Current Research

This is a limestone relief of the Ocean Goddess, NEHALENNIA. Stone votives and altars devoted to her were discovered in the 1600′s after a brutal storm swept away sand dunes in Zeeland, Netherlands. She is often presented with a basket of fruit and a dog or a wolf at her side. Archeologists believe she was a pagan deity that long predated the Roman times (200 AD) when these stones were carved – she is thought to be Celtic in origin and possibly a mother goddess who watched over people at sea. In the 1970′s, a fisherman off the marshy shores of Zeeland caught more stone votives in his net. Soon afterwards the community decided to build a recreated Roman Temple to honor NEHALENNIA. It is agreed that she seems to be important to the area where several rivers, the Rhine, the Maas, and the Scheldt, all come to a delta emptying into the North Sea…

What else has been lost in the sea? 

- Lucy 

SEAHENGE // at Doggerland

This is an image of tree stumps in a circle around a larger tree stump, a possible “Seahenge” (in relation to Stonehenge) off the coast of England. Archeologists and geologists speculate that at one time in the past, possibly 4000 years ago during the Bronze Age, the North Sea was actually a land mass that connected the British Isles to the rest of mainland Europe. They call it Doggerland. There have been remnants of human activity discovered in in the relatively shallow waters of the North Sea and the Wadden Sea, and it’s likely that sea level rise from the melting of the last Ice Age caused communities to gradually move inland. 

Many discoveries of human activity off continental shelves around the planet point to the possibilities that humans lived much more intertwined with the ocean prior to water levels rising. The marshes, swamplands, brackish water, and tidal rhythms could have been much more a part of daily life. In the 1970′s a Welsh writer, Elaine Morgan, published a book called The Aquatic Ape, in which she expanded a prior theory the a period of the human species’s development was at least partially aquatic. It was and has been mostly dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience. 

I’m interested in considering the differences between colonial, capitalist caused climate change forcing community displacement due to rising sea levels, and the possibility that ice melting caused rising sea levels in the distant past and communities had to adjust…

Historical speculation can be used to either confirm our current structures or interrogate and criticize them. Like technology, there are hidden blessings and curses of each story we tell ourselves. 

What does it mean to speculate on history? How do our current biases blind us to possibilities? 

-Lucy

These are two images from an article in the New York Times on the ‘Ghost Forests’ that are emerging on the eastern shore of the US, near where I grew up in Maryland. It was taken by a photographer named Gabriella Demczuk, who also used sea water she collected at each site to make salt prints. Ghost Forests are emerging all over due to rising sea levels that surge underground and kill trees from the roots up. In addition, the land is sinking and uneven rainfall (drought one season or heavy deluges the next) cause more trees to die. 

The conversation I hope to have is with my mother…

The topics will spiral and circle – 

’Ghost Forests’ will be one of the things I want to ponder with her.

In her yard there are several oak trees that are hundreds of years old. This past spring many of them have died due to the ground being too wet and a fungus infecting the roots. On top of that there is a species of beetle that feasts on weakened roots. 

What does it mean to haunt? 

#mysticalexperience #devotion #loss #climatecolonialism 

-Lucy

What remains of what has been washed away?

Coming Soon