Swansula Vision

An unfinished speculative map of Swansula, begun during the Covid-19 lockdown while the project was being developed at the Royal College of Art.

The map became a way of trying to hold the entirety of Swansula at once - not as a plan for what would be here, but as a piece of Lunasaw thinking: what could be here? How much could disappear beneath marsh and bog? What might an ecological industry look like? Could this fantastical level of making, living and ritual become self-sustaining?

Across the map, waste plastic is recycled and extruded into structures for dwellings and trade along the estuary, combined with intertidal mud cob gathered from the landscape. Waters are clean enough for pods of dolphins to return and play around the Dolphin Filtration Dye Temple, where water is filtered and circulated through natural dye processes.

The disused Thames Crossing pylons remain above the reeds, transformed into temples where projected deities appear through animation and a deep faith in nature is practised. Biomimicry extends into the infrastructure itself: self-sufficient carbon-capture systems take the form of Black Ducks, while energy is drawn from water and wind.

Making the map began to shift Swansula further into the future and became the starting point for Relics of Estuarine Magic. I began to imagine that the map itself might be something found - an incomplete trace of how the Lunasaws once imagined their world.

Swansula was no longer only a proposition for 2045 or 2099. It became a world for the plastic age and a much deeper future, where deep past meets deep future.

The marsh makes this leap possible. Its energy and materials, its accumulated layers of industry, ecology, archaeology, history and folklore allow the imagination to move across enormous stretches of time - asking not simply what might happen to this landscape, but what kinds of worlds it might still contain.

Grace at 65, 2057

Sketch for a human-scale narrative sculpture with moving image projected through an Odona Dragonfly Eco-Maton conservation drone.

This was an early drawing for what I imagined would become one of the final physical works of Swansula at the Royal College of Art. I placed myself directly into the future of the project, Grace at 65, in the year 2057, inhabiting Swansula as part of the Lunasaw community rather than observing the world from outside it.

The figure was conceived at human scale, with moving image projected through the lens of an Odona Dragonfly Eco-Maton, bringing together my own ageing body, speculative conservation technology and the ecology of the marsh.

The sculpture would have been accompanied by the song To Swansula, later preserved within Swansula Quartz. The song brought a deeply personal narrative into the world, allowing the Lunasaws to exist emotionally as well as ecologically. They weren't only conservationists, material makers and harvesters working in service to the landscape; they experienced longing, devotion and isolation within it. This began to complicate the idea of Swansula as a utopian bog community - asking what it might actually feel like to belong to this place and to one another.

The sculpture was never realised in this form. When the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the project, Swansula had to adapt. The physical world I had been building became increasingly digital and dispersed, and the project shifted towards telling this future through fragments of moving image, sound and messages preserved within a fictional digital time capsule Swansula Quartz.

The drawing remains an early trace of that transition, and of my attempt to physically place myself within the future I was imagining.

Swansula’s Eco-Matons

Swansula’s Eco-Matons are radical ideas for rewilding automatons, inspired by the prehistoric wildlife of Swanscombe Peninsula.

Fantastical sci-fi eco-bots, they are imagined as being made from waste and plant-based materials, designed to fill extinct ecological niches within the landscape. As they move through Swansula, they harvest and process the natural materials they ‘eat’ - digesting organic matter and transforming it into new materials.

A coming together of wildlife and industry.

The Eco-Matons grew from research into the use of technology in wildlife conservation, sustainable bio-based future materials and their processes, biomimetic design, and the artificial or augmented forms of nature being developed in response to the climate crisis.

They imagine a future in which technology does not sit apart from the ecosystem, but becomes entangled with it.

Eco-Maton Phanti, 2020
Stop-motion Animation Puppet
120cm x 50cm x 150cm

Beetroot, blackberry and madder root bioplastic, aluminium, silver, copper, brass, rose fibre, natural rubber, linen dyed with weld,recycled textile, found plastic, recycled OHP lens, copper, brass