Natur am Byth: Artist in Residence
July 2024 - March 2025

Natur am Byth is Wales’ flagship Green Recovery project re-thinking the way we see endangered species and habitats around Wales.

Throughout my residency, I developed a site-specific project that engaged LGBTQIA+ communities with secretive species that are often overlooked and unloved, living between urban and rural environments in the Swansea Bay area of South Wales.

The project explored the intersections of art, ecology, and queer resilience, with my research focussing on the Fen Raft Spider and one of its key habitats, Crymlyn Bog. Through performance-led workshops and gatherings, I invited queer community to reflect on the bog’s ability to survive despite it’s violent history, including being bombed during WWII and being surrounded by landfill, an Amazon warehouse and residential developments. Crymlyn Bog sits on the outskirts of Swansea, and despite its massive size, incredible history and ecological importance, many local residents are unaware of its existence. Crymlyn is currently oversaturated and restoration efforts are focused on encouraging water off the site.

The Fen Raft Spider, covered in hydrophobic hairs, is able to float on water and continue to exist in Crymlyn’s water-logged environment. In recent years, concentrated efforts to boost the Fen Raft Spider population have led to sensationalist media coverage, with headlines exaggerating its size, calling it “as big as rats” and painting it as an invasive threat. My research drew parallel between the divisive and damaging language used to describe a species simply trying to exist, and the queer-phobic, trans-hating, narratives we far too often see in media and politics.

Framing the misunderstanding and mistreatment of both this secretive species and its habitat as metaphors for queer resilience and empowerment, I explore themes of interspecies care, belonging and community in times of oversaturation.

All photos by Dafydd Williams, Crymlyn Bog, January 2025.

Through a series of three performance-led gatherings for LGBTQIA+ folk, we explored inter-species care and safe space. Exploring practices of queering ecology, we played with ways to create space for ourselves, care for the environment, and reimagine what it means to belong in times of ecological and emotional oversaturation.

Workshop participants were invited to share offerings to the Fen Raft Spider and Crymlyn Bog. These took the form of drawings, poems, scores, social media posts, lists, videos, sound recordings and conversations. They encourage others to engage with the species and site into a gentle future.

My most sincere thanks to the queer folk who gathered with me, participated in workshops, and brought so much joy to this project. This work is nothing without the community we built together.