Circe of the Pond
This residency is a celebration of the profound importance of the Ladies’ Swimming Pond, on Hampstead Heath in London, in the lives of thousands of women and girls who have swum there over the century since its beginning. From Autumn Equinox 2025 to Autumn Equinox 2026, I am exploring the idea of the Pond as a place of transformation… transduction… sublimation.
The Pond’s mud contains bacteria that generate electricity, which can be harnessed to power tiny things. The plants in and around make the seemingly magical transformation of sunlight, carbon dioxide, water and other elements into the molecules and structures of plant matter, with its astonishing forms, colours and scents.
I am extracting both the overt colours, and the latent ones within the leaf tips, petals, barks and galls, experimenting as I go. Ancient medieval French texts offer recipes for making inks from plants: buckthorn, elderberry, iris, wild carrot, oak bark, woodruff, dandelion… By shifting its pH, the petals of Iris can be transformed into almost any colour of the rainbow. Mix the brownish gall juice with iron salts, and it leaps to the deepest black of inks. Will the Heath’s iron-rich chalybeate spring waters do the same?
A manifold of extraction sacs and tubing hold the brewing flowers, leaves and roots. Intricate botanical portraits paint themselves with the inks extracted and transformed from the very plants they depict. Paper charms embed fragments of powerful medicinal flora. Micro-gins infuse from petals of edible meadow species. The enchantress, Circe, keeps loving watch over the swimmers at the Pond. From the flora within and around, she offers potions to transform, alleviate and elevate.
