A Proposed Installation

Formed from riverbed clay, dried meadow stalks and seeds, the work was made during a recent residency near Lampeter, in Wales the land of my childhood. The stalks are embedded in hand-formed clay pebbles and rest on Welsh slate, arranged like a quiet river of memory and renewal. The piece is proposed for a wide corridor in Wells Cathedral, where it would sit opposite grand marble tombs — offering a living, feminine, regenerative counterpoint to the permanence of stone.

The title, To Rise Again, carries a layered meaning. It references the Welsh political slogan of the Free Welsh Army—We Will Rise Again—from the same region where the materials were gathered. That phrase, once a nationalist call to resistance, is transformed here into something gentler but no less potent: a call for ecological return, for spiritual renewal, and for a future rooted in the land.

It’s a piece about fragility, rebirth, and rootedness. And, in a way, it’s a return home.

To Rise Again 2025 slate, river clay, dried meadow grasses

Flowing Light: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Eco-Feminism, and the Sacred Pulse of Nature

As I prepared my recent installation proposal, I found myself returning to the mystic words of Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose words form the theme of this years installation proposals for The Wells Contemporary. She was a 13th-century visionary whose ecstatic writings are filled with poetic intensity and radical intimacy. Her major work, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, offering both theological depth and an elemental sense of connection between light, body, earth, and spirit.

Mechthild was born around 1207 in Saxony. After receiving powerful visions in her early twenties, she left her noble background to pursue a life of spiritual devotion. She joined the Beguines, a movement of laywomen who lived communally without formal vows, dedicating themselves to prayer and compassionate work outside the control of the institutional Church. Later in life, she lived at the Cistercian convent of Helfta, where her writings were preserved and encouraged by a circle of other women mystics.

What draws me to Mechthild is not just her extraordinary courage as a woman speaking her spiritual truth in a male-dominated era. It’s the way she understands divinity as movement—as light that flows, as love that pulses through the world. She describes God not as a fixed point above us, but as a radiant stream of being flowing through the soul, the body, and the natural world.

“The light of God flows into the soul and drives it out of itself, so that it no longer remains in itself but flows out into the immeasurable love of God.”

— Mechthild of Magdeburg

This concept of flowing light resonates deeply with both my own spiritual path and my art. My recent work has turned from painting to land art, rooted in material gathered during a residency in Mid Wales—a place close to my heart, and to my past. I grew up in Wales, and returning to make art from the soil itself felt like a kind of pilgrimage: a return not just to landscape, but to memory, and to the earth as a living presence.

My installation, To Rise Again, uses riverbed clay to form pebbles with plant stalks and seedheads from a rewilded meadow —each one a small, potential future. These pebbles are arranged on Welsh slate, placed as a kind of quiet river of remembrance and regeneration. The work is designed for a stone corridor in Wells Cathedral, where it will lie opposite and in contrast to the grand tombs of powerful historical men. While those monuments are static and enduring in stone, the clay pebbles are ephemeral and alive—with the potential to germinate, scatter, and rise again.

Flowing Light and Eco-feminism

It was only after working with these materials that I began to realize how much this installation also embodies an eco-feminist sensibility. Eco-feminism sees a deep connection between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women. It calls us to honour the sacredness of the earth, of cycles, of care, and of life in all its fragility and transformation. Mechthild’s mystical voice speaks directly to this: she was a woman asserting spiritual authority outside the patriarchy, writing not in Latin but in the vernacular, grounding divine revelation in rivers, trees, and light.

Her vision of God as flowing light aligns with the values at the core of eco-feminism: that spirit and nature are not separate, that the sacred is not far off, but immanent in soil, in seed, in breath. She reminds us that transformation—spiritual and ecological—requires intimacy, listening, and vulnerability.

This is why she matters to my work. In a time of ecological grief and collapse, to imagine a light that moves through all living things is to reclaim reverence, humility, and hope.

To Rise Again is, in part, a gesture of this hope. A remembering. A flowing.