Lily’s project sought to explore the heritage and historical traditions of water worship across the Pen Llŷn coastline while engaging with contemporary concerns and solutions around the protection of clean water in our rivers and seas on a global level.

Clay-based workshops formed a central part of her work on Natur am Byth!. Using raw clay from the Pen Llŷn coastline, participants engaged with Welsh water worship traditions while confronting contemporary concerns around the protection of clean water. Together, we created vessels from the clay to symbolically hold our thoughts and wishes, culminating in a ritualistic return of clay to the sea - imagining the sea as a vast healing well in an effort to revive the ideology of water’s power and magic.

Over the project’s period, she engaged with school groups, museum visitors, support centres, a local walking group and a much wider network of water quality citizen scientists. In addition to clay workshops, the project involved an alternative psychogeographic pilgrimage, the creation of salt-and-ink biodiversity-inspired “quadrats,” and a stained glass window in the colours of nitrate and phosphate river samples gathered by over 600 volunteers across Wales.

The project emerged from conversation, collaboration, and creative research, and gave participants a chance to reflect on their relationship with water, and understand the importance of water quality for the health of the planet’s ecosystems.

About: Lily Tiger is an artist-filmmaker from West Wales. Her practice is a research driven exploration of places and people, situated between community engagement and documentary filmmaking. Her work spans across sculpture, sound, photography and analogue filmmaking, with a key thematic interest in folk traditions and ecological practices situated in Wales. 

This work was commissioned as part of the Natur Am Byth! project by Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru.