‘Sensing Earth Space
- a meditation in clay’ with Joe Dalziel.
OmVed Gardens. 6.30 - 8pm
Due to popular demand this event will be running again in October.
JULY | exhibition, workshop and events at OMVED:
12th 11am - 3pm [Open day] SOLD OUT
15th 11am - 5pm [exhibition continues]
15th 6.30 - 8pm Sensing Earth [a meditation in clay][tickets here] SOLD OUT
16th 11am - 5pm [exhibition continues]
26th 10.30am - 1pm Rammed Earth Sculpture Workshop[tickets here] SOLD OUT
‘The Land is a Giant Eardrum’
OmVed Gardens solo exhibition- London - July.
I’ll be exhibiting at OmVed Gardens (open day 12 July) alongside hosting a live meditation event (15th July) and also teaching a rammed earth bio-sculpture workshop (26th July).
JULY | exhibition, workshop and events at OMVED:
12th 11am - 3pm [Open day] SOLD OUT
15th 11am - 5pm [exhibition continues]
15th 6.30 - 8pm Sensing Earth [a meditation in clay][tickets here] SOLD OUT
16th 11am - 5pm [exhibition continues]
26th 10.30am - 1pm Rammed Earth Sculpture Workshop[tickets here] SOLD OUT
Permanence/Impermanence:
Collecting & archiving contemporary clay practices [conference 26 June]
V&A Future Ecologies of Clay
I have been selected to speak at the conference Permanence/Impermanence at University of Westminster this June. The three-day conference addresses how artworks in the ‘expanded field of clay’ can be made accessible to current and future audiences.
These works may be ephemeral, site-specific, participatory, or live, thereby posing significant challenges for museums. I look forward to sharing my understandings gathered across my earth body journeys whereby archiving, photography and journaling on this exact page have become a key aspect of the process and therefore work itself.
Join me Fri, 26 June
Sheiling hut / stone cairn.
Sleeping in my van, I find myself thinking about home.
What does it mean to belong to a place? To a particular stretch of land?
I've been encountering huts all along this route — shelters, shielings, roundhouses. To exist in wild places is not simply a matter of endurance. There must always be shelter. There must be rest. The feeling of safety, I'm realising, is at the heart of what we call home.
Land is Art. The Body is a Gallery
journal extract:
‘The landscape itself is the Artist.
Time and Space are curators.
The body is the gallery through which the living world can perceive itself.
We don’t need to create, we need to learn to perceive.’
Heather Hut / Thatched Round House
On my hike I stumbled across a tiny, old, circular dwelling with stone foundations and turf sod walls under a heather-thatched roof. ‘Shielings’ were a fundamental part of Highland life for centuries where the practice of transhumance, (moving livestock to upland summer pastures and lowlands in winter) meant these temporary shelters were scattered all across the hills. This place was very special, offering great insulation from the elements. As a structure, it represents a completely different relationship to land, as a seasonal, non-possessive home related to the rhythms of animals and pasture rather
than to fences and deeds.
Continuing my route, I came across a replica roundhouse, built in 1999 by young people from the local Abriachan youth group. They had been clearing invasive spruce from the site, uncovering hut circles thought to be Bronze Age archaeology beneath. The initial heather thatching was done by a thatcher called Brian Wilson. Historically, roundhouses like this would have stood here in around 2000BC.
Clava Cairns
The variety in each standing stone is very prominent as depicted. Each has so much character, reminding me of an earth body. It appears these stones were selected for colour, featuring larger, redder stones to the south west, and smaller and whiter to the north east. They indicate a complex design rather than ad hoc additions, exhibiting a precise astronomical alignment with the winter solstice. On the shortest day of the year, the setting sun shines directly down the entrances of the passage cairns, illuminating their interior chambers. Sites like these are examples of the oldest Land Art remains known to us.
cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos
"whoever owns the soil owns it all the way up to the heavens and down to the depths of hell."
(old common law)
I’m reminded of the book Feral by George Monbiot. The book argues humans innate need for wildness to escape the ‘monotony of over-civilization’ and to reclaim a sense of enchantment.
It outlines that the Cairngorms here were once part of the ‘Amazon of the UK’. Today only a few small pockets of these ancient Scots pines still exist - this place (Uath Lochans) being one of them.
It also talks about the process of reversing the damage to ecosystems by stepping back, allowing natural processes to take over, and letting ecosystems thrive without constant human intervention.
Scotland has an extreme concentration of land ownership, where roughly half of all private rural land is held by around 432 individuals. Many large estates are registered through offshore companies, deliberately obscuring the identity of its true owners. Monbiot describes this landscape of "aristocrats, oligarchs, bankers and sheikhs" as a primary barrier to ecological restoration, with land kept for deer stalking and commercial forestry rather than nature recovery.
I am reminded that even in ‘wilderness’ places such as this, the land is still a commodity to be ‘owned’, and controlled, and my concept of a truly ‘wild’ place has many layers to it.
A land may be shared, but it seems the idea of posession remains typically underlying to human thinking. This is an unsuprisingly colonial approach for the UK, yet fundamentally this top-down structure strikes me as completely upside-down to how the natural world actually functions.
Tues 24 Mar 2026
Scotland notes.
- 8 days solo trip through the Scottish highlands living in my van.
Having travelled across the globe exploring connection to land through materiality and ecology, I am setting off on a journey to explore the lands which neighbour my own birthplace. As a person of both Sri Lankan and British descent, I am asking myself what it means to be from the UK, from a place and from a land.
- a rough itinerary
London - Glasgow
1. Cairngorms - Uath Lochans and Glen Feshie (hike)
2. Clava Cairns and Loch Ness
3. Abriachan Forest - Carn na Leitire Summit Cairn loop
4. North West Highlands - Bones Caves - Knockan Craigg
5. Fairy Pools - Assynt - Stac Pollaidh (hike)
6. Ullapool - Isle of Skye - Fairy Pools
7. Skye - Old Man of Storr - Quiraing Loop (hike)
8. Skye - Fairy Glen - Loch Garry
- Glasgow - London
(total approx 1800 miles)
Earth Volumes 001. 002.
In collaboration with Batten and Kamp
During my residency at Erra Art Farm with OMM Museum in Türkiye last October, I had the pleasure of working with artist duo Batten and Kamp on the creation of two earth chairs.
The idea spawned from an urge to exhibit clay-earth in its purest form, as a box-section extracted from the ground and framed in its rawest state on a single sheet of steel.
‘Earth Volumes’ is a functional art project that explores raw clay as furniture and as a perceptual instrument, placing the body in dialogue with matter to examine the effects of geography and place on an individuals body and mind.
Matter itself becomes the seat, grounding the sitter directly to the earth much like an earthen floor beneath our feet. I am interested in how environment shapes the mind through psychophysical interaction, i.e weight, density, temperature, texture, and visual cues that influence our body and emotion through the concept of the ‘mind’s touch’. How does perception extend beyond direct physical contact into imagined and affective experience?
The sitter encounters the chair not only as an object, but as a self-contained presence, comparable to a body occupying space. The chairs weigh approximately 150+ kg (over twice my weight).
Climbing Grasmoor Wainright via HopeHill Head and back down Lad Hows.
+ Saddle to Sumit Whinlatter Pass climb .
Date Hiked : Jan 8, 2026
Distance: 20.54km
Average Pace: 16.06/km
Moving Time: 6.5 Hours
Time: 9:12
Elevation Gain: 1,273m
Tues 13 Jan 2026
Grasmoor Wainright,
Lake District, England.
- Shedding the City.
3 nights in a Bothy, Jan 7-10
Bringing the mind to stillness doesn’t just happen in an instant.
The walk starts scattered, fidgety, sweaty, incontent. Shedding. Reversing. releasing. Too many items, bag too full, not enough, finding rhythm, falling into comfort of stride and bodily mobility. It’s almost as if I’ve forgotten how this body works, how it settles and ebbs and flows, where the energy begins and grounds down drawing up from the source like a machine plugged into the environment from which it came. The city sheds itself slowly, falling off like layers of an onion, revealing a core made of nothingness, simplicity, reduction, time, place, now-ness, here-ness, this-ness, spaciousness.
Earth Body VI,
Erra Art Park, Türkiye
‘Conception’ [Earth Body VI]
Clay, Lime, graphite
128 x 90 x 181cm,
3000kg
2025
Clay is the substance of life.
The land is a living being, where matter constantly awakens into consciousness.
The sculpture depicts a large-scale infant’s head, facing skyward in communion with the celestial. It’s three-tonne solid body- formed directly on-site from the soil of it’s own origin- is composed entirely of natural materials and remains in dialogue with the elemental forces that govern it.
Cradled within an ancient olive grove, it’s location symbolises the regenerative cycle between the ancient and the newborn- the dry land lying dormant with fertile, nascent potential.
The outer layer of the sculpture is finished in lime and graphite, offering a reflective surface that draws the viewer into the piece while absorbing it’s surroundings- embodying the Universe’s desire to perceive it’s own self.
Thurs 4 Sep 2025
Erra Art Farm
Earth Body VI
construction notes
Thurs 4 Sep 2025
Erra Art Farm
Territorial War
Having cleared a location for the sculpture and already poured drainage stone foundations, I have come up against a dilemma- there are ants nesting right in the centre of the piece. Engin Bay comments ‘there is no ground here without ants’. It seems I have underestimated them; there could be thousands underground. I research deterrants including sound, scent and try cinnamon which seems to create an instant no-go zone for them.
(*update Oct) After careful deliberation I decided to continue building on the same site in the hope that the ants would relocate. At first, the ants retreated underground and seemed to go silent after the cinnamon was spread- only to eventually reappear and continue entering underground from the front corner of the sculpture. How they found their way back to their nest in the centre undergound, I don’t know - they must have their own kind of super advanced gps navigation.
Thurs 4 Sep 2025
Erra Art Farm