Becoming Lichen (Digital)

Becoming Lichen walk 1

Midday 14 December

Gilfach Nature Reserve, Rhayader.

Duration around 90 minutes, with refreshments

This will be a walk to encounter rare lichen colonies in this very special reserve at Gilfach, led by ecologists Josie Bridges and Ellie Bagget from Natur am Byth, with movement artist Simon Whitehead. Simon will share some gentle movement exercises and meditations emerging from his recent research, in which he attempts to learn ways of being and strategies for adaptation from these ancient and mysterious organisms. Simon will also share some recent lichen field recordings; invitations to listen to the world through lichen.

Becoming Lichen walk 2

08.35 21 December (sunrise)

Meet outside Oriel Davies Gallery, the walk will take us to St.David’s Cemetery.

Duration around one hour, followed by light breakfast

In this walk we will find and identify the diverse gravestone lichens that live in the Cemetery with ecologists Josie Brigdes and Ellie Bagget from Natur am Byth along with movement artist Simon Whitehead. Simon will offer ways of moving slowly and to listen with Lichen, practices emerging from his current embodied research at Oriel Davies, Becoming lichen. The event will culminate with a short harp recital. Ceri Owen Jones will play along with the lichen colonies, the ancestral and stone ambience of the cemetery.

Places are limited, booking essential.

To touch lichen is to touch something that pre-exists our human lifetimes, peer closely and you see that they are all distinctly and mysteriously themselves, made up of many collaborating lifeforms. Crustose, Foliose, Fruticose - lichens thrive everywhere, on buildings, trees, rocks, road signs and gravestones.

As a movement artist, I’m interested in how the slow growth of lichens, their symbiosis and adherence to the earth might inform gentle movement, inner meditative practices and cultivate soft bodily resilience to the stresses of current times. For this period of research I am adopting lichens as my ‘more than human mentors’. Attempting to notice and learn from them and the places in which they thrive, to move as lichen is to combine our differences, to be together in ways that we couldn’t if alone, to make something complex, unusual.

I am currently learning how to record the sounds of lichens, in an attempt to ‘feel’ into their vibrational relations with other beings. (This involves spending time in Coetir Tycanol, close to my home, one of the most diverse ecosystems of lichen species in Wales and the UK). I will document this process over the coming months, shared through the OD website.

Lichens give us reasons to be cheerful; they combine differences, live as composites, their longevity perhaps, gives us hope.

As symbiotic communities ‘Lichen has much to teach us about our relationship to the environment and our place within a living world…this little organism with its incredible life force invites a new vision (on a new scale), a new ecology.’ - Vincent Zonca (2023)

Supported by Arts Council of Wales 'Create'

Becoming Lichen - irregular diary

- part 1 - Coetir Tycanol Woodland, Pembrokeshire - 2.09.24

- part 2 - St David’s Church Cemetery, Newtown - 18.09.24