TAMSIN
GREEN

walking out of sleep (2021-23)
encounters with lichen territory

At some point I started to notice them. 
At some point I wanted to know why they were here and not over there. 
At some point I was concerned when they were nowhere to be found.

The project explores one woman’s relationship with Map Lichen and the places that they inhabit. Over a period of two years she travelled to locations across the UK to spend time with the lichen in often remote and challenging terrain. She walked and slept among the lichen, sensitising herself to the elements that these friendly green crusts need to survive. She made photographs and wrote poems. The ‘maps’ guiding her into lichen territory.

Alongside her fieldwork she spent time with displaced lichen. The Natural History Museum in London is home to half a million lichen specimens, looked after by the Curator of Lichens. 120 of these samples are Map Lichen collected across the UK from the 1800s. Each visitor to the collection reviews the files and leaves their own notes, suggestions and new samples… After all science, knowledge and the herbarium itself are not static.

Becoming Lichenised - Installation views, Llyf , Stiwdio Griffith, Swansea (2024)

This exhibition explores circularity through the use of by-products and left-over materialsfrom the making of the book. After all, there is no waste in nature… The overprinting, calibration markings and stacks of paper reference the Lichen archive at the Natural History Museum in London where I undertook extensive research for the project.