This week's newsletter is introduced by Ali Pretty, founding Artistic Director of Beach of Dreams and sculptor Julie Brook . We are delighted to be collaborating on an exciting festival later this year, by co-hosting two online cafés, of which the first takes place this coming Wednesday.

Ali Pretty writes "I’m a walking artist, community activist and founding Artistic Director of Beach of Dreams, a coastal festival and open invitation to celebrate and reimagine the UK’s coastlines. In 2025, Beach of Dreams becomes a UK-wide event: an opportunity to reflect on what our coastlines mean to us today, and what they could become tomorrow.

Beach of Dreams has been growing in scale since 2017, and as we’ve expanded our scope, we’ve adopted our approach. When asking the four countries of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England to consider the vast challenges they face from the climate crisis, we were unsure where to begin. Our festival has always remained focused on local communities, and it’s here we found our answer: by creating a national network of artists and partner organisations, we’re able to explore global questions concerning our beaches and our environment, all the while ensuring that they are shaped by local conversations, knowledge and lived experience.

In doing this, we’ve been galvanised to find many local responses from the UK have parallel projects taking place across the world. One such serendipitous pairing is between sculptor and land artist Julie Brook, and the Taiwan Thousand Miles Trail Association (TMI Trail) represented by Shinlee Hung. TMI Trail has developed the Eco-Craft Trail Building programme, working with traditional trail builders who use skilled labour and local materials rather than heavy machinery. The approach elevates traditional craft skills to honour the environment, promoting a holistic understanding of the local ecology, and minimising disruption to the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Julie Brook, Beach of Dreams’ commissioned artist for Fife, will create a new site-specific work, Tide Line, this May, with support from the local community on the coastline. Julie’s ephemeral stone structure, shaped by the tides, will gradually erode over time, and will respond to the weather and natural forces."

Julie Brook writes "In conversation with Shinlee I will be sharing elements of my practise as an artist working predominantly outside and often in very remote landscapes. I am interested in responding to the form and materials of a specific landscape and how, by a simple re-alignment of materials, I can create a work that invites us to look at and engage with a specific place in a new and different way. To consider scale and time, gravity and light, the relationship between the four elements. I use forms of making that are used in path-making such as dry stone walling methods, steps, making walk lines. I will use some images to illustrate the work. With Shinlee we will explore the differences and overlaps between her organisations’s commitment to making paths using traditional methods that are responsive to the environment in Taiwan in relation to my own work in Scotland, Japan, Nepal and Namibia."

Ali Pretty will host this walk · listen · create Café on Wednesday 12 February, in conjunction with the World Trails Network, in which Shinlee, Julie and she will consider “When does craft become art?“. Join them to discuss the similarities and differences in elevating traditional craft skills to honour the environment, and in creating sculptures that respond to nature and its rhythms and structures. 

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