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60 BlowsRaw wool, willow, film

At the start of every summer, Britain’s 20.9 million sheep must be sheared. Over the past 75 years, the price of wool has been dropping. Last year, farmers received on average 44p per fleece. It costs at least three times that to pay the shearer. And, for many smaller sheep farmers, having the wool collected by the Wool Board costs more than it’s worth, so it sits in on the farm, slowly rotting.

With  thanks to the shearers:
Sidney Vincent and Fred Bonastroo 




This project was coursework for Camille’s MFA at the Royal College of Art, and showed at the College’s degree show, RCA2025.
Using combined historical and ethnographic research, ‘60 Blows’ was motivated by a desire to find out how the gradual collapse of the wool industry is felt by small scale sheep farmers in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, and the Cotswolds. The work investigates the relationships forged with animals raised as a resource, our responsibility to them, and the labour it takes to maintain it all.
fdDEUS REX 4AZIONE NELLO SAZIO NºGUERRA CIVILE)Forces of Nature www.forces-of-nature.comArts Gathering
 
For 300 years, from the 17th century until 1936, the Oare Gunpowders Works site in Faversham, Kent was an industrial site that produced a weapon that was used to kill and destroy. But it was also a place where people worked everyday, made their livelihoods, and found community. Today, the site bears evidence of its darker past through its ruins, but it is also a nature park where plants and animals make a home, people find quiet and volunteers donate hours of care, and parents take their children to play. On 15th of March 2025, we transformed this place again into a place to gather, to think together, to make together, to be together.


This project was produced as coursework for Camille’s MFA at the Royal College of Art, and was commissioned by Cement Fields, a Kent-based arts organisation. 


On the 15th of March 2025 Forces of Nature hosted a day-long gathering at Oare Gunpowder Works Country Park. This day was motivated by a shared desire to engage with the layers of history, ecology, and community embedded in this place. The gathering was a collaboration between 13 artists from the Royal College of Art MFA Arts and Humanities, seven local Kent artists and over 300 attendees of all ages, from Faversham, London, and beyond. Camille was the organizer of this event, facilitating the overall structure of the gathering, coordinating the artist call, and marketing.
 Camill









Buprestidae
Film

In the back rooms of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, millions and millions of insects lay pinned in drawers. Composed of organic matter, these insects are vulnerable to decay. 




With thanks to Maya Lucas, Amo Spooner, and Louis Lofthouse at Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

This project was produced as coursework for Camille’s MFA at Royal College of Art.










seaweed vision
viewmaster, pressed seaweed, poetry

dear land farmer,

if your bones creek as you lay down to sleep
less you push yourself through to make
the rush of your way can’t keep the hurl at bay
while you wait in your smell of brine and swell

then wash your bones in the mother creek
and follow it down where the oysters sleep
and when tide pulls out on a moonless night
as you slide through the water, you’ll make your own light
at the rush and the whirl there’s only one way
the water will hurl you gently out to the bay
there if you wait in the calm you will smell
sea brine and seaweed drawing you to the swell.


This project was produced as coursework for Camille’s MFA at Royal College of Art and showed in the David Hockney gallery as part of the show ‘BOUYANCY’ curated by Mia Barraka and Cassidy Conway Cole.
 
On 1 March 2025, a federally funded grant program that supported the development of small scale aquaculture operations in coastal Maine, USA was terminated.The gulf of Maine is the fastest warming area of sea on the globe, and the lobsterfishers who make their livelihood there are deeply aware of the inevitable collapse of the fishery. Lobsterers often own their own businesses, and because of this, they typically reap a fair profit. Aware that this livelihood is now extremely temporary, lobsterers and others have turned to a form of food production that is resilient to climate change, and, when done right, beneficial to ocean ecosystems: seaweed farming. In Maine, there has been a boom of small scale seaweed farming, where growers own their own businesses. Typical primary food growers, people who farm on land, often are at the whims of big agricultural companies and poorly structured government subsidy systems that trap them in a cycle of harming their own land through the application of fertilizers and pesticides, and intensive machinery use. For the sea farmers, this is not the case, but the independent coastal economy is under threat.

In ‘seaweed vision’ Camille imagines a near future world where, with the end of this federal grant funding, a resistance movement of seafarmers flourishes. Rather than accepting an industrial agricultural takeover, they develop into a cooperative community of seaweed farmers. Inside a viewmaster, on the reel, a seafarmer has written a ruttier, a poem historically used by sea navigators to show them the way. The ruttier has specific references to a real place in coastal Maine, that would be identifiable to an individual with a relationship to that landscape. 



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