Layers in the Landscape

“According to quantum physics, you cannot ‘just’ observe something….to make an observation you must interact with the object you are observing.”
(Hawkins, S. 2010, p.80).

Stories about rising sea levels, flooding and the drowning of coastal settlement are interpreted by the popular media to be disasters which place our coastal communities under stress. Our interactions with these events are therefore coloured both by this sense of dramatic doom and by the discipline through which we are engaged. Nowhere is the evidence for this more visually apparent than in the submerged forests and peats which border the coastline of West Wales. Often these forests are lost beneath our beaches, generally appearing only periodically after storms. These storms create a context of chaos with which the forests are then associated.

We propose that the regular rebirth of these submerged trees through the challenges of flooding and erosion offers opportunities to observe such events through a wide angle perspective that sees past the chaos. Utilizing a range of experts in diverse fields from within science, humanities and the arts we will combine to form a new understanding regarding the interplay of flooding facts and fictions through the layering of time. Our processes will be transparent as we interact with one another’s expertise, presenting our culmative observations in an interdisciplinary format that will weave the various layers into one cohesive, video narrative.