‘Washed up and Blue’
WASHED UP AND BLUE
a collective exploration
of objects that wash up on the Solway shores
and the movements and migrations
that bring them to us,
using images, objects and words
The creative works exhibited in “Washed Up and Blue” were created by Dawn, Helen, Leon and William over two weekends in January and February 2025, as part of a programme created by the Solway Firth Partnership , Shambellie House and Waste Stories.
The programme included participating in a beach clean at Southerness, where we selected objects – seaweed and feathers, mermaid’s purses and shoreline plants, but also manmade objects such as fragments of nylon rope and net, sea glass and pirate glass, shotgun cartridges and other marine plastics – to bring back to Shambellie House.
We enrolled these into creative processes including cyanotype printing and creative writing to produce the exhibition.
By juxtaposing the natural and the synthetic, in colours that themselves recall the marine environment, we hope to stimulate new thinking about both aesthetic beauty and our relationship with our planet.
The programme was made possible by support from Marine Fund Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway Regional Arts Fund and the University of Glasgow.
