Becoming Frogphlegm

This film-in-progress research Becoming Frogphlegm maps my semi-mythic journey across species and continents, to ask the persistent questions: “How to exist on land?” and “How to exist in the water?” Here swimming becomes a speculative, performative form of land art by which to navigate amphibious entanglement across landscape, protest and sculpture.

The research queries any sense of permanence of art on land as it documents the dramatic erosion of coastlines across the UK, showing five metres of coastal loss in two tides in Storm Ciaran in Dorset and Storm Babet in Angus. Here, a whale lies monumental on the shore in Arbroath, the body battered by Babet, local children using its body as makeshift play equipment. Meanwhile, dialogue is created with sculpture, through a monumental Henry Moore in the torrential rain of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the weir of the River Dearne fast flowing to contain the deluge.

We see varied and persistent barriers to the water. In Singapore, the beaches are shown closed by oil spill; in London, the constructed waterways next to the US Embassy run red from a Greenpeace protest. Sculptural materials are melted into the film as liquidity and solidity converge in more sustainable ways of making. Seaweed is sandcast at Coles Castings’ biofuel foundry, run on vegetable oil, the artefacts posited as storage of precious metal, that can be recycled in future crisis.

Yet as both film and object are held as a reminder of a sea that once was swimmable, the research ends with the dilemma of whether this validates the making of art in the climate emergency, or whether we should embrace leaving nothing behind.

• https://www.flolondon.co.uk/all-posts/in...
• https://www.newwavemagazine.com/single-p...