Ling Warlow
Artist in Residence 9th & 10th September
"Reflecting colour on the island, plant life on the island, plants coming through the rocks". Leaning into the botany of the island.
Ling explores the tenacity of plant life and the proliferation of colour found across the island and reflected in her palette of plant dyed papers.
(M)OTHER WILD 2ND & 3RD AUGUST 2025
An event by (M)other Collective as part of Drawing Out Hilbre with BADA at Hilbre Archipelago
Artists: Jo Eyles, Lydia O’Hara, Lucy Jones, Lena and the Sea, Emma Thackham, Claire Weetman.
The six members of (M)other Collective, all artist-parents from across the North West, are researching how women can consider their “wild nature” and find their natural “home” whatever that may look like for each individual, without being distracted from their creative energy by domestic/commercial life. This direction of research stems from the text ‘Women who run with wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman’ (Clarissa Pinkola Estés 1992). By inhabiting Hilbre island and experiencing its ecosystems, (M)other artists have connected with animalistic characteristics and attuned to the aspects of the natural environment that nurture and inspire creativity.
Our explorations of mothering and practices of care in this remote location have informed our collective creative practice where we aim to respect the ebbs and flows of creativity within (m)otherhood – connecting to the central research themes of Drawing out Hilbre that explore Sustainability and Self Sufficiency, Time and Tides and Engagement with Nature.
On the 2nd and 3rd August 2025 you’re invited to join (M)other Collective on Hilbre Island where they will share some of the outcomes of their research on Hilbre, through exhibition of works in the buildings, installation of works around the island and opportunities to join the artists in acts of movement, rest, connection and wildness.
If you are coming to Hilbre Island please wear appropriate clothing and footwear for the weather and walking across rocks. We do not recommend that you bring pushchairs. Please bring your own drinking water and refreshments. Two compost toilets are available on the main island.
Saturday 2nd August 2025
11am: Meet at the Ice Cream Stall at West Kirby to join (M)other Collective on the 1-hour low tide walk to Hilbre Island
11am-2pm: Visit installations and exhibited work across the island and within the Buoy Master’s Buildings.
12:30pm “I Become the Island” an interactive site specific performance with Lydia O’Hara. Join a tour of the island, performance and an invitation to participate in her Hilbre Island inspired yoga. Visitors will be given a keepsake to take away from their experience.
2:00-2:30pm Last chance to leave Hilbre for the mainland if you don’t want to stay overtide.
3pm – 8pm Experience being stranded on Hilbre over-tide. Visit installations and exhibited work across the island and within the Buoy Master’s Buildings. Share your picnic alongside creative conversations about (M)other Wild
3pm Finding Solitude, an invitation to view Claire Weetman’s sculptural chairs installed around the island and to find a seat for creative reflection as the tide comes in.
5pm Beachcombing at High Tide with Lena and the Sea as a creative act of rest.
8pm-9pm Join (M)other Collective for a sunset walk back to the mainland
You can come and go to the island between 9am – 2pm on Saturday 2nd August whilst the tide is out. If you decide to stay past 2:30pm then you will need to wait on the island until 8pm when the tide has gone back out. Please follow the advised walking route from West Kirby via Little Eye and Middle Eye.
Sunday 3rd August
11am: Meet at the Ice Cream Stall at West Kirby to join (M)other Collective on the low tide walk to Hilbre Island.
11am-3pm Visit installations and exhibited work across the island and within the Buoy Master’s Buildings.
12:30pm Emma Thackham hosts a shared lunch and conversation connected to her research ‘The Islands Beneath Our Skin’
1:30pm Jo Eyles invites you to join her on a short walk to gather natural materials for a mark-making workshop.
3pm-3:45pm Last chance to leave Hilbre for the mainland before the tide comes in.
You can come and go to the island between 9:30am – 3:45pm on Sunday 3rd August whilst the tide is out. Please follow the advised walking route from West Kirby via Little Eye and Middle Eye.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Emma Thackham
@onelifeartists
Emma is an interdisciplinary artist and art psychotherapist. Her research explores topics such as social action, performativity, embodied knowledge, cultural heritage and art therapy.
The Islands Beneath Our Skin is the working title of a new research project exploring creative practices and connections between communities in the UK and The Caribbean.
Her performative pilgrimage, bearing the Flag of Dominica, to the liminal tidal Hilbre Archipelago imagines the land as a portal between islands, and in quiet reflection she summons and honours ancestors within.
Her sculptural work is currently exploring the realm of the seven feminine archetypes, (the Mother, the Maiden, the Huntress, the Mystic, the Sage, the Queen and the Lover).
Claire Weetman
@claireweetman
Claire Weetman is crafting three chairs – self portraits of a search for solitude in wild outdoor spaces – woodlands, meadows and beaches. Places that are familiar and everyday when explored with others but luxurious and wild when explored alone.
In the text Camera Obscura, Roland Barthes compares familiar landscapes to the maternal body “There is no other place of which one can say with such certainty that one has already been there.” The wild locations where Claire has sought creative solitude from motherhood inspire the laborious processes used to camouflage the recognisable, familiar form of the chairs. Natural, elemental processes of fire, earth, air and water have slowly and meditatively altered these domestic objects so that they can exist in the wild – an attempt to turn a place where the maternal body may be able to sit into the landscape itself. Installed around Hilbre Island, this collection of re-crafted chairs aims to capture the tension between a desire for connection and a need for space for ourselves.
Claire’s work informs an activity on Saturday 2nd August when visitors to (M)other Wild are invited to experience a period of solitude in the remote location of Hilbre island.
Lydia O’Hara
@lydiaoharaartist
Lydia is a multidisciplinary artist and art therapist whose approach allows the concept for each work to dictate its most appropriate medium. To date this has included video, performance, painting, music, and more. Lydia’s practice takes an interest in embodied cognition and unconscious processes, exploring this from various perspectives including womanhood, lived experiences, collective consciousness, and motherhood. Whilst on Hilbre Island Lydia is interested in developing her work exploring “wild nature” in women, connecting with pre-evolutionary animal aspects that remain in human nature. Through observing life on the island: creatures, plants, and elements, Lydia will find ways to internalise a piece of this wild place to return to whenever she needs. This will feed into a larger piece of work looking to share this process with others, and complement her series of free hanging outdoor paintings depicting the isolating experiences of mothers and babies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I Become the Island” will be an interactive site specific performance on Hilbre Island on the Saturday of (M)other’s sharing event. Lydia O’Hara will invite visitors to join her on a tour of the island, followed by a performance, and finally to participate in her Hilbre Island yoga. Visitors will be given a keepsake to take away from their experience.
Lena and the Sea
@lenaandthesea
During the residency I sank into solitude, really felt rest, my mind had time to wander, taking time to beach comb was a simple joy. I slept on the sand. I watched seals. Taking this time for myself always makes me a better mother. When I return they get a mother that feels nurtured and so can nurture them.
At Hilbre I took my canvas sheets on an adventure, bathing with me in a rock pool, laying out covered in moss and seaweed and stones and the salt and sand of the island. I worked into them with charcoal and water. I lay them to dry on the flagstones of the Buoymasters house.
I will take the canvas sheets back to the studio and work on two Hilbre abstracts: dark green, grey, the blue of the mussels, sandstone and clay before returning them to exhibit in the Buoy Master’s house in August.
Join Lena and the Sea on Saturday 2nd August for beachcombing at high tide with Lena and the Sea as a creative act of rest.
Lucy Elizabeth Jones
@cestrianpedestrian
Drawing out Hilbre: ‘Accumulate’
Much like tumbleweed attracts and accumulates material, so do I as an artist, Accumulate experiences, techniques, influences and understanding of the world. In this globe shaped structure they merge and fuse together into an ever evolving entity.
A warp and a weft is made up of freshly harvested willow, organically interlaced through the found metal structure. Into which I start to weave a variety of found and created materials through the uneven grid. The strips of fabric are extracts from my experiences as an artist, not just of being on Hilbre, but the events leading up to and what I will eventually take away or leave behind.
I often keep any selvedges or offcuts of fabric from various projects as well as the edges of paintings. They are intriguing to me because what deems them worthy of discarding, is what makes them worthy of keeping and using in a different way. They are not bound by intention. Their arbitrariness translates as honesty, and the stories they tell are not polluted by self consciousness. I secure them to the structure by hand stitching. The imperfect nature of each stitch akin to a person’s handwriting or of an artist’s gesture or touch.
As I sat in the Buoymaster’s house on the island watching for seals out of the window, I wondered about all the women that had sewn in that room before, they might have sewn fishing nets, work clothes or even a family tree, with far greater dexterity than myself.
The slithers of fabric and photos interwoven, form a rapidly solidifying sphere. A shape that is important to me particularly in this setting embodying the circularity of nature most pertinently in the ebb and flow of the tides and waves, their endless movement and change, each the opposite of another, interdependent and uncontrollable.
Jo Eyles
@the_joy_perspective
Jo is a visual artist, DJ and educator based in Liverpool. As a keen advocate for both the arts and social justice, she enjoys engaging with and empowering communities through her practice. Her mixed media approach embraces drawing and painting, photography, print, collage, textiles, and sculpture. She combines expressive use of pattern, form and colour with experiments in a diverse range of materials, endeavouring to limit the environmental impact of her work by using sustainable and recycled materials wherever possible, including recycled cardboard boxes, fabric remnants, and household waste.
Much of Jo’s recent work centres around humanity’s place within the universe and its impact upon Earth’s ecosystems. She has given her series of environmentally-conscious artworks titles with double meanings that examine the connection between humans and the natural world, and ask us to question how we can develop a more symbiotic relationship with our surroundings and the planet as a whole.
Jo currently juggles the various strands of her creative practice with being a full-time educator and busy parent. Work on Hilbre has enabled her to connect with nature and enjoy solitude, to sink into the natural rhythms of light and tide that govern the archipelago, and to work in harmony with the landscape, developing an understanding of the inherent qualities of the natural materials found there.
Her new work examines the spaces in between: spaces found between layers of rock or across the sands that connect each of the islands, spaces in time between the cycle of tides, and the spaces for reflection that allow Jo to balance her role as a working mother with that of an artist. She explores themes that relate to both motherhood and the nature found on Hilbre: fertility, growth, nurture, protection, vulnerability, erosion, strength and resilience.
Jo invites you to join her on Sunday 3rd August for a short walk to gather natural materials for a mark-making workshop.
For more information
To learn more about the Drawing out Hilbre project and the other artists who are working in residence there in summer 2025, please visit the BADA website.
'Re-Imagining Hilbre', as a SSHI (Site of Special Human Interconnectedness) by Luciana Hermida. This exhibition is part of ‘Drawing Out Hilbre’, a BADA project in partnership with the Independents Biennial 2025. From 17/06 until 01/07 (read bottom of post for more details on opening times).
About the exhibition:
How we navigate nature in the context of environmental decline across the world requires shifting how we look and engage with the natural world. Re-addressing our connection with the environment is an ongoing journey. Hilbre represents a starting point in the journey to more meaningful connections with nature as well as the journey itself through the act of deep mapping.
During this exhibition you will be invited to navigate Hilbre through art and geopoetics, allowing you to gain a deeper connection with the island. Geopoetics relates to the ‘poetics of the earth’, an approach that explores the relationship between language, place, and the human experience, through creative and poetic means.
This is not just an art exhibition. Its a process as it is ever evolving, where human participation is paramount, as either observers who take in what is being presented and allow new connections to unfold but also as co-creators, sharing and re-creating what is being observed. This exhibition is also a statement as it aims to highlight the status of Hilbre as an SSHI, a Site of Special Human Interconnectedness.
The exhibition will be open on particular days during its duration, due to the tides and the artist’s availability to welcome visitors.
The artist is planning to be there on the following dates:
Tuesday 17th of June from 10.30am - 12pm
Wednesday 18th of June from 10.30am - 2pm
Friday 20th of June from 10.30 - 12pm
Saturday 21st of June 11.30 - 4.30pm
Saturday 28th of June 10 - 6pm
Tuesday 1st of July 10.30am - 1pm
Please check @luhermida.art page regularly for updates on opening times as these are subject to change in weather conditions.
Any questions please message @luhermida.art or email info@lucianahermida.co.uk
Terry Duffy
'R S Thomas Triptych'
Acclaimed Artist Terry Duffy’s ‘RS Thomas Triptych’ to be Installed at St Hywyn’s, Aberdaron June 12–15, 2025.
The internationally acclaimed artist Terry Duffy has been invited to install his large-scale masterpiece, the RS Thomas Triptych, upon the altar at St Hywyn’s Church, Aberdaron. This historic installation takes place in the very church where the renowned Welsh poet and Nobel Prize nominee, the Reverend RS Thomas, served as preacher in his final years.
The triptych, inspired by Thomas’s poetry and themes of the ‘Abyss’, reflects Duffy’s long-standing engagement with the poet’s work and Welsh cultural identity. Originally created for the commemoration of RS Thomas in 2001 at the Welsh Academy in Cardiff, this powerful artwork has since been exhibited at significant venues, including the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
As part of the 11th Poetry & Arts Festival celebrating RS Thomas & ME Eldridge, Duffy will present an exclusive talk exploring the inspiration behind the triptych and the intersection of poetry, art, and philosophy.
Key Event Details:
📅 Poetry & Arts Festival: June 12–15, 2025
🎤 Terry Duffy’s Talk: Friday, June 13, 2025 | 12:15–1:00 PM
📍 Venue: St Hywyn’s Church, Aberdaron
The festival will also feature a rich programme of poetry readings, musical performances, and discussions, celebrating RS Thomas’s literary legacy and the wider themes of science, theology, and creation.
This unique event will appeal to art enthusiasts, poetry lovers, cultural scholars, and those interested in the profound artistic and philosophical questions raised by RS Thomas’s work.
For further information or media inquiries, please contact:
Emma Embery
📧 Emma.terryduffy@gmail.com
🌐 terryduffy.info
12th April 2025.
'Hilbre Independent Biennial Introduction'
Meet the artists and visit Hilbre Island.
2nd April 2025.
Hilbre Independent Biennial, marks the first workshop & event by artist, 'Luciana Hermida'.
This marks the beginning of 'Re-imagining Hilbre' an event part of 'Drawing Out Hilbre Archipelago'. I am very excited to be part of the Hilbre Independent biennial 2025 for the first time and to connect with people through art and nature on the upcoming workshops I am hosting. The outcomes of the workshops will inform legacy artworks which I will create, to be exhibited on Hilbre Island in June. The first workshop we discovered the landscape of Hilbre through an audio tour, recorded the rock formations with different materials, created collages and exchanged our experiences. All these aspects of the day contributed to the deep mapping of Hilbre - an experimental and meaningful way of journeying a particular site, and therefore, connecting with nature meaningfully.
Luciana Hermida. April 2025
Instagram: @luhermida.art
Terry Duffy
MONUMENTS -Revisited
'Remark' exhibition'
Terry Duffy's acclaimed work, MONUMENTS, is to be shown for the first time in more than a decade, as part of a broader exhibition of contemporary abstract art 'REMARK' at the new Chester Visual Arts exhibition space.
8th February - 7th March 2025
www.terryduffy.info
FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: emma.terryduffy@gmail.com
Artist's talk by International artist, 'Terry Duffy'
4th March 17.50 @ Chester Visual Arts Space, Grosvenor Shopping Centre, Chester. UK
Terry Duffy will be hosting a talk about his acclaimed work, 'Monuments', which is being shown for the first time in more than a decade as part of a broader exhibition of contemporary abstract art at the 'New Chester Visual Arts Exhibition Space'. Terry will be discussing more recent small works, and the large scale, 'Adjustable Angel'.
News:
"I have a Beetle in my black box".
Fanchon Frohlich's production has been produced by the students of LJMU
The trustees of BADA are pleased to announce the production of Fanchon's play, "I have a black beetle in my black box" is to performed by the students of LJMU as part of the 150th Anniversary programme of the Princess Road Synagogue, Liverpool. It is wonderful to see more of Fanchon's creativity being realised.
Sunday 2nd February 2025 at 1.30pm