‘a creeping sense of placelessness’.

Inside the Tithe Barn
Under the viaduct
The side of the viaduct

Thank you Lydia (and Milo) for your company. It feels more important than ever that artists and others exploring these issues come together to share experiences and support each other, as well as continuing to find joy in the green shoots of Spring and the beauty of what remains.

Rubbings from a burned tree trunk
The end of our walk

Lydia is currently showing work in the following exhibitions:

Walking with… Wildlife Guide Nick Patel

Last week I returned to Heal Somerset to meet Wildlife Guide, birder, and ex nature reserve warden Nick Patel (@WilderSkies on Instagram). Nick and I first met at Heal’s Into the Wild event last Summer, when I was part of a panel on diversity in rewilding and also sharing a little on the place of art within the rewilding movement. Nick runs regular events at Heal, and at a number of other Somerset locations through his organisation Wilder Skies.

At Wilder Skies, our aim isn’t just to show you the best wildlife the South-West has to offer, but to help you engage with it on a deeper level, leaving you with a stronger passion for the Biodiversity we share this land with… A ‘Wilder‘ connection you might say…

Wilder Skies: Somerset Nature Tours

Nick and I were keen to continue a conversation on diversity and inclusion within rewilding and the environmental sector more generally, and as is usually with Queer River walk and talks, whatever else came up on a wander around the site at Heal.

Map showing the land at Heal Somerset

Heal Somerset is the foundation site of nature charity Heal Rewilding. It spans 460 acres of rolling countryside, set on land that once operated as a dairy farm. Our mission is to revive healthy, resilient ecosystems by giving nature the freedom it needs to recover. This means creating space for trees, plants and wildflowers to regenerate naturally, enabling wildlife to move and thrive, and supporting the comeback of species under pressure.

I’d not been back to Heal since last Summer, and was particularly keen to see the changes made to the site’s hydrology, by both beavers and people. We started with the beaver wetland, which has developed from a small, tidy dam across a little stream (a tributary of the River Frome) to a series of dams and a growing beaver pond, doing its best to hold back some of the water that has fallen in these last few weeks, of what has felt like constant rain.

Nick has previously worked on a number of nature reserves, primarily wetland sites, including on the River Exe ( a nice link with my last Walking with… post there, with Exmouth based artist Ann-Marie Culhane). and has a particular passion for birds, butterflies, orchids, and dynamic, evolving wildlife habitats.

As we left the beaver wetland to walk uphill, I noticed the tracks left behind by the free roaming Tamworth pigs, and the little micro-ponds created around the site as they rootle and flip the turf. The actions of the pigs exposes bare ground for a wider range of plants to take root amongst the heavy matt of dominant grasses, which in time will attract more insects, which will feed a wider range and increased abundance of birds, and so on. The limited diversity of plants is itself a legacy of management for grazing by dairy cattle, and the application of slurry and/or fertilisers.

As we walked, and Nick caught the call of a Redwing, or spotted a Fieldfare in the upper branches of an oak tree, our conversation turned to the subject of race and racism in rural places. Nick was born and brought up In Preston, Lancashire to a white Mum and a Dad of Kenyan Asian heritage, and shared with me his experience of living and working in the countryside as a person of mixed-heritage.

‘I’ve never felt welcome in the countryside ever… casual racism is constant, and with everything going on recently, it’s gone back up again… I want to regain the idea of my Britishness, but in a different way, to re-find that identity and be proud of it. British nature is the way for me to do that.’

Nick talked about the complexity that being dual heritage brings, ‘sometimes I feel really brown and asian and other times white’ and I shared the responsibility that I and my husband feel, as a white couple with a mixed heritage son, bringing him up in a very rural, predominantly white area.

I’m used to anticipating homophobia, of making the choice when and when not to ‘come out’ on a daily basis, depending on where I am and who I’m talking to, but if your racial heritage is different to the majority of your local community, you don’t always have the option of passing beneath the radar, in the same way, even if you wanted to. Nick hopes that his presence within the environmental sector takes inclusion beyond tokenism and encourages others to follow a similar path if that’s where their passions lie, ‘I want other people to see that it’s a very normal thing to work in the countryside…’

As we carried on walking, we passed our conversation to listen to a couple of skylarks that had flown up from the top of the hill and were singing their hearts out. It was a really joyful moment amongst the all the grey wetness of recent weeks, a sign of Spring and of hope, and so different to watching skylarks singing over heavily managed and sprayed farmland, where their young may stand little chance of finding enough insects to eat. As Nick said ‘(Heal) is a sanctuary’

Heal isn’t just an island sanctuary though, one of the many positive aspects to the site is the role that it plays in linking up with patches of woodland and nature friendly farming, acting as a wildlife corridor, with species from the woodland at the nearby Stourhead Estate for example, moving onto and across the land as it becomes more rich and tangled.

Nick shared with me that his work as a wildlife guide extends into urban spaces too, with an equal passion for helping people to notice what’s on their doorstep, ‘…trying to get people to notice what is growing in the pavement, what is living in their local park.’

As we looped around and started to head back down the hill to the house and barns where we had parked, we took a closer look at the recent work that has been carried out to block ditches, daylight streams, and generally bring water out onto the land again. I haven’t yet had a chance for a proper chat with Heal’s Rewilding Ranger Daniel Hill but I try to keep up with the work that he and Josh Ashbee (river and peatland restoration specialist) have been sharing on social media, and it was brilliant to see how all the recent rainwater was interacting with their interventions. Obviously, with all my river related work, and a passion for river restoration and rewilding this is right up my street.

Clay bunds blocking ditches, streams feeding scrapes and pools, and water running across open ground, hitting and rerouting around woody debris. It’s going to be really exciting to see how the plant and animal life with grow and evolve around all of these changes through 2026 and beyond.

I asked Nick what he was hoping for in terms of species that might return to the site, or become more common (I’m a massive fan of wetland birds, so cranes hopping across from the Somerset Levels would be amazing). and he explained how a lot of the changes will be good for crickets and grasshoppers, which in turn should bring in Yellowhammers, and that he’d love to see Brown Hairstreak Butterflies turning up again (as well as Lapwings and a host of other birds).. At this point the drizzle turned torrential and so we headed to Heal Somerset HQ for shelter and a coffee.

I set up Queer River as a way to learn from dialogue with a range of voices on rivers and wetlands more broadly, it’s an important part of my practice as an artist, but it’s also a way to resist making myself smaller in the face of prejudice, and to be more bold in my exploration of what a Queer and Neuroqueer identity brings to an understanding of the world. I wrote in a recent post ‘Re-Making Rivers: Learning From Different Perspectives‘ how as a country ‘…we seem to fall back so readily into foregrounding the experience of white, male, probably straight naturalists/writers/explorers.’ and that I was conscious that the majority of my Queer River ‘Walking with…” posts have shared the experiences of white people.

I’m really grateful to Nick for taking the time to show me around Heal Somerset and for being so open about his experiences, thoughts and feelings. I love his passion for both wildlife and for people, and it was a real pleasure to geek out a little together. I would really encourage you to visit his website and sign up to one of his upcoming events (and I’m not on commission, honest).

This coming Sunday 21st February sees Nick linking up with Blue Lias Kitchen to run a Water Kefir Workshop and Wild Winter Wander, tickets available here

Into the Light, Heal’s ‘Two-Day Rewilding Gathering’ returns to Heal Somerset this Summer with a watery theme and I’m happy to say that I’m returning as a contributor too. Take a look at their events page for more information and to book your tickets.

Walking with… Artist and Activist Ann-Marie Culhane

Yesterday I made my way through the rain to Taunton in Somerset, to meet Ann-Marie Culhane. We have shared connections and values, and have been talking about meeting for a walk for a number of years. Ann-Marie’s practice draws on permaculture design, and projects are long-term, ‘based on the cycles and patterns found in nature.’ A way of working that goes against the short-termism of many arts projects and funding schemes.

‘I feel very strongly that we need to start to view time differently and work towards funding deepening, longer cyclical models of practice’

This year we finally made a plan to meet in the middle, between her home on the Exe Estuary in Devon and mine in the headwaters of the Salisbury Avon near Devizes, in Wiltshire, and to walk together along the River Tone.

On my way to Taunton I noticed how the land changed in character, from Westbury where I caught my train, into Somerset via Castle Cary. Small, hedged fields with winding streams that ran alongside the track, full to the brim and spilling over, changed to a wide open landscape as we entered the Levels, with long straight ditches and rhynes, banked rivers and pumping stations, keeping the water from the land.

Despite drainage efforts, there was plenty of standing water, with pairs Mute Swans standing out bright white against the muddy greens, and a group of grey Cranes alongside scattered gulls. Seeing the Cranes was really exciting for me. I’ve long been drawn to wetland birds, as well as researching species reintroductions more generally, and followed their return to Somerset through The Great Crane Project, including joining one of the Crane Safaris that were running back then.

As an ‘outsider’ the hydrology of Somerset intrigues me, and my work has been taking me there more and more recently, from walking with Feral Practice, working at Heal Somerset, visiting beavers at Longleat with Head of Research and Conservation Dr Tom Lewis, and leading a walk down to the River Brue from Hauser and Wirth. It feels very different to the chalk downland and chalk streams of my home patch.

I keep thinking about how the lower lying areas of Somerset will change/adapt to the extreme weather and sea rises of the future, and whether we can learn from their past (a time/place of wooden trackways and marsh living peoples, where humans learned and borrowed from beavers). We obviously need to rethink our relationship with the multi-species communities that form our river ecosystems (that’s what Queer River is all about) and consider what benefits more deliberate re-wetting and rewilding can bring (see Heal Somerset and Somerset Wildlands).

Arriving at Taunton I sat in the waiting area in my waterproofs, checked the forecast, and waited for Ann-Marie’s train the arrive, whilst watching the water running down the plate glass windows.

‘From 1994, I have been initiating, catalysing, designing creative and eco-arts projects, events and performances and working as an artist, activist and educator…My work takes place mostly in outdoor spaces: orchards, community centres, parks, farms, the street, by or on rivers… I aim to work with others to reduce the harm we are inflicting on our planet; to increase understanding of our place in the family of things and to bring alive positive and life-sustaining visions at a time of deepening environmental and social justice crises.’

Ann-Marie Culhane

Ann-Marie’s work has spanned a range of subject matter over the years and involved collaboration with different communities, both human and non-human, but I guess what connects with me most is her work with more watery places. Living as she does by both the river and the sea, and being drawn to focus her practice on her local area, much of Ann-Marie’s recent work has focused on the River Exe watershed and coastal communities, through Tidelines CIC:

‘We work with people of all ages creating ways to come together in collaboration to celebrate and care for the Exe estuary and coast, and to find ways to adapt and respond collectively to the changes caused by climate change and the catastrophic loss of biodiversity that is impacting the place we live.’

Ann-Marie and I walked from the station down to the banks of the Tone, and paused under the first bridge, where I shared some ‘fish cards’ that I had made for us to use, a form of Walking Pages, collaged together using imagery from charity shop finds. Everything was getting pretty soggy by then, so writing/drawing wasn’t easy, and we ended up rubbing on earth and lichen, and letting raindrops join in with pen sketches.

As we walked we talked of many things, but primarily Ann-Marie’s work with Salmon (see Salmon Run), my own work with Beavers, and the sometimes troubling language of native vs alien/invasive in terms of the other species we find ourselves living alongside (Signal Crayfish, Pacific Oysters, Japanese Knotweed etc). We questioned whether, as the impacts of climate breakdown increase, changing habitats and temperatures, the ways of classifying and ‘managing’ species not previously found in the UK may need to change too (see an earlier walk with Botanist Mark Spencer)..

The Tone was full and heavy, muddied and brown, and had left piles of tangled branches and plastic on the banks, or hanging from trees. A Cormorant flew past following the path of the river, later followed by a Kingfisher. As visitors to the river we pondered the need for the barriers that form the two different sections of the Firepool Weir, and the Firepool Lock where the river flows into the Bridgewater and Taunton Canal We’ve each developed projects centred on improving river connectivity for migratory species, linked to the demolition of weirs, sluice gates etc. (e.g. Salmon Run and The Ripple Effect).

Moving on, our conversation turned to the different models that are being trialled around the world to bring power to ‘Nature’, often inspired by indigenous cultures. From councils of beings, to having ‘Nature’ on the board of companies and other organisations. As crises and emergencies unfold, people are understandably driven to develop and share models of working, from place to place and river to river.

We wondered out loud whether in contemporary Western contexts, when humans bring a model from one place to another, or speak for other beings, enough time and care is taken to root these practices in an understanding of their specific locality. Do we need to more fully apprentice ourselves to those beings that we represent, and perhaps use arts-based methods to learn from their embodied knowledge?

Ann-Marie’s own Assembly of River Beings ‘- developed with Friends of the River Exe, as part of an Arts Council England funded DYCP research project in 2025, exploring species-led practice and nature-centric governance – was an Exe specific process, which explored the idea of speaking on behalf of species: ‘a two day event working with participants (through making, knowledge, embodiment) to prepare for and research a river being, from a long list created with the Biodiversity Records Office, local Wildlife Trust and historical records. A three hour assembly then took place witnessed by members of the public, and an opening and closing ceremony with the river’

When we met the apple trees of a riverside orchard, Ann-Marie used a lens to magnify the lichens living on their branches. Viewed on a different scale, we saw their water-holding cups and fine spikes. Ann- Marie has worked with orchards regularly over the years and her experience brings a different insight and a deeper knowledge than me. Projects have included Flow, an 8 years old, ongoing project centred on ‘a ribbon orchard of 193 trees’ in the Riverside Park area of Exeter, with programmes of cultural events throughout the seasons, and Fruit Routes at Loughborough University ‘an edible campus (of) …fruit and nut trees along walking and cycle routes across the University Campus’.

As always with these walks, much more happens than I am able to record here. The knowledge gained and exchanged isn’t only about the words we share, but the trees touched, the objects collected from the banks, and much more that is outside of words and conscious thought.

We ended our walk in a cafe near the river with Fiona McDonald of Feral Practice (find out about Tonal, their audio project here) and had a catch up on books we’ve been reading and projects we’ve been involved with. Once we’d dried off and drunk coffee, our conversation turned to what communication can look/sound like beyond Western written/spoken languages.

All our work shares a focus on inter-species relationships, and the potential for arts-based research to open up ways of sharing knowledge across species boundaries, from Fiona’s work with Wood Ants to my exploration of Neuroqueer Ecologies and Ann-Marie’s everyday observation of ‘invasive’ Pacific Oysters via a temporary stay in her home.

Photo Credit: Ann-Marie Culhane / Pacific Oyster

These walks, and the conversations that they lead to, are such an important part of my practice as an artist/researcher exploring queer and neuroqueer perspectives on ecosystems and multi-species relationships. As previous collaborator and Researcher Andy Marks put it ‘through Queer River you are building a community one person at a time’. I’m thankful to Ann-Marie for meeting and walking with me, and really looking forward to whatever may come next.

The community research project River Tone, Risks Beyond Human Eyes initiated by Phil Tovey, begins soon. Phil and I had a chat about few months ago about Queer River, and are planning to walk together soon.

Next month I’m really pleased to be walking and talking with Nature Guide and Birder Nick Patel at Heal Somerset. You can find out more about Nick and his work via the Wilder Skies website and on Instagram, and I’ll be sharing my reflections back here again soon.

Walking Out

Over the last few months I’ve been parking up and walking out from some of the towns and villages sited along the Bristol Avon and its tributaries, as they run through Wiltshire. Although the Salisbury or Hampshire Avon runs nearest to my home in the Vale of Pewsey, the two watersheds meet only a few miles away from here, with streams on ‘the other side’ feeding the Semington Brook and other Bristol Avon tributaries.

I’ve been using Walking Pages to document and process these walks. My Walking Pages vary, but generally consist of a series of paper pages that connect together in a linear way, recording what I notice as I walk. For these recent walks I’ve been using a fold-out concertina format, made up of six A4 white paper pages overlaid with collected botanical, architectural and other imagery that link to the subject matter of river wildlife and human infrastructure. Onto this surface I write, draw, make rubbings, and attach objects washed up by or left along the river, stapled in the moment or dried out and stitched on later in my home studio.

The printed illustrations, representing the idea of the ‘official’ British landscape, blend with the messy, multi-sensory and emotional responses that emerge in the moment, and what the river shows me. This includes a rough list of the mammal/bird species that I see, hear or notice tracks/signs of, and some of the plants too.

‘Noticing is my way of opposing a particular modernist practice of looking towards an imagined future. Certain things get coded as possible futures and then we develop blinders so that all we can see is our trajectory towards one kind of imagined future, which isn’t actually the future but is a stereotyped dream future. And so, we stopped seeing. Noticing is trying to take those blinders off to look at the world around us, with special attention to the more-than-human world, by which I mean the human plus non-human world…’

Anna Tsing, Future Observatory Journal

It’s quite an addictive process. Each walk informs my understanding of the character and health of a section of river, and provides a piece of the puzzle that I am building internally. The more I walk, the better I understand where I live, and that internal model builds. The two rivers connect everything together from chalk downland to railway embankments, agricultural land, towns and nature reserves, bringing life, providing blue/green corridors for the movement of plants and animals, and carrying our waste.

The OS Map App helps me find my way through industrial areas, farms and housing. The coloured dashes that indicate public footpaths and bridleways and which pass most closely to the wiggly blue lines of rivers and streams are the ones that I look for. When I’m a bit lost, a red arrow shows me how to get back on track. Awareness of our local river systems can be so limited and fragmented due to such limited access, so I’m using walking and making to piece together a multisensory, multi-species map using those parts that I can reach, and the Walking Pages are one element of that.

These walks are also helping me to develop my understanding of where beavers are living in Wiltshire, as I research human-beaver relationships, and beavers as makers. I log any signs I find of beavers as I walk, and upload my photographs to the Mammal Mapper App to contribute to county records. I also collect fragments of beaver chewed wood, to draw back in my studio, as a way of looking even more closely, or make scans of them to use later in artwork (video, installation etc).

‘Walking Out’ of town I walk out of a busy mind, out of the expectations of others, the need to mask or perform, and eventually out of the noise and busyness. I find it easier to notice the smaller, quieter details when there’s less people and cars; an otter’s head moving slightly as it chewed its catch near Chippenham for example, a glimpse of pale cream exposed wood amongst darker bark that shows me a beaver has had a chew on a waterside willow branch, or the piping sound of a Kingfisher signaling its arrival, flying low and fast above the water’s surface.

‘I have long thought of the outdoors as an escape, a distraction from everyday life. My safe space. It allows me to unload whatever’s clogging my mind, park it wherever I am, focus on something else… and then return to that original headspace with a clearer outlook. I’m refocusing my attention, yet resting my brain at the same time…’

Joe Harkness, Neurodivergent by Nature

I’m not looking to escape the urban experience all together though, just to bring my full attention to where I am and what I am experiencing. It’s not that a rural area is some kind of green oasis to escape to either, the rural spaces are often as heavily managed and affected by human activity as urban spaces. I can find myself in yellowed, sprayed fields, between chicken sheds or alongside solar farms, or anxiously weaving my way through farm buildings to find a gate or stile thet will get back to the river.

What I am primarily ‘Walking Out’ of then, are inherited ideas of the urban and rural, of what a river is and who lives there. What I’m ‘Walking Towards’ are direct experiences of the reality of that place, received through my body and my senses, and processed through making. The making of this kind of artwork acts as a mechanism for noticing and recording (in a similar way to my Walking Bundles). I do it to understand rivers as communities of life that weave the urban and rural together, experiencing which animals and plants live where, and the impact that different kinds of land-use have on the ability of a river community to live, grow and flow.

The return of Beavers to Wiltshire has provided me with a new way to think about and with rivers when I’m walking. Is there potential in that section of river for a family of beavers to re-make it to meet their needs? Can they create the space and habitat for the other species that their re-making supports, or is the river too constrained by farming, roads etc? And what happens when human and beaver infrastructure combine or collide?

‘Across Britain, rivers and streams have been heavily modified, with 85% of our rivers straightened, confined, or cut off from their floodplains. These changes have limited the ability of rivers to function naturally, contributing to increased flood and drought risk, declining water quality and the loss of biodiversity.’

Beaver Trust – Making Space for Water

We might expect these kinds of issues to be discussed by ecologists, environmental scientists, geographers, or maybe urban planners. Similarly if you mention environmental education, most people would think of science communication.

For too long art has been the ‘nice if you have time for it’ subject. Something decorative, something to make you feel good in your spare time. But arts practices developed in dialogue with places and communities, can provide us with sensitive ways to notice the reality of, and build new kinds of relationships with, the other beings with whom we share such places. Relationships vital to our ability to live well in a future impacted by climate breakdown.

I’ve been fascinated by and felt happiest alongside other animals since I was a small child. When I was growing up I had drawers full of shells, feathers, skulls and bones. I kept a folder on the wildlife that I had found in our garden. My favourite book as a small child was an Encyclopaedia of Animal Life, until I graduated on to The Amateur Naturalist by Gerald and Lee Durreell which helped me plan ant farms or owl pellet dissections. I kept injured birds and animals in the back garden or spare room and was always going to work with animals when I was older.

But the Secondary School career options, that offered an art or science route from school into University, couldn’t accommodate me and my creative, neurodivergent mind. So my planned Zoology degree turned into Fine Art instead, with as much time as I could spent outside the studio, in the woods and by the river, and a career of almost 30 years since, spent developing participatory methods to engage communities with their local natural and cultural heritage.

My arts practice now recognises and models the value of fusing art and science, and as a kind of hybrid Artist/Naturalist I provide ways of knowing places and ecosystems that use art and walking to go beyond the restrictive binaries and boundaries that divide art/science, urban/rural and human/nature, and blinker us to what else might be possible.

Bringing art and artists into dialogue with those working within river restoration, rewilding and other regenerative land practices, has the potential to support the development of new ways of knowing and being with wetlands, through creative mapping techniques and community engagement. Art practices can also be devised to include and learn from non-human animals (hence my beaver research), as practiced by many indigenous societies.

It may have taken me a while to see it, but looking back my career path created a role for myself that didn’t at first exist. My working processes as a practicing artist, and the sensitivity of my Neuroqueer body-mind allow me access to a complex, multi-faceted understanding of what we have come to call Nature, and our place within it, developed through direct experience, creative dialogue and collaboration, where sensory and cultural differences are valued for the insights that they can offer us all.

And I get to learn from beavers…

How do I notice birds?

I’ve had a very rich and busy September. Working with groups and individuals in Liverpool with Up Projects, in Somerset with Hauser and Wirth and Spike Island, in Bath with Forest of Imagination, some really rich time in Portsmouth, beginning a ‘walking and talking’ mentoring process with artist Hannah Mae Buckingham. I’ve also started an exciting new advisory role with Not Bourne Yesterday: Chalk Stream Communities of the Chilterns (more to come on that soon).

Right now it’s time to slow down a little and settle into my home patch again, letting everything from these last few weeks settle, and decide where I’m heading next, in terms of focus/subject matter/media.

A couple of days ago on social media I came across an American 11 year old boy called Samuel Henderson, who can do amazing bird impressions (impressions doesn’t seem the right word somehow, he embodies them through sound), and is also autistic. I was blown away by his skills, and set thinking by an instagram post that said what an amazing hunter he would have been 150 years ago. Why a hunter? What other benefits come from inter-species communication? What about the wider value of learning from and connecting with our non-human kin?

As well as connecting with my Neuroqueer Ecologies research, he made me think of Irish sound recordist and ornithologist Sean Ronayne, who went on a mission to record all of the native birds of Ireland, and who is also autistic. There’s an interview with Sean here where he talks about the relationship between sound sensitivity and autism, and a starling that learned to mimic his voice and Cork accent, amongst other things.

‘…I’m seventy, up to ninety percent tuned into the frequency of the natural world, my ears are scanning. And when I’m having a conversation… my attention is only partially yours. If anything else speaks up, a bird or whatever, I’m gone.’

Sean Ronayne

When I first set up Queer River I was thinking about what queerness brings to an awareness of ecosystems, and since then have brought neuroqueer experiences into the mix too. When first exploring LGBTQAI+ people’s experiences of green and blue spaces, I was partly looking at the impact that trauma plays. For instance, one article (the reference is lost from my memory sadly) mentioned the possibility that the hyper-vigilance that a queer person might experience in certain settings, due to traumatic previous experiences or a more general awareness of the risk of being openly queer, could also lend itself to a hyper-awareness of birdsong.

In previous work with organisations (e.g. a project/course for Well City Salisbury (WCS) and Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, images below) I have supported participants to use visual ways to document their experiences of birdsong, partly inspired by spectrograms. I also produced an activity resource on a similar theme for WCS. Over the years I’ve researched Great Bustard reintroduction, the place of Swans in popular culture, and the work of artists and composers (e.g. Marcus Coates and Stevie Wishart) that have been inspired by and collaborated with birds.

What I’m interested in now, is the relationship between autism (and neurodivergence more generally) and birds/birdsong. As well as Samuel and Sean, well known autistic naturalists such as Chris Packham and Dara McAnulty, (author of Diary of a Young Naturalist), are also drawn to birds. Do we all share something? What relationship do sensory and processing differences have with a sensitivity towards/appreciation of birdsong?

‘I was studying badgers and kestrels… my life was pretty polarised between punk rock and birds. I became very solitary… I was very confused and angry, principally with myself, because I didn’t understand why I was different from other people and I couldn’t see that difference. To ourselves, we all feel normal. At that point, I was trying not to communicate with anyone. My mission was to get my degree, do a PhD and spend the rest of my life hiding in an ivory tower studying birds…’

My Younger Self Would be My Biggest Critic, Chris Packham

Joe Harkness has recently released the book ‘Neurodivergent by Nature, published by Bloomsbury. Joe’s book is a follow up to his first book Bird Therapy, which drew from ‘...his personal experiences with mental health challenges, Joe discovered solace and resilience in the natural world, particularly through bird watching.’ Joe and I were going to meet as part of his research for the new book but that didn’t quite happen in time. I’ll be reading it soon though.

‘After receiving an ADHD diagnosis in his thirties, Joe Harkness began to question whether his bond with nature was intrinsic to his neurodivergence or something developed through his life choices. Keen to know more, he connected with other neurodivergent people who share his passion for the natural world. Threading their stories with his own, Joe explores why they chose to seek diagnosis, the ways they find solace and understanding through nature, and what led many of them into nature-related careers.’

Exploring the connections between nature and neurodiversity, Bloomsbury

As usual, my initial research uncovered more questions than answers, and with an already slightly overloaded brain after a busy few weeks, I decided to get out of my head and out of the house. So I went on a walk, with a long blank roll of paper, a black pen and a stapler. As I asked a question of the children that I collaborated with at Forest of Imagination in Bath – ‘Where does a river begin?’ – so I asked myself a question on this walk – ‘How do I notice birds?’ – trying to become more conscious of how I become aware of birds, and the role that my different senses play.

As I walked out of my house and on a loop that took in the River Avon, country lanes and sheep fields, I wrote down each bird I noticed and how/where I’d noticed it. Seeing a Kestrel perched on a telegraph pole, hearing the calls of a family of Red Kites that nest nearby, seeing/feeling the shadows of unknown birds passing over the tarmac in front of me, picking up a grey, loosely banded Woodpigeon feather.

I noticed chains of reaction as a Kestrel spooked a group of Jackdaws that flew across the sky, flushing a Magpie which then rose up out of the hedge, pushing the by now perching Kestrel off of its perch, up to where my eyes connected with a Red Kite in the distance, coming to see what food a tractor cutting silage had exposed.

As I walked, I thought about how in the moulting season I had gathered quite a few feathers from birds of prey, and that had became the most noticeable bird presence. If I’m collecting objects then I’m more likely to notice feathers, whereas if I’m filming or have my sound recorder with me then I pay more attention to closer, bigger, more ‘filmable’ birds such as swans, or bird song and sounds. When I was in the New Forest looking for evidence of the animals that lived there as part of my Neuro/Queering Nature residency with Spud, I was paying more attention to footprints, and whoever had recorded themselves on my camera trap.

Ultimately though, in my arts practice I tend to draw on all my senses and piece together a more holistic ‘picture’ of my environment through their interconnection. I’m less likely to prioritise one sense than another. Walking and telling myself to only notice birds was hard, it started to make me feel tight and tense, which wasn’t the idea of going for a walk at all. The huge amounts of shiny acorns on the floor, the changing colours of the leaves, sheep wool on the fence, all called for my attention. In the end I cut myself some slack and started adding a little colour between the rows, smearing the last of the year’s blackberries, rubbing on fresh green grass and some mud exposed by the scraping of deer hooves. For me the birds don’t exist in isolation, everything is interwoven.

The usual benefit to me of going on a walk, especially after a busy time of designing and holding spaces for others, is surrendering to the place and what it wants to show me. It’s a chance to let go of the need to focus my attention and meet others’ expectations, and to allow my boundaries to dissolve. Trying to only notice birds didn’t quite fit with that, even though it was my own agenda.

‘I think there are multiple effects that nature has on me. First of all, it gives me a place that has no judgement in it; a robin is not going to turn around and tell me, ‘What you’re doing is stupid’. And that sort of freedom in a place where I can just go, and I know that there’s going to be no backlash from it, that I can just relax, and from that it gives me a sort of base grounding point from which I hold an anchor myself in my life.

Every time I go out into the forest, I gain almost new layers and old ones are taken away as I go over falls. And this I think is one of the most important things that I found in nature, that when you’re in it you can sort of go into your thought processes in your mind, and pick the problems and the areas that are going wrong and fix them. And there are no distractions that you find from the real world, that will divert you from this course. It’s just you, nature, and your own mind…’

In Conversation with Dara McAnulty, Dara McAnulty

One of the reasons I didn’t originally think that I could be autistic was that I didn’t fit the usual idea of what being autistic looks like, and I am intrigued by the fact that I still don’t feel like I fit. My noticing of birds isn’t like Samuel’s or Sean’s. But my need to get outside and be with non-human animals is. The benefits sound very similar. So perhaps what we share is the need to decompress after consciously editing and masking ourselves to navigate social spaces, and the sensory sensitivity, and hyper-empathy, that enhances our awareness of other animals and our entangled relationships with them.

Research shows that many autistic people have experienced trauma, from bullying, harassment or abuse, or from the constant grind of trying to navigate social systems that don’t cater for our needs. All of the people I’ve mentioned above have described the therapeutic value of time spent ‘in nature’ (in a less human dominated world, where other voices can be heard).

”Belonging’ conveys the experience of becoming whole through integration of all aspects of ourselves, including the shadow aspects we conventionally suppress. Time with the wild non-human world can support us to do this, as we re-experience ourselves as part of our entangled universe. This can be particularly true for autistic people. Time away from humans provides the rare possibility of being able to fully unmask, allowing complete sensory immersion and self-integration.’

Belonging (March 2023), Kristen Lindop (image above)

We are different to each other, as all autistic people are different, but we all benefit from time spent outdoors, outside of busy urban environments, opened up to the communication of the more than human world. Aided by our sensory sensitivities, that in other environments can cause distress and discomfort.

But why birds in particular? I don’t know about that yet, but I’m aware that the majority of examples I’ve used above are white, male-presenting people (apart from Artist Kristen Lindop), and that birdwatching and the spaces associated with it can be very white, male spaces. The practices of keeping a bird list in birdwatching also echoes the urge to collect that I mentioned above, that some autistic people experience. With Sean there also seems to be something about collecting the calls of all Irish native birds (see my earlier post on autism and collecting here).

I only recognised myself as autistic when I started to look at and hear from a wider range of autistic experiences, particularly women and gender non-conforming people, and I’d be keen to hear from women, trans/non-binary and Black neurodivergent people on their experiences of birds/birdsong and birdwatching.

‘I experience strong physical and emotional responses to many presences, particularly birdlife… Being with, and becoming with, birdlife is a powerful multilayered experience for me – in my art practice and in my life in general’

Artist Kristen Lindop (via instagram)

Please do comment or email if you have thoughts or experiences that you’d be happy to share. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a short video clip of a hunting Kestrel from near the end of my walk…

NB. I’m aware of scientific research carried out comparing bird and human brains, deliberately impairing the ability of birds (e.g. captive Zebra Finches) to sing, in an attempt to understand what might cause some autistic people to be non-speaking. I have chosen not to go into that in depth here.

A Taste of the Mersey: Racial Justice and Regeneration

On Thursday I led a walk in Liverpool titled Neuroqueer Ecologies: Noticing Differently, as part of the UP Projects symposium Bodies of Water: Regenerative Art Practice. The symposium was curated by Justine Boussard (below, left) and partnered with the Liverpool Biennial, with an associated public art commission by Anne Duk Hee Jordan at A la Ronde in Exmouth and Haigh Hall in Wigan.

Before I left Liverpool on Friday I also managed to get around a few of the Biennial venues, visiting work by artists that connect with my practice, curated this year by Marie-Anne McQuay.

It’s only the third time I’ve been to Liverpool, and the last time was about 30 years ago, so I write this as a visitor, sharing a sample of what most connected with me and will feed into my Queer River research.

My walk aimed to offer a taste of the methodology that I most use within Queer River – walking, talking and making with rivers; noticing how water moves/is moved through the city, and following it down towards the docks. I wanted to highlight the insights that neurodivergent perspectives on ecosystems can offer, and bring the subject of watery, regenerative practice into a real world setting, through an embodied experience.

At the start of the walk I shared the following quote from autistic Philosopher Robert Chapman:

‘A radical politics of neurodivergent conservation is also consistent with a radical politics of environmental conservation. After all, it has been the same logics, the same system, that has ravaged the biodiversity of the planet as has sought to eliminate the neurological diversity of humanity…’ 

I gave each person a pack of resources to document what they noticed (a blank paper map, pencil, crayon, empty bottle, envelope), and I carried another bag of equipment (stethoscopes, magnifying glasses etc) for us to share.

Before going to Liverpool I had started to look into the history of the River Mersey and its place within the city’s culture. It was almost exactly 4 years to the day that I had arrived in Glasgow for Queer River Wet Land. There I was working with the University ahead of Cop26, to reflect on and walk with the Kelvin and the Clyde, learning about their industrial heritage and potential future flooding, and thinking with others about whose voices are heard in discussions on climate breakdown and river futures, and whose voices are missing. Similar thoughts were going through my mind about The Mersey.

I first discovered that the Mersey is thought to take its name from its place as a boundary between Mercia and Northumberland (and more recently between Lancashire and Cheshire), but that possible earlier Celtic origins link the modern name of Mersey with Meteia, meaning ‘the reaping one’ or ‘she that cuts down.’

Also, I was aware of the role of slavery within Liverpool’s history as a port city, although less familiar with that history than with towns and cities nearer to my home in Wiltshire (see an earlier post here).

‘Liverpool ships were responsible for the transportation of over 1.1 million enslaved African people to the Americas between 1750 and 1807, more than any other British port. Written histories of the town begin to appear in the midst of Liverpool’s rise to prominence in the ‘African trade’, at the end of the eighteenth century. Liverpool reached its slave-trading apogee during the decade of legal abolition at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, when the town owned close to 80 per cent of Britain’s total slave trade.‘

Liverpool’s local tints: drowning memory and
“maritimizing” slavery in a seaport city

As a white person, and a Dad to a teenage boy of Jamaican heritage, I’m keen to advance my learning on the place of slavery within British history, and of racial justice within environmental/climate issues. My knowledge of climate justice draws on the experiences of different communities, including recent work with Disability Arts Online, on behalf of Climate Museum UK, to providing professional development on the relationship between disability justice and climate justice.

One of the things that stood out whilst digging around online, was a quote from a speech by Michael Heseltine in 1981, written whilst staying in the Atlantic Hotel, and ‘standing with a glass of wine’ overlooking the Mersey. Heseltine was in Liverpool following The Uprising of Liverpool 8 (aka the Toxteth Riots):

“The Mersey got to me. It was enormously significant in the history of our country, and I felt a debt to that river…It was an open sewer, and I felt deeply sad that we hadn’t realised what an enormous, valuable resource it was. That was where the idea came from, that we must make good the degradation of centuries.”

Heseltine’s ‘It Took a Riot’ speech led to the development of the Mersey Basin Campaign: ‘established in 1985, with government backing and a 25 year lifespan, to address the problems of water quality and associated landward dereliction on the Mersey and its tributaries..’. The MBC worked with local people to improve water quality and encourage ‘sustainable waterside regeneration’. Their work is now continued by the Mersey Rivers Trust.

The cleaning up of the Mersey was obviously a very good thing. In 2002 oxygen levels were reported as being able to support fish along the entire length of the river for the first time in recent history, after years of pollution by sewage and industry. Salmon returned, and occasional grey seals, porpoises and dolphins visited (sadly today the Mersey has one of the highest loads of ‘forever chemicals in the world). A Conservative minister being praised as the saviour of the Mersey however, at a time when poor housing, environmental pollution, high unemployment and institutional racism within the police, had led to the disturbances that brought him to Liverpool, seems pretty simplistic.

‘Heseltine’s correspondence itself indicates that the release of details of the new arrangements for Liverpool’s regeneration should not be released until he had returned from holiday, stressing that ‘he does not want the statement to go out while he is lying on a beach in Mauritius. He thinks the reaction would be unfavourable’.

Disorderly cities and the policy-making field: The 1981 English riots and the management of urban decline.

The Thatcher government’s economic and social policies played a key role in the decline of British industries and communities in the 1980s and 1990s, just as austerity and Brexit have in recent years, and Douglas Howe then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was quoted as suggesting a ‘managed decline’ of the city. The uprisings in Liverpool and in Brixton (and several other major cities) led to the commissioning of the Scarman Report, which highlighted the need for policing reform and improvements in housing, and identified ‘racial disadvantage’ as a key factor in the disturbances. The Scarman Report also informed the development of the Race Relations Act in 2000.

A Liverpool University survey undertaken 5 years before the Toxteth riots revealed that 31% of local employers admitted to acting in a discriminatory way to black applicants…’

The approach taken to regeneration in the Toxteth area included compulsory purchase and demolition of housing (including social housing), with associated impacts on local communities. A campaign was eventually set up to save the ‘Last 4 Streets’, leading to the creation of Granby 4 Streets LCT in 2011, who went on with Assemble to win The Turner Prize in 2015:

‘After the riots in 1981, the streets of Toxteth in inner-city Liverpool went into decline and its housing, services and residents suffered with it. The situation was compounded by a series of failed regeneration plans, leaving the streets drained of life. After 30 years of neglect, the local community decided to take action; they started cleaning, planting and painting their streets and over 100 boarded up terraced houses in them. They set up a vibrant monthly market and they campaigned to stop the demolition of the last four remaining original streets.’

Granby 4 Streets, Ideas Alliance

As we walked from Black-E on Thursday (our base for the symposium), down to Queen’s Dock, all of this was in the back of my mind; the relationship between regenerative practice in public art, the restoration of wetland ecosystems, and the regeneration of post industrial/urban areas, where economics, politics and racial justice all come into play.

The creation of the city of Liverpool involved building over large sections of the Mersey watershed and its associated ecosystems, as well as creating a hard edge along the main Mersey channel. Building over what originally would have been a network of smaller waterways, and creating large areas of hard surfacing, both increases flood risk, and denies space for plants and other animals to live.

‘Liverpool is the forth highest risk in the country for surface water flooding. This is a result of urbanisation, aging infrastructure and that a large percentage of water courses are culverted which leads to standing water.  Because of climate change, both the chance and consequence of flooding has increased.’

Merseyside Prepared

On our walk we noticed mosses and Buddleia sprouting from older brick buildings, and a small artificial island in the Wapping Dock that had provided a place for a family of Canade Geese to nest. Buddleia often appears in urban areas, sprouting out of cracks in walls and pavements. The botanist Mark Spencer, with whom I walked for Queer River in 2021, described how Buddleia is planted to attract butterflies, and readily spreads along connecting structures such as roads, railways and rivers, but that no studies had been carried out on its impact on butterflies. They readily feed on its nectar, but its leaves don’t offer food to caterpillars, and it may actually out-compete those plants that do.

I was excited to see that Liverpool Biennial artist Kara Chin had included modelled mutant Buddleia plants within her installation Mapping the Wasteland: PAY AND DISAPLAY (above right) at FACT Liverpool this year. The text alongside reads ‘The Buddleia plant was first brought to the UK from China in the 1890s…Chin draws comparisons between Buddleia’s status as an ‘invasive’ species and the racist language used in mainstream media about immigrant populations’.

My recent work with young people at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, another port city, responded to the work of Palestinian Artist Alaa Abu Asad who similarly explores cultural responses to the spread of invasive Japanese Knotweed, as a metaphor for racist and xenophobic language used in relationship to human migration.

My own research has started to look at whether reintroduced native wetland species such as beavers can be said to bring an indigenous perspective to river restoration (re-making) in the UK, and what multi-species collaborations can offer us. What could I as an artist learn from being apprenticed to beavers?

The morning after the symposium I continued exploring the waterside, via a walk to Open Eye Gallery and Tate Liverpool, to meet the artist Helen Kilbride. As I wandered along, surrounded by smooth, pale, engineered stone surfaces, contrasting with the crumbling brick of the day before, I wondered how far back into the current city the waters of the Mersey would have reached. What liminal places would have existed here before where land and water met – marsh, salt marsh, reedbed? What other rivers and streams would have joined the Mersey that are now filled in or culverted?

‘Beacon Gutter once marked the boundary between Liverpool and Kirkdale; as of 2025, it’s been buried for 200 years. Dingle is named after the brook of the same name, which flowed down Park Road. Over 15 miles of buried waterways exist in Liverpool. Today, the Mersey may be the only river most people think of in Liverpool, yet across the city run the Alt, the Jordan, the Old Garston River and others.’

Streams of Consciousness: In Search of Liverpool’s Lost Rivers, Robin Brown

At Tate I took a photograph of an indigo-dyed textile map of the city, accompanied by a soundtrack, created by Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic (below left, followed up later with a visit to their installation at the Walker Art Gallery, below middle and right).

‘Guzman and Jankovic reinterpret the history of sacred indigo textiles, which are deeply connected with colonial histories and the trade of enslaved Africans who carried the expertise of cultivating indigo with them to the Americas. The textiles feature an abstract pattern of intercultural DNA sequences that embody a global connection between the Black Atlantic…The accompanying soundscape alludes to ideas of belonging and exclusion through an exploration of diasporic sounds that combine electronic music, dub, punk, and Senegalese drums’

Messengers of the Sun

From the Tate I walked to FACT, and from FACT to Bluecoat, where ChihChung Chang‘s installation combined rubbings of manhole covers and other urban infrastructure in the shape of a Chinese arch (I had used the same technique on our walk the day before). Chang’s arch was combined with a handmade boat and projection of archive imagery, referencing ‘rapid-changing and evolving environments such as ships, islands, water and ports’.

Also at Bluecoat, was Odur Ronald’s installation Muly ‘Ate Limu/All in One Boat, made from aluminium printing plates and scrap metal:

‘The jerry cans reference the dangerous and illegal methods people sometimes use to cross seas to Europe…The arrangement of the installation references The Brooks – a renowned ship which travelled the passage from Liverpool via the West Coast of Africa, carrying over 5000 enslaved people…’

My last stop of the morning, before I travelled back to Wiltshire was the Walker Art Gallery where I came across the work of Leasho Johnson. Johnson is a Queer artist of Jamaican origin who ‘aims to disrupt perceptions around historical, political, stereotypical and biological expectations of the Black queer body.’

I realise that as a white person, I am learning about Black experience of rivers and other waterbodies from the outside, piecing a picture together through the voices and artwork of others. This post is intended as a way to publicly process and document my thinking, rather than make myself out to be some kind of expert. I’m keen to hear from others with related experiences if you’re happy to share them with me, and am particularly interested in the Black community’s relationship with the River Mersey in the present, and other Black artists/writers exploring wetlands through their work more broadly.

Thank you to Justine and UP Projects for inviting me to Liverpool to walk with The Mersey, and to everyone who joined us on the walk. And to artist friend Alys Scott-Hawkins who was my hotel breakfast buddy, and provided some of these photos of the walk, as did Lucy Caruthers, designer of spaces and experiences.

I’ve really enjoyed seeing people’s images and reflections from the walk being shared on social media, and feel happy to have created a space where people felt able to take part and record their experiences in a way that worked for them. Please do stay in touch if you’d like to, I’d love to hear from you.

After the Rain: Run off and Roadcombing

After a Summer of drought, I was wishing for some heavy rain. We had a little, then a little more, and now we’ve got the heavy stuff. As I wrote on instagram, the arrival of the rain relieves some of the tension in my body, hardened and tensed by the wait and the awareness of the damage being done to plants and animals, with the ground baked har and river levels dropping.

Temporary stream running down my road

I live on a very slight hill, the continuation of the edge of Salisbury Plain, sloping down to the beginnings of the Hampshire River Avon. When rain is heavy it forms little streams down our road, heading for the river. These temporary streams leave behind clumps of straw from the recent harvest, along with plastic bottle tops and metal bits and pieces lost from vehicles, acorns and sycamore seeds.

I took a walk after one of the first bursts of rain, and gathered a few things that had been washed up. I walked from my home along the road to the river bridge, tucking headlight plastic, pieces of yellow line and the odd seed or feather into my pocket. I’ve written about Roadcombing before, and the place of collecting in my practice, but not really about run off from our roads into rivers. The water is very welcome of course, and I can pick up a certain amount of rubbish, but after a long dry period what less visible stow-aways does the water carry with it?

In 2024 a white paper, produced by Keyline Civils Specialists found that:

‘Road runoff is responsible for 18% of waterbody failures in England (86% of the country’s inland water bodies fail to meet targets)...road runoff contains a toxic cocktail with heavy metals, including zinc, cadmium and copper, plus polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) such as pyrene and benzo(a) pyrene. Microplastics and hundreds of other chemicals also routinely enter waterways in this way.‘

In a piece written about the paper’s findings for the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Professor Alex Ford of Portsmouth University said:

“We know these chemicals can be neurotoxic, immunotoxic, carcinogenic as well as reproductive toxicants.”

So what about the impact on river ecosystems? John Bryden, Head of Improving Rivers at environmental charity, Thames21 adds:

“Many rivers can now only support a limited number of pollution-tolerant species due to years of accumulated contaminants. We need urgent and comprehensive action involving both the technical solutions promoted in the recent white paper and the nature-based approaches identified by our tool.’

When I reached the river I climbed down to look under the bridge. It didn’t smell great. Water was pouring in from a pipe under the bridge as well as starting to flow through the river channel. Our nearest bridge has two ‘arches’, one that always has at least a trickle, and this other one that had dried up completely. It was encouraging to see a thin ribbon of water starting to make its way back to form the smaller channel, but the smell of sewage (or something like it) was pretty off-putting.

My individual, day to day artwork tends to deal with the material world, the things that I can touch and collect, or use to build or make marks. My process builds sensory awareness of environmental change. I record the footprints of animals that have passed under the bridge, or gather the feathers they’ve left behind. But hidden substances like the chemicals in road run-off are harder to notice, and so more difficult to raise awareness of. How can they be made more tangible? Is anyone doing any interesting creative or community engagement work around this? Something for me to ponder.

Tonal podcast with Feral Practice

Earlier this year I walked along the flooded River Tone near Taunton, Somerset, with artist Fiona MacDonald, working with more than human communities as Feral Practice.

Fiona invited me to talk about Queer River, and explore more generally how Queer and Neurodivergent perspectives might shape our understanding of rivers.

In a similar way to Queer River, the Tonal project has seen Feral Practice bring together conversations with a diverse group of people, who have different experiences of and perspectives on rivers in general, through walking with the River Tone.

‘Tonal, by artist Feral Practice, is an audio project exploring water issues nationally with a special focus on the River Tone in Somerset. Each podcast episode is a riverside conversation with someone who has a specific personal or professional relationship to water and the river, building a broad base of knowledge from many distinctive perspectives.’

Our conversation, and others recorded in connection with the River Tone, have now been launched as the Tonal Podcast, have a listen here: https://tonal-uk.com

Re-Making Rivers: Learning from Different Perspectives

As an artist I’m interested in making, including how other species can be seen as makers, and the possibility for multi-species collaboration, including in the re-making of UK rivers that have suffered from previous human interventions.

Earlier this month I spent a few days holiday in Devon with my family. I was hoping to find time to look for signs of beavers, being in such a beaver hotspot as the Otter Valley, and maybe attempt some beaver watching if I found a good location. But I wasn’t expecting to be so surrounded by evidence of beavers right where we were staying.

Walking around the holiday site, with some small steams/ditches and 3 small fishing lakes (our teenage son is a fishing fan), I saw signs of beavers pretty much everywhere. Small felled trees, freshly cut coppice, beaver chewed fragments on the footpath. Over the following few days I started to notice small dams in the streams and a large older one part covered over with brambles. As it got dark on the first evening I sat on the bank of one of the lakes, and a beaver came gliding along 10 feet in front of me. I made the mistake of moving to take a video and it disappeared with a huge splash and a whack of its tail.

I was in beaver heaven. I saw or heard the local beavers every evening – on our last night they were hidden but I could hear them loudly chomping – and when we walked down to the nearby River Otter there were stashes of ‘harvested’ maize in the river from nearby fields, and half finished dams in the drought-lowered water.

Beavers re-make rivers with their bodies, as they gnaw wood, carry rocks, dig canals, and push/puddle earth into crevices, adapting degraded wetlands and bringing them to life. It’s not about restoration in the sense of taking rivers back to how we think they once were, but bringing them the best health and levels of biodiversity they can achieve now, in a time increasingly impacted by climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and pollution.

In the Norfolk Rivers Trust beaver enclosure on the River Glaven that I visited last year as part of my residency with Groundwork Gallery, the beavers had incorporated the ruins of WW2 sewage infrastructure into their own constructions (featured image and above), adding stray bricks and a muntjac deer skull to dams and lodges. Beavers work with the ‘blasted landscapes’ that we’ve created through extractive capitalism, and re-make them to the benefit of wider ecosystems.

‘The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes…’

Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing

My aim is that Queer River contributes to the decolonising of the discourse on river futures. When I say this I’m very aware that I am a white person living in an industrialised, European country. I’m not claiming to have the whole story. I’m aiming to provide a space where queer, neuroqueer, non-human and other voices can come together and be heard, and where we can all learn from each other.

Indigenous voices and practices are important to my research, and I am excited about the potential for learning from reintroduced keystone species and ‘ecosystem engineers’ such as the beaver too. In my recent PhD proposal, I wondered out loud if in a country with no indigenous human population (despite what the far right may tell us), that returning beavers might bring an indigenous perspective to UK wetland creation and management, that we lost when we hunted them to extinction.

People in other cultures and the UK’s past have learned from living alongside beavers (see my previous post about beavers and bridges/trackways and the work of Bryony Coles), and now in this time of ‘renewed coexistence’ perhaps we need to do so again in new ways developed through arts based research (as river restoration has with the development of beaver dam analogues for example).

Justice is a key part of my process/practice, from environmental and disability justice, making sure that the disproportionate impacts of the environmental crisis on disabled and neurodivergent people (among others) are more widely understood and understanding the valuable insights we bring (see Neuroqueer Ecologies), to multi-species and epistemological justice, valuing different forms of knowledge and understanding and accepting that a white, western, colonising worldview was what created these problems to start with.

A lot of the figureheads of the river restoration and activism movement in the UK seem to be white men. I’m very conscious of that as a white, male-presenting person who works in environmental and outdoor learning contexts. There’s a lot of good work being done by such people and I think we also need to use our privilege to make space for other voices and experiences.

‘The modernist view treated water as simply a ‘resource’ for irrigation, water supply and sanitation. The aesthetic, cultural, spiritual, and ecological values that the local societies ascribed to water were simply occluded by this view. Under modernity rivers were a giant plumbing system carrying cubic meters/feet of water, and were expected to stay within the imposed iron limits of average flows.

Experientially for the local societies in Pakistan/India, average flows were meaningless as were cubic meter numbers. To them rivers were living entities with their moods and regimes with no two days the same. People lived and interacted with rivers like they lived and interacted with their families.’

Daanish Mustafa, Decolonising Water

For example, while I value the work that Robert MacFarlane is doing, in using his profile and writing to bring the issues of river degradation and sentience to a mainstream audience (see Is a River Alive?), I think we need to work a lot harder to explicitly acknowledge and amplify what indigenous, feminist, global majority and non-human perspectives are bringing to this work.

In this country we seem to fall back so readily into foregrounding the experience of white, male, probably straight naturalists/writers/explorers. Which other river writers and activists should we be hearing from?

There’s so much to say on this subject. I can’t fit everything I’d like to say into a single blog post, and I still have a lot to learn from others. So this is just a taste of my thinking about the need to foreground decolonial discourses, and help bring about the re-making of rivers, through a collaborative, multi-species reimagining of what a river of the future might be.

Here are some references to writing that has informed my thinking, in addition to the links in the post.

Please do suggest other reading or art/environment/comunity projects you think I might benefit from having a look at, and I’ll return to share more examples soon:

  • Chao, S and Kirksey, E (Editors) (2022): Who Benefits From Multi-Species Justice? From the book: The Promise of Multispecies Justice – Duke University Press.pp 1-17
  • van Dooren, T. Kirksey, E. and Munster, U. (2016): Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness – Environmental Humanities (2016) 8 (1): 1–23. DOI:10.1215/22011919-3527695
  • Parsons, M, Fisher, K and Crease, R.P (2021): Decolonising River Restoration: Restoration as Acts of Healing and Expression of Rangatiratanga. Chapter 9 of the book: Decolonising Blue Spaces in the Anthropocene, Freshwater management in Aotearoa New Zealand. Palgrave MacMillan
  • Todd, Z (2015): Indigenizing the Anthropocene. From the book: Art in the Anthropocene. Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies) – Open Humanities Press. Pp 241-252
  • Tsing, A L. (2015): The Mushroom at the End of the World, On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins – Princeton University Press
  • Woelfle Hazard, C. (2022): Underflows. Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice – University of Washington Press