Scientific and artistic perspectives overlap to mark and celebrate the wonders, mysteries and detritus of Morecambe Bay.

John Fox and Sue Gill live on the west shore of Morecambe Bay in a wooden house with a turf roof.

From 1968 to 2006 they were the Artistic directors of Welfare State International (WSI) www.welfare-state.org the arts company based in Ulverston which gained a world wide reputation for creating new celebratory theatre with many communities. Their invention of lantern parades, site specific events, street music and new ceremonies for secular rites of passage have had a big influence on mainstream culture.

In 2008 John and Sue set out to generate “The Weather Station” from their home at Bardsea, an holistic art work “to demonstrate the connections between making artworks and living as creatively as possible in tune with family, landscape, season and weather.”  Raw data has been gathered in collaboration with micro-marine ecologists and botanists, with plant pressings, photographs, short films of microscopic life, etchings, paintings, enamels, wood cuts, whirlygigs, books and diaries, which altogether present a rich and complex poetry of life at the weather Station.

Their forthcoming exhibition at Brantwood, “Fragments from the Weather Station”, is an initial summary of their work, a marker point of the first three years research. In the home of John Ruskin, who equally was searching for a way of being where “there is no wealth but life”, they will display artefacts and ideas to demonstrate their small but parallel journey.

John and Sue explain further: “..much contemporary art is becoming a novel spectacle driven by commodity and celebrity…it used to have and could still have another role; a role where creative activity can be woven more fully into the way we live our lives.” They describe their exhibition as “an idiosyncratic confluence of history, artworks and ideas.”