Unctuous Between Fingers is a creative research project led by artist Bryony Gillard that poses the question, what can we learn from seaweed?
This website is intended as a resource — a living repository of seaweed thinking. The contributions included are varied in tone and form, considering many different positions, perspectives and interpretations of seaweed. We hope that these resources, histories, stories and artworks open the door to your own seaweed journey and provoke some questions about possible seaweed futures, ecologies and symbiotic care.
More about Unctuous Between Fingers:
The project uses as its starting point, an archive of pressed seaweeds and algaes held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, predominantly collected by women in the mid 1800’s. A gendered hobby, ‘seaweeding’ was considered a creative pastime of little importance. However, many of the collectors made a significant contribution to marine botany, meticulously recording specimens and sharing their findings generously with the (male) scientific community.
What happens when something slippery, living and intangible is pressed, dried and flattened? What do we lose or gain in the process of preserving these specimens and how does this transformation from unctuous and elusive to brittle and flat relate to ideas around collecting, naming and care, active and historicised feminisms? These questions and provocations resulted in a moving image work in 2019, made in collaboration with a group of individuals from a range of disciplines who find affinities, work, inspiration or joy in seaweed.
Now in its second phase, Unctuous Between Fingers unfurls its tentacles (or fronds) to make touch on seaweed’s relationship to gender, indigenous knowledge cultures, colonial cooptation and the politics of naming. This endeavour is both critical and optimistic about seaweed’s importance in the climate emergency — celebrating it’s life giving and science fictional qualities, but also recognising the ease with which late capitalism has coopted seaweed as a bandaid under which to continue processes of extraction and oppression.
The moving image work was originally commissioned by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter.
This website and its commissions and activities were made possible by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
About Bryony Gillard
I am an artist, curator and educator with an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute, School for Art Praxis.
Situated between writing, workshops, performance, video and exhibition making, my practice reflects upon events, creatures and ideas that refuse to be pinned down or categorised.
Through a process of both uncovering and layering ideas, herstories and conversations, my work attempts to create a space for generations of intersectional feminist practice that are elusive, messy and entangled in contemporary concerns. I am drawn to thinking with and through the more-than-human-world and I am committed to intersectional feminist and anti-colonial doings underpinning my practice and approach and I understand that this is an ongoing process.
Since 2015, I have developed a model of working that places workshops at the centre of projects, using workshops as a shared site of both production and reflection, to de-centre myself and create a space for many voices. Workshops often centre around principles of improvisation — considering improvisation as a non-hierarchal space of resistance & transgression, using sound, voice, movement, conversation, automatic writing & therapeutic exercises to map and think through ideas collectively.
My pronouns are she/her/hers.