Cabin Voices

Letterpress printed book, with a polymer photogravure of a pinhole photograph of the Cabin at Bucks Mills on the cover.

The Cabin at Bucks Mills sits on the cliff, overlooking the beach and the eastern limekiln. It’s the last building in Bucks Mills on the steep path down to the beach. Artists Judith Ackland and Mary Stella Edwards stayed there for weeks at a time, for five decades, to paint and write. Now it belongs to the National Trust, with most of the furniture, cutlery, and crockery, and even some of the artists’ materials left pretty much as it was in 1971, the last time they were there. I did an artist residency there with Elizabeth Willow in September 2021, and it completely changed my practice. A year after the residency I imagined what the things in the Cabin may have been saying. Some of them (the mercury mirror for example) were very surprising! If you are also interested in listening to what things might be saying, then you might enjoy The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. Warning: it got me reading Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett… and then a 3.5 year PhD ensued.