London Thamesport is situated on the Isle of Grain. As in most docks, the majority of workers are male. At Thamesport there are no women stevedores to load and unload cargo. The one woman who has recently taken the physical test to do this role didn’t pass, the strength required to relentlessly lash containers together apparently too great. Closed worlds are inevitably and endlessly fascinating and romantic, the unfamiliar functions of industrial sites included: the towers of containers, immense cranes, dock vocabulary, nautical chart symbols, deep water capacity and thoughts of distant seas and lands. The romantic image dissipates when faced with the health and safety statistics which demonstrate the everyday danger of such industrial labour. This temporary tattoo on my pregnant torso is a take on the traditional designs of sailors and dockers. It is drawn with Hoo clay, which was dug extensively by local ‘muddies’ on the Hoo Peninsula in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be used in the manufacture of cement.

Full image and text published in Nicole Mollet's Kent Cultural Baton Map of Kent, following a residency on the Hoo Peninsula in 2012.

Migrant routes across Mediterranean, alongside military and cargo traffic on carbon paper. Selected for Of the Sea group exhibition at Chatham Dockyard, Kent, 2016 

RAF Fylingdales commissioned for The Thaumatrope Project, Firefly Books, 2013

Baton Shell Grotto, Art Moves, Queen Elizabeth Park, 2014