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lighthouse / Signalling poetry in Morse code using torchlight from the top floor suite of the Liverpool Hilton hotel. Overlooking the Irish Sea, the hotel became a poetry lighthouse. Triangulated with an answering poem signalled overnight across the river Mersey from Bidston Observatory, and a written piece buried three metres under the hotel entrance flagstones commemorating a storm. Conversation with road diggers and hotel workers activated the piece.
2017
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protection / Signalling flag flown from twelfth floor scaffolding of a Victorian orphanage by Liverpool ‘security’. The flag could be viewed from a Victorian jail rooftop across the city with binoculars in the setting sun, marking a third cathedral spire or ley line of invisible parallel lives. Hidden conversations of mutual trust and risk activated the piece.
2017
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Hope + Resolute / Passers-by help to signal tankers on Crosby beach, Merseyside, using a parallel form of maritime signalling language. Using umbrellas blown into the docks by storms remade into flags, protection becoming language and flight. Navigation poles mark an invisible path, a safe unseen channel.
2017
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Styx / Every dusk at Highgate Cemetery, London, a warden circumnavigates the cemetery tolling a Victorian school bell, separating the living from the dead for the night. I record her path and borrow the bell to toll the dusk tide in on the Thames foreshore, departure point for the Mayflower, considering if the bell keeps its function.
2018
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Port de Grave / “They will appreciate it / I’m sure” Wade Bishop
Graves cared for on daily ritual expeditions on residency on Port de Grave peninsula, Atlantic Newfoundland, as community engagement on realising most of the religious community are deceased, climbing segregated fenced-off graveyards for equal care. Grave decorations blown into woods by 80mph Arctic winds are restored, overgrown ancient gravestones cleared and lonely unvisited graves spoken with.
2023
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The Falls / On residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Aberdeenshire, I reimagine Clova Estate as a murder mystery scene, lead by an audiobook CD crowscarer and barter with the sister of the Laird / of the gamekeeper. Considering land ownership, access, and non-human life, while scaling deer fence gates and negotiating tracks around the stately home. Performative fragments and clues throughout Clova include film shot into crowscarer CD in dusk forest, recording a parallel world as night falls and evening birds return, rubbing from caravan abandoned in the forest, predicting aurora sighting, and white feathers for cowardice becoming epaulettes to give courage. Funded by the Oppenheim-Downes Memorial Trust.
2025
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Matterhorn / “…from the centre point of the mountain directly towards you is the black line of the ridge which outlines a sharp face at the centre and on the right is a more gentle snowy slope / That outline is really sharp and reflected on the water in a blurred shadow in the ripples / the sunset is in the sky the centre is left to right one third of the sky is one big cloud and below that the horizon is sort of golden and horizontal stripes and again these are reflected in the lake / In fact the gold although broken into sparkles is brighter than the sky.”
My mum describes a photo of the Matterhorn, taken by my dad, on the phone the day she is diagnosed with rare blood condition that becomes leukaemia.
2018
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/ ali hutchinson / may 2025 / – – –
Ali Hutchinson 