#dropintheocean

drop in the ocean

“What happens when you throw a stone into water? Make a wish in a well? Have a wash in the sink? What are the stories and statistics that come flooding out the tap? Water shapes our landscapes; enters, leaves and fills our bodies; connects us all. But how much do we need? And where is it all coming from?”. This is Jess Allen’s message to the world.

During some of our lectures we looked into different practitioners of performance and ecology and one of them stood out to me with their unique techniques and mindset towards ecology in performance. Jess Allen brings awareness to audiences through walking in circles around a point but get larger as she goes so that it looks like a ripple in water when a stone is thrown to symbolise our impact on water. She does this whilst carrying a yoke and buckets over her shoulders, one filled with water and the other with stones. As Jess goes on her adventure she will stop and talk to people and ask them to pick up one of the stones, make a wish and throw it in the bucket of water.

Jess Allen expresses the connection of water and how it brings us closer to one another but also reveals more about ourselves. She mentions how this can remind us of how we use water, why we need it and why it is so important. Jess talks about our feelings and senses and that we should reconnect with water to make every day feel more extraordinary. When Jess had finished with her walks she would have a gallery of all her work set up for people to see and experience with maps, stones set out to picture her journey, bags of water containing items found on her journey and many more items to show humanities connection to water.

Jess is a performance artist from Aberystwyth, she mainly works as an eco-activist with her walking art in rural landscapes but she also has a PhD in biology and a PhD in contemporary performance. Jess also trained as a dancer and worked as a landscape and conservation officer.

I personally felt a connection between Jess and our Polar Bears piece as they both strive to bring audiences closer to their message in unique ways and instead of just performing, they actually interact with audiences which allows that stronger bond to be made and makes our message more clear. I also was inspired by Jess because of her social media and constant uploading of beautiful pictures and videos of her adventures in nature and meeting strangers to include in her project. This inspired this blog and how I needed to show audiences not just in person but over social media the work that we are doing and the message we want to spread about climate change. She has inspired us how small ripples can make such a large impact on the bigger picture and those around us and that we can cause more people to create ripples in the water, spreading our hope of a better future.

You are not a separate drop 💧 in the ocean.

I think it’s more acquaintances that I know.