Dr. Laura Denning is an artist, writer and academic. Her art practice is transdisciplinary, working across film, sound, social participation, curation and installation, often using mark-making (including photography) and walking as experimental methodologies. Laura has recently completed a British Academy funded project, A Feminist Almanac of the Weather, focusing on trauma, conflict and displacement in relation to the Scottish Clearances. Using distressed polaroids, she created a Tarot of the Weather (now held in the collections of the Wellcome Trust and the Warburg Institute, and various UK universities).

On board Godzilla Laura will be using her polaroid camera to document the journey from Stralsund to Peenemünde from the water. Peenemünde has a grim past as a massive industrial site located in old mines for Luftwaffe’s guided missile research during WWII. The work was conducted by concentration camp prisoners. Laura will be documenting the “ecotones” between the Baltic Sea and these sites of trauma, exploring “weathering” as a methodology using polaroid photography.

” The polaroids act symbolically as signposts to a past, and allude to an imagined analogue record of a world that existed before we were dominated by the digital image. It provides a fossil record of a bygone experience. Polaroids preserve a reality, and are tactile, relational, conversational. They are also very plastic and highly manipulable. I scratch and smear and distress the image. These processes accentuate their perceived “historical” presence. They have a patina, they have multiple stories to tell, some decipherable, some only to be guessed at. This haptic practice enables a way to uncover reduced understandings while gathering the richness of engagement in place.”

“I have never visited the Baltic sea before – though I have a long and lively relationship with the Atlantic, and have made work about the ocean previously. I have never sailed the ocean before – short ferry trips are my only previous experience! I am excited to undertake this unique residency doing something new to me in a place that is also new to me.”