A morning swim at Lulworth Cove on Saturday morning prompted this piece. I’d never been to Lulworth Cove before and I lay on my back and eased myself around in a full circle taking in the chalky cliffs, the pebble beach (and beachgoers), the curve of the cove as it opened up to the sea, the little sailboats moored in its sanctuary.

I stretched my arms above my head, floating with my ears submerged in the seawater. It is a sound vacuum under the sea – all thoughts dissipate, and stillness enters. I wanted to capture this feeling of ‘tuning out’ with a collage.

I was fortunate to find an image of a submerged statue in a magazine – her expression one of complete peace and calm – feelings I experience when I am under the water. By carefully cutting out and easing floral stickers across her head, I was able to fashion a pair of headphones – I was thinking of the over-ear kind that drown out everything around you, and allow you to hear nuance in music you’ve listened to many times.

With the stickers along the bottom, I wanted to create a sense of what might be going on inside – how this experience might be in service of wellbeing – drowning out stress and worry and allowing more positive, nourishing thoughts to bloom.

With the floral “bubbles” I hoped to allude to this sense of nurture and care turned inward extending beyond this moment and perhaps to others also. The neon page markers in their “sunburst” are there to suggest a current moving the ‘bubbles’ upwards and outwards.

Meg Attwood

This artwork was created as part of a participatory project Un/Stuck:

Creative Explorations of Negative Thinking alongside young people as co-researchers.

Re-connection with nature as an aspiration was a predominant theme in the final artworks.

https://public-art.bristol.ac.uk/2022/11/11/un-stuck-creative-explorations-of-negative-thinking/