Rachel Marsh

Research title: What can Mary Stella Edwards’ poetry and painting in Bucks Mills in the last century teach us about responding to the climate crisis today?

Commenced: April 2023

Rachel about her research:

Mary Stella Edwards (1898-1989) – poet and artist – had a deep love for Bucks Mills where she shared ownership of the Cabin over-looking the beach. She and artist Judith Ackland, stayed and worked at the Cabin for nearly five decades until 1971. During this time the effect of human exploitation of the natural world was already being felt in the decline of the local fishing industry. Edwards’ reverence for the natural world and her place within the landscape of North Devon is resonant of vital materialism, as described by Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. Mary Stella Edwards was an active listener –in her work, stars, birds, plants and even shadows are animate.

To view seemingly inert or ‘dead’ objects, be they rocks or rubbish, as ‘vital matter’ changes our relationship with the world around us; it transforms the subject/object dichotomy, revealing the complex interrelationships between humans (themselves composed of vital matter) and the materials we exploit. How might this understanding reframe our view of the natural world and our place within it?

This multidisciplinary research will combine an exploration of the development of Mary Stella Edwards’ poetic and pictorial language in the Edwards & Ackland archive, and relate these findings to the current environmental and scientific understanding of the natural world and the climate crisis we face. Alongside this, Rachel Marsh will also be developing her own poetic print practice, inspired by Bucks Mills, using letterpress, pinhole photography and alternative photographic methods to explore her findings and to build – as Robin Wall Kimmerer would describe it – a grammar of animacy. 

This PhD is funded by UWE Bristol / College of Arts, Technology and Environment and commenced in April 2023.