How do we advocate for the unmeasurable? At the entrance of the Cromarty Firth, where folklore greets industrial futures, a changing coastline threatens the landscape’s capacity to do what it has since time immemorial: tell story.
Etched Entanglings speculates a near-future where a coalition of carvers in Cromarty have successfully advocated for story to be valued as a landscape asset through the creation of a new stewardship order. Within the firth, where multi-species carving has long been a method of how stories are told, story becomes inseparable from stone.
Merging Michael Marker's “animate landscapes” methodology - which views the stories of place as real - with Karen Barad's “agential realism” – pushing that beings become through their entangling - the landscape’s capacity to story increases through new possibilities of connections at a set of anchor points. In turn, the coastline evolves as it entangles through stone, sediment and story.
Stamping was used to document how beings within the first were interacting with one another, telling their stories. Throughout the wider Moray Firth, one minute of sound was recorded at each site and a set of colourful, circular stamps were used to show how loud each being was, with larger circles representing more dominant voices.
Using cyanotype, fieldwork photographs are collaged with plant matter from the site, the stamping that represented voices present in the landscape, the minute sound recording and mapping data of the area's geology to capture how stories unfolded for a moment in the landscape.
Design interventions grow from the existing entanglings of beings within the landscape. This includes the creation of artificial tidepools, new stone carvings, and community planting initiatives. In doing so, old voices tell new stories within Cromarty Firth.
Cyanotype collages of site photos, existing conditions and proposed changes show how new stories grow from the entanglings in the anchor points. Beads are used to represent how the possibility of story could be experienced as beings move through the firth.
