A Vision Of North Hill, Minehead, Somerset in 2237

C-Type Photographic Print on Fuji Matt paper mounted on Duraspec Acrylic with Dibond with wall mounts. Archival. Artwork dimensions are 1000 x 667 mm.

Also available unmounted as 420 x 594 mm and 594 x 841 mm giclée prints.

Digital montage of 102 Petri dishes and PlusPlates made in the Singer Lab, 2024.
This digital composite image has been crafted in Photoshop from photographs. The Colony Cam is a high-resolution camera designed by Singer Instruments that enabled Zoe Snape to document her experiments in Bio Art.

Responding to the Somerset Art Weeks festival theme of “Flux and Flow”, Artist In Residence Zoe Snape, concentrated on her relationship with her local Somerset landscape. Having seen an exhibition of the English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner’s paintings at Tate Britain, Zoe recalled that the nineteenth century artist had travelled the Somerset and North Devon coast, and wondered if he had ever visited her home town of Minehead and looked at North Hill. Zoe likes Turner. They have some things in common; his Dad was a Barber and used to exhibit his art in his Barbershop. He was born in London but he loved the sea. He feared illness and preferred to be outdoors. And, he’s visited Minehead.

A quick google, offered Turner’s ‘Somerset and North Devon Sketchbook’, from 1811, and there, amongst the pages was ‘Minehead From the Coast’ that is displayed at the beginning of this floor of the exhibition.

Barely there, simple yet confident lines, an enjoyment of contour, and there, on the left St Michael’s Church, where her children were christened, where she married her husband, where she made the decision to return to her creative and countryside roots. It is where two of her best childhood friends lived. Her art teachers lived there too, and still do.

She printed some titles of Turner’s paintings of the South West onto paper that fitted within the confines of a Plus Plate - the rectangular dish in which strains are grown. Then she traced them using several strains of yeast as her paint, onto the surface of agar, the jelly-like substance made from seaweed on which cultures grow.

Zoe went took her sketchbook to Minehead Beach, to the exact location where Turner himself had sat to sketch North Hill. This sparked an idea. Rather than represent North Hill purely figuratively, what would happen if she took Petri dishes up onto North Hill and waved them around in the woods? Rather than draw what she saw, could she scientifically record it? What might these recordings show?

She took petri dishes lined with agar for a walk up North Hill Road into the woods, placing them under umbrellas of ferns, in pillows of moss, balanced on branches of oak trees, along muddy paths, and waited. Inspect the bottom left of North Hill in this composite image, and the dark foreground behind the pink Petri dish, and you will discover what grew from these experiments in bioprospecting.

Zoe had been reflecting upon the difficult time of lockdown in 2020, and thought as we’d survived it, her intention was to push back against Climate Anxiety by imagining a better future, a vision of North Hill 213 years from now (as long away as Turner’s sketch of 1811 is in history). Perhaps its future may be preserved in Petri dishes and PlusPlates. Perhaps giant bubbles of seeds and mycelium. Perhaps the English poet Samual Taylor Coleridge’s words will still echo among the Rhododendrons and old Oak trees with the birdsong of the Chiff Chaffs, Firecrests, Wrens and Blackbirds. Perhaps as Turner himself observed, sun still rises through vapour, light and colour remain, and waves break relentlessly against the wind. Who knows the future of the fox and deer? Zoe chose to keep them here, in their own little bubbles high up on the hill. Contained yet connected to something altogether bigger and expansive, futuristic and hopeful.