The funding Waste Stories received from the Leverhulme Trust came to an end at the end of 2024. The Trust’s generous support has allowed us to create ideas, methods and partnerships that we will continue to develop into the future. 2025 started with a new venture in collaboration with our excellent colleagues at the Solway Firth Partnership and the also excellent Shambellie House. Shambellie House is a creative centre for arts, heritage and environmental courses, workshops and events in Dumfriesshire, and we got together to create a 4-day programme of workshops which introduced participants to cyanotype printing methods and creative writing in order to allow them to explore the ocean-crossing movements and migrations of natural and synthetic artefacts that eventually wash up on the shores of the Solway.

The programme included getting involved in the D&G Eco Warriors 7th birthday beach clean at Southerness on Sunday, 19th January. The beach was as beautiful as ever in the drizzly silver morning.

It offered a now classic mix of drums, fish boxes, twisted piles of frayed rope and microplastics embedded in seaweed, as well as squadrons of geese on the sand and in the skies.

And of course the inevitable tyres and shoes.

Keith Walker led the participants through an introduction to cyanotype printing, to make visual images using some of the objects that were collected during the clean. The images they produced were eerily beautiful, creating ghostly landscapes and exotic bodies, as well as playing with the relationships of scale.

Brendan Breslin and I led the creative writing element of the programme, prompting participants to think of other stories of journeys, from Odysseus to the Kon-Tiki expedition, and from stowaways to castaways.

The creative works produced during the programme were initially exhibited at Shambellie House, alongside some of the beach-combed objects used in or inspiring the work.

Four people completed the entire workshop programme and their work went on to be exhibited by Dumfires and Galloway NHS. It is presented in the Washed Up and Blue booklet, which is available along with other Waste Stories creative outputs and guidance on our resources page.