one way you look are Dungeness Nuclear Power Stations – now non-functional – one unexpectedly defuelled since 2021 – providing low carbon electricity since 1983

look the other way and there is Prospect Cottage and the amazing garden that Derek Jarman created, surviving in such seemingly inhospitable surroundings – an exceptional example of a wildlife habitat of shingle beach with communities of rare plants, insects and animals that are unique, precious and exceptionally fragile

where I spent a two week residency in September 2024 allowing me to further my enquiry into the cellular level of things: the microbial, the molecular, the nuclear

within the amazing context of Derek Jarman’s house and garden – which Tilda Swinton describes as his toolbox, and a battery

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precis of project:

I will be making a ‘reading’ of the garden and surrounding areas working across multi-media sensory devices. With an emphasis on sustainable ecologies in relation to the economy, from a decentred (posthuman) xeno-feminist, and cross-species perspective, in an attempt at ‘living with uncertainty’. I utilise Lynn Margulis’ thinking around symbiogenesis - my interest is how to shift perspectives to a microbial and molecular scale, where we finally understand that there is no ‘outside’ of environmental crisis.

Rather than the neo-darwinian emphasis on the selfish gene, and genetic mutation being the place at which difference occurs, Margulis’ work points to how cells inflect DNA. That DNA is driven by its environment: the ceulluar activity around it, and how the full story doesn’t lie in the genome alone but the entire system. Mutations are both random and driven by biochemical processes. The environment is as important as the genetic constitution. We are 90% non-human DNA, a highly promiscuous DNA; an eco-system; a holobiont; a consortia of several organisms, living alongside many other organisms from our eye lashes to the bacteria in our gut. A queer hybridity from which emerges new life.