Martha’s practice explores themes of environmental haunting and archive, thinking specifically around landscape and nature through socially engaged methods. Their work is interdisciplinary and typically manifests as photography, film or collaboration, but is always mindful of environmentally sustainable ways of working. Their work and thinking on the Fens grew out of returning ‘Holme’ during the 2020 lockdown and since then has been present in a number of aspects of their thinking. During the residency, Martha will be continuing to develop their project ‘the shrinking archive,’ an online research and creative Fenland repository, which they are looking to explore how to make physical through this residency.
The shrinking archive is a project that develop during a 2021 DYCP grant researching the Fens. The Fens, Martha believes, is still not widely included in contemporary cultural dialogues and this is something they are keen to change. The fens are associated with a sense of loss, the loss of landscape, the loss of a horizon, the loss of elevation but what does a landscape associated with so much loss gain through creative intervention and research, especially in an era of climate crisis? For this project Martha will be thinking of the landscape/ecology through its radical histories and community (both human and animal).
