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My name is Tina Dempsey, so I'm a visual artist, I am a collector of things, I am a gentle adventurer and I make work predominantly in response to spending time on the coast.
I've always always spent time on the beach, you know, at the coast. I need to, I lived inland for a short time years ago, and couldn't work out what was wrong. I felt really unsettled and it was because I couldn't get to the edge and that’s when I knew I had to be by the sea.
Right the way through, from university to now, collage is that sort of thread, that seam that runs right the way through; playing on that and experimenting and pushing what collage can be, I suppose.
I'll pick a starting point, whatever that is, like a piece of paper or card or something, and then the layering responds to each layer. So the next layer responds to the layer before and so on and so on and so on, and that's how it builds.
I've been collecting paper and things I've made. This is stuff from uni to now, so this is seven years worth of paper, so that's another collection election.
I didn't realise I was a collector. I kind of knew I liked things, but I didn't realise I was a collector. Then I, when I started to look back, I've always collected. I used to collect like novelty, rubbers, and I used to collect sweets and I used to collect notebooks and. And it was just this sort of sudden realisation that I am a collector.
With lockdown everything stopped and our place to go was the beach every day. I started to collect these things from the beach, and I think collecting really is very much, um, especially on the beach, it's just an instinctive thing. So it's picking just what speaks to me. Something will stand out and then I'll think, ‘Yeah, I want that’, and it's, it's…I can't explain it anymore than that. I just know that that's a thing. Then it's about curating those things that I've collected and how I display those things. So they then become a thing in their own right.
But that sort of intensity of being there every day, walking there, observing that landscape in a lot more detail was kind of the start of that really. And then I was making work that I didn't know why I was making it. I was just playing around cuz we had all this time. And then kind of almost put that away.
I suppose quite often the perception of Fleetwood is that it, well, it's described. I believe as a town of rural deprivation, and I suppose locally Fleetwood, you know, may have had a particular reputation. But to me, the coastline here is just, just incredible. It's absolutely beautiful. It's a lot quieter, and the wildlife, so it's a triple SI (SSSI), which is a site of special scientific interest, so for the Marine life and wildlife in the area, and it's just stunning and it's kind of got everything as a coastline.
I kind of have this notion that me and the sea look after each other. So whenever I go onto the beach or just walking by, I always collect plastic waste plastic, and it's almost like, so I, I take away something that the-that the beach doesn't need or doesn't want, and then it kind of almost repays me by every time I go and pick up plastic, I tend to find something beautiful. So like a small fossil coral, or just, or a really nice piece of plastic. So it's almost like we're gifting each other. Um, and we kind of have this sort of unspoken, uh, little relationship, which is very nice.
