The Love Stories environmental commission is about nurturing conversations with our environment, conversations that are rooted in creativity, care, and community. Through artist-led projects, Love Stories amplifies diverse voices across rural Wales, bringing people together to reflect on climate change and our relationship with the natural world. From films and circus shows to photography, textiles, choral performance and natural paint making, the commission has encouraged artists to respond to the brief of “the Environment” in unexpected and deeply personal ways.

For Pembrokeshire-born artist Deryn, the story begins with the sea. Growing up surrounded by the dramatic coastline and open landscapes of West Wales, she has always felt a strong bond with nature, especially the ocean. That love has shaped her creative practice, which centres on exploring our connection to place through playful engagement with found and organic materials. Her work celebrates impermanence, creating objects that exist beautifully for a moment before returning gently to the earth without harm.

In September last year, during a group residency on Bardsey Island, Deryn’s practice took a new turn. Each day, she walked the shoreline, gathering small “treasures”: stones, driftwood, shells, rusty metal fragments, and plastics washed in by the tides. But what fascinated her most was the seaweed. Piles of it, tossed ashore after storms, shifting endlessly with the rhythms of the sea. She was captivated by its changing qualities: rigid one moment, flowing the next; leathery in texture yet luminous in its greens, browns and reds. It was, as she describes, “where the love story began.”

That love story grew during her final year studying Jewellery Design at Carmarthen School of Art. Stitching pieces of kelp together, she began creating seaweed “fabrics” that could be shaped around the body, adorned with copper, and worn as part of the landscape itself. Her final pieces were not just jewellery, they were living conversations between body and environment, art and nature.

With her Love Stories to Nature commission, Deryn is continuing this exploration. This time, she is working on a larger scale, pushing the boundaries of what seaweed as a material can become, and inviting others into the process. Through workshops and community engagement, she hopes to share not only her love of the sea but also the meditative act of stitching, offering a creative space where natural materials and human hands meet in care, patience, and imagination.

At its heart, Deryn’s project asks us to consider how creativity and natural spaces are intertwined in shaping our sense of belonging and wellbeing. Her work with seaweed is both personal and communal: a love letter to the Pembrokeshire coast, and an invitation to others to discover their own love stories with nature.

Let us know you’re coming by emailing:
info@span-arts.org.uk