Lores of the LeftCoast

Blackpool, you have my attention

1. Listen - It’s loving

It’s the first way you can love. Your surroundings are turning out their pockets, spilling their treasure. Be alive enough to hear it.

Gossip has saved lives. For centuries the rumour has carried value. Whispers ride winds and become myth; become story. New words fall from air and into regular mouth use, into written use, into history books. Truth and falsity become meandering terms. They define nothing and mean everything. Who knows? Who cares? What is truth anyway? Who decides? This? It’s just how we’ve always done it.

Beautiful, invisible work

2. Wonder/Wander

Meander. So much gets missed on the straight road from past to progress. Let the wind take the ship. Movement is making.

I’ve been asked to listen as work many times before, but it’s never been the job description on the contract. It’s like the question isn’t nameable somehow - Can you listen to/for/into this, please? Yes. Yes I can. I’d love to.

A mutual friend threw my name in the mix and I’m grateful. The golden moments on my CV all came directly out of relationships. It makes sense. Plant life tangles below ground and occasional flowers pop above the soil. From good roots grows good trouble.

A creature of my place

3. Today, you are a creature of this place.

With me. With the sea. With us. With yourself.

I care what happens over there and sometimes that feeling has nowhere to live. There is no research to support the presence of the caring stranger. There is plenty of experience to suggest the parachute project brings more harm than good. Data sings the praises of the five minute neighbourhood and hyperlocal living. What are the consequences of me listening and leaving? I consider this a lot.

Welcome. All parts.

6. You are joining in the middle

This is the middle of many 100 year plans. It is not the beginning. You will not provide the end. The deadlines are unclear - What freedom.

Stakeholder.

When a tree is felled, the weight of the body is proportionate to the number of people willing to take a share in the load of moving it. More hands make light work. More hearts highlight the possible onward pathways. Some move the tree, some turn it into firewood, some whittle spoons and dream up sculptures, some tell about it. All are stakeholders.

I recently learned from a palm reader that my head and heart lines are completely intertwined. Forgive me for not knowing how to separate them.

Land; verb and noun

8. Dance and sing while you make sense of it

Re-making, re-imagining, re-pairing, re-membering - Music and food and taking your thoughts for a walk all help. Tenfold with a friend.

I once went to Italy and ate a perfect, white peach. Soft sunset skin, juice escaping down my chin. Sweet, fibrous, pulled clean from the stone with my teeth. I held the stone in my palm, a souvenir of what had just happened. Proof it happened. I still have that stone.

A permanent farm here now

10. You are community

Community is not a destination. You can’t drive there or order a slice to your door. No one can make it for you or hand theirs over. Even if they could, I hope they wouldn’t. It’s here - You and him and them and us. We are it.

About the work:

Lores of the LeftCoast is a work developed in response to The Land Beneath Our Feet Symposium hosted by Leftcoast in April 2025.

Laws are created to govern shared space and enforce power. They decide who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Lores are something else. They are the complex stories we create between ourselves, whispered down generations and across geographies. Lore is knowledge of how we have lived and dreams of how we might live in the future. It needs a community to exist.

On 24 April 2025, LeftCoast invited friends, colleagues and neighbours to come together to consider questions of collaboration, creative action and environmental responsibility. They invited artist, Lydia Catterall, to attend the event as a ‘listener’. This work has emerged from what she overheard.