Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
15/3/2025 - 3/8/2025
A film that looks at the meeting between offshore wind energy and Doggerland, the submerged landscape that used to connect the UK to mainland Europe. The film frames this meeting through a nonlinear poetics of the North Sea, where archaeological exploration and speculative energy futures occur simultaneously.
The film includes footage from the North Sea seabed taken during an expedition by the Submerged Landscape Research Centre from the University of Bradford in summer 2024. A voiceover reads entries from a sonar scan of the seabed commissioned by a wind energy company, looking at potential archaeological sites around the turbine bases. Other footage includes site visits with palaeoarchaeologists researching Doggerland; Scroby Sands Offshore Wind Farm; the North Sea filmed from on board the Excelsior sailing vessel; Siemens Gamesa blade factory in Hull, and the Norfolk Broads.
30,000 Years of Offshore Wind Energy Development
2025
Engraved Stainless Steel, Felt, Fired Sediment, Rope
120 x 42.5 x 42.5 cm
A plinth engraved with a map of the North Sea, spanning the waters between East Anglia, UK, and the Netherlands. The cut-out sections trace both existing offshore wind turbines and projected developments over the next decade.
Suspended within the plinth is a fragment of fired sediment extracted from the North Sea seabed by Europe’s Lost Frontiers research group (The University of Bradford) in 2016. Taken from approximately a meter below the surface, the sediment is made up of glacial till dating back between 30,000 and 20,000 years.
Object with scour but no shadow
2025
Laser Engraved Wind Turbine Blade Section
85.5 x 84 x 19 cm
This section of a wind turbine blade was obtained from Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult’s blade testing facility in Blyth.
Engraved onto its surface are two images: part of sequence from a technical document outlining the installation of scour protection during wind turbine construction, and a 19th-century engraving of vole teeth from Zoology Elements by Paul Gervais (1871). The vole teeth reference the 'vole clock’, a contested method of archaeological dating that uses changes in vole species over time to establish chronologies for prehistoric environments.