Molly Brown

Participating in We Live With The Land

& The Land as Other

My work is informed by ecological thinking: how we might broaden our ways of thinking about our place in the world, the relationship to our non-human others and how art can help imagine these new modes. I use traditional and experimental relief printing methods; the labour intensive processes around this are a way to think through and develop ideas. My current process combining etched lino with more traditional methods is exploratory and often leads to imagery that is playful and unsettled. In previous work I have looked at the Welsh landscape through the lens of historical ecology: signs in the landscape that give clues as to how humans have interacted with the place. I see plant location and morphology as a kind of language to be interpreted through printmaking, deciphering clues as to our place in nature. My proposal would focus on one particular piece of land and would explore the metamorphosis of the area over the deep time since the last ice age. Potential eras to imagine or represent could be: the pre human, pre-agricultural human settlement, upland agriculture and re-wilding/ new agroforestry models. The work would reflect plant life, people's labour on the land and the drivers behind the changes over time. I would examine the current changes to Welsh land, asking whether there is a balance to be struck between the need for carbon offsetting whilst avoiding the reinforcement of hierarchical and colonialist attitudes towards land ownership. Part of the collaboration could use species and habitat data to link changing biodiversity in the range of colour/tone used in each print. This would mean a representation of actual data in the finished work as well as the human story about how inhabitants have lived with the land through the developing years.