Ephemeral Coast

DR. MARY H GAGEN

Mary H. Gagen, who is an Associate Professor of Geography at Swansea University wrote an essay called Navigating Coastal Climate Change for the Ephemeral Coast, S. Wales catalogue. Here is a short extract which describes the relationship between her life and research on the Welsh coast.

I was born and raised in Manchester, a large post-industrial town in the north of England. At the age of 17 my family moved to Mumbles, a nineteenth century Welsh fishing village, close to Swansea. The sound of the sea kept me awake at night, and I yearned for the sound of planes landing at Manchester’s International Airport. Two decades later, I cannot imagine living away from the coast. My coastal years formed my decision to train as a physical geographer, and finally as a climate scientist. The beach near to my new home was – unbeknownst to me at the time – one of the most famous sites in the UK to anyone studying the sea level changes that accompanied the last great ice age.

She is a member of C3W, the Climate Change Consortium of Wales and in response to the first exhibition, Dr. Gagen brought groups of students to participate in climate change awareness activities in the gallery.

Ian Buchanan 

Ian Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the founding editor of Deleuze Studies and the author of the Dictionary of Critical Theory (OUP).
He contributed the essay, ‘The Ephemeral Coast: On the Edge of the Otherly Realm’ in the Ephemeral Coast, S. Wales, 2014.

Extract:
Water is endlessly fascinating to artists and poets, and indeed some of our greatest artists and poets have also been great swimmers (Lord Byron is the most well-known of the poet swimmers, Swinburne was no slouch either), but that fascination has always been tempered by fear and the deeply felt sense that water is not a human domain (this was Shelley’s view, which he effectively proved by drowning – Shelley wasn’t the only poet to drown himself, either, Hart Crane also chose this mode of death, as did Virginia Woolf).[1] To swim, then, is to immerse oneself in an otherly realm that is both deadly to humans and teeming with its own life as great ocean-explorers like Jacques Cousteau and Hans Hass revealed in the middle of the 20th century.

Celina Jeffery and Ian Buchanan co-edited the ‘Junk Ocean’ of Drain Magazine, which was launched in January 2016.  He also wrote the essay, What Must We Do About Rubbish?

 http://drainmag.com/what-must-we-do-about-rubbish/

[1] Sprawson 1992: 32-33; 99-101; 103-105.