Elementum Journal 2018: Edition Four 4: Shape

Elementum is a biannual journal that explores our place in the natural world through new writing. In this Edition we join women responding to a shifting environment in lace, cyanotype and stone. We follow colourful trails of fish with marine biologist Helen Scales and trace an alphabet of otters with Jackie Morris. We track down fossilised sea urchins impressed in burial mounds and church windows, and learn how observing birds can help us to pin memories to places. Wyl Menmuir finds that working with wood helps to continually reshape his writing practice, while Jane Lovell shares her path through a poem, where words glimmer with hope in a dark landscape. There is new writing from Whitney Brown, Will Burns and Alex Preston and striking imagery, newly commissioned, from Tor Falcon, Neil Gower and Catherine Hyde. Other articles explore the long-forgotten but now recently recovered work of Anna Atkins and Emma L. Turner. More than a hundred years ago, these pioneering natural historians were harnessing technology to frame the future of nature photography while breaking the mould of who might tell the story of Britain's algae, ferns and birds. We travel from the chalk of the English South Downs to the reedbeds of Norfolk, and from a Welsh valley sculpted by ice and dynamite to the foot of a cliff in Northwest England, where Annie Worsley uncovers the imprints of our prehistoric coastal ancestors, a mother's straight path along the sand encircled again and again by the small footprints of her children. This edition is 160 pages, limp notch bound for durability and printed in full colour in the UK using vegetable inks on FSC-approved uncoated paper with coated paper interludes. Size 274x210mm Printed in the UK