Madeleine Bunting
How we invented the River Severn: The many ways that human intervention has made the river what it is today and how we are now trying to unpick the damage
Madeleine Bunting is writing a biography of the Severn to be published by Granta, interviewing people who live by or work on or near to the Severn. As she walks the 220 miles of the Severn Way, she is tracing the story of how the river has shaped the history and identities of two countries.
Alexander Caminada
A Temporary Place
The River Severn as a place in constant flux
Photographer Alexander Caminada has increasingly sought the solitude and unique landscape of the River Severn. Inspired by its diverse topography and surrounding infrastructure, his work deliberately diverges from conventional pictorialism, emphasising exploration and experimentation. He continues to pursue new projects that celebrate the river, its fragile nature and our connections to it.
Kate Dineen
The Power of Ceremony: changing our relationship with river Severn
Kate Dineen is a celebrant who brings ceremonial practises to the river Severn with the invitation to deepen a relational understanding of river as living part of the web of life. She collaborates with artists, ecologists, scientists, people of all faiths and none and creates an inclusive space for gratitude.
Angela Findlay
Ode to Mud
A Quarter-Century Love Affair with the Severn
When artist Angela Findlay first encountered the Severn in 1999, it was love at first sight. Within weeks she was living beside it near Frampton, walking its banks every day, watching its changing moods, and falling into rhythm with its deep tidal breaths and endlessly shifting mud. That mud found its way into her paintings, danced onto canvases through her hands, and on into London galleries. When she moved to her house in Stroud Cemetery in 2006, the Severn was reduced to a silver ribbon across the valley, but its mud continued to shape her work.
James Greenwood
Sabrina and Me
After a brief spell in The City, James Greenwood spent a decade travelling around the world by horse. On his return, he and his wife bought their family home - a bankrupt hotel on the banks of the River Severn - the first thing he did was find a suitable boat. The boat turned out to be not that suitable. Fascinated by the River, James has spent the last 30 plus years exploring the water between Gloucester and Bristol, riding the 10-meter tidal rise and fall, scaring his family half to death and engaging with the politics of the potential of the Severn Estuary to provide 20% of the UK’s electricity.
Matt Hart and Mike Powell
Hunters of the Ebb Tide: Lave netting on the Severn Estuary
Matt Hart and Mike Powell have a lifelong affinity with the River Severn and its Heritage Fisheries. Benefiting from generations of experience and a lifetime in the river, they are two of the last remaining ‘Hunters of the Ebb Tide’ that practice the ancient art of lave netting for salmon.
Kel Portman
Severn Ways
Portman is a landscape/walking artist living in rural Gloucestershire, a few kilometres from the River Severn. His practice explores his own walking & landscape-based experiences, examining space, place and process. The resulting works often include written objective reflections as well as a more personal/emotional response to the landscape. By removing 'attachment' from the process of image making, the need for identifying the beautiful, sublime or picturesque in an image is overcome and the space truly explored without preconceptions. Much of this walk-based work becomes an ‘encounter’. By using alternative means to define and identify the subject, there emerges the discovery of the 'unattached' landscape. Currently and over the past years since lockdown, he has established a routine of daily practise, producing and publishing every day a series of theme-based new works
Stuart Ballard