Found Sound for January: Morvern Graham

Welcome to the Fern Podcast, as the season turns. I'm Lea Lenders and I'm delighted to introduce this found sound for January, created by musician and sound artist Alice Boyd. Found sounds is back for 2025 with another 12 episodes, each released on the middle Friday of the month. For this new year, Alice will be travelling across the UK to meet people inspired by heritage crafts, folklore and the landscape, creating a sonic scrapbook of their practice. For January's episode, Alice meets Scottish Scandinavian illustrator, printmaker and storyteller Moorven Graham on the East Scottish coast. Together they head out onto the windy beach to collect limpids for Moorven's latest folklore character, the Shelley Coat. You may wish to pause the podcast here for a moment while you find somewhere warm and quiet to close your eyes, sit back and settle down into this month's found sound. So Moorven, could you introduce yourself and describe your work? Yes, certainly. My name is Moorven Graham. I am an illustrator, a printmaker and a storyteller. My career has grown many wild and beautiful arms and legs over the first couple of years. Most commonly nowadays you'll find me here in my little attic studio by the sea, doing printmaking and visual art and also you can find me storytelling, telling lots of fuk tales and fuk stories, both online and sometimes in person as well. Yes, so right now we're in Moorven's beautiful studio and there's the little shells hanging over there and there's a view of the sea from your window. What inspired you to move to the sea? I think the sea is a place that draws creative people to it very naturally. It's got a very special energy about it and it's an energy that actually I was quite nervous to move to in some ways because although I've always been very drawn to nature, I've always been drawn to environments like forests and mountains in the sense that they're quite predictable and they feel quite comforting and in some ways living on the coastline right next to the sea is quite exposing and I almost wondered if I was going to get swept away a little bit by the sea but in some ways it's only given my work and my life, this kind of dynamism and this wildness that I've really been enjoying and really been embracing in my work lately. Nature and folklore are a huge part of your work. How did you get inspired by folklore in the first place and also the natural world? Well I really grew up with folklore in my childhood. My parents told me fuk stories almost constantly every single day and so growing up me and my siblings were really exposed to this idea that the world around us was just full of these magical creatures, you know like a tree, it wasn't just a tree, it was the home of a community of fairy folk and there were silkeys in the sea and there were giants in the mountains and there were beasties and trolls and witches and powers that were invisible to the naked eye but you could see them in other ways and so growing up I suppose the world just had this enchantment and this magic attached to it and I never really lost that when I grew into an adult and I suppose I just sort of infused that into my work and it's something that I'm so passionate about introducing to other people just because of the magic that it can bring to people's lives, I think it's really special. I'd love to see some of the objects around your studio, would you be happy to give us a little tour? So maybe we can start over here because over here I've got some objects, I've built a little mobile from objects that I find washed up by the sea in the past couple of months that we've been living here so we have a lot of pottery and ceramics and sea glass as well and also some hack stones which are very magical objects that I love finding, you don't find them so often unfortunately but when you do it's a very good day. But anyone who doesn't know what a hack stone is, can you describe what it is? Yeah, it's a any stone or pebble which has a naturally occurring hole through the middle of it so you can see through it and they have a lot of very magical qualities attached to them and according to folklore people say that they bring good luck and good health and also if you look through the hole of fire you're meant to be able to see fairies and you know hidden creatures that are able to spot various things but yeah so just little collection of things, a lot of maps and very obsessed with maps so there's a couple of places that I've been to, the Orkney and the Shetland Islands and also the small Isles so it's nice. I like to make little, collect little talismans and little objects to remember memories. I'm a very object based person so I like to surround myself with stuff as much as possible yes. All right, where to next? Let's shimmy on over here and maybe we'll open the window and get some nice fresh air into the room. So there we've got the sound of the sea, yeah it's really nice to have even on a day when for whatever reason I'm stuck in the studio and I can't get out and I have to just be bent over a line of car or sitting in front of my computer, it's so nice to just be able to open the window and stick my head out into the salty air and here are the oyster catchers and the carloos and it's a really nice way to be connected to the outside world whilst still being in my studio, it's a real privilege. Now let's pick me what I'll look by the sea, it's really nice, it's very special. Here we've got basically where I do most of my printmaking, this is the messy corner or at least I like to try and reserve one corner of the studio for the messy stuff because printmaking does get very messy, there's a lot of ink and oil and paper and everything involved. So sometimes instead of using brushes I'll pick things from nature, grass stems or flower heads or sticks and then I'll use them to create some interesting lines and marks and actually these little things are tiny little seed heads so they make little sounds like a tiny rattle which I find very delightful. I do lots of different types of printmaking but mostly relief printmaking so a lot of my no monotype and holograph printmaking so for something like lino for example usually I would start with sketching or drawing at the image and then it's just a case of transferring it onto the lino and then once it's on the lino a case of carving at the image and you kind of have to think in terms of negative space because you're carving away what you don't want and leaving behind what you do so it's quite similar to wood carving in a way I suppose or sculpture so you're creating this 3D object but the 3D object isn't what you're actually ending up with, you're creating this lino and then you end up ending that up and printing that and then you get the print at the end so I'll just pick up some of my tools and I'll do a little bit of carving and we're coming to a case of lino here. Do you know much about the history of lino printing or carving? I mean it certainly goes back so very far and that's the thing that I love so much about printmaking is how manual it is and how it hasn't really changed that much since people would have practiced it in the early days and one of my favourite things about being a printmaker is the fact that my practice doesn't really rely on much modern technology I love that I can spend a whole day up here in the printmaking studio and at no point do I actually need any modern technology, I've just got my tools, I've got my lino, I've got my ink and my paper and my manual printing press and that's all I need and it's very refreshing that it is to spend a whole day just for if technology. So today what are you working on? Well later on I was hoping to have a little wonder down the coastal path and head to a really lovely beach and I need to collect a couple of shells for a focal costume that I'll be making for a storytelling video soon and there's always something else lovely to find by the sea so I thought we could go and forage a couple of sea objects as it were, that sounds great, yeah. So really lovely day, the sun is shining a little bit but we also got some slightly moody clouds over there and it's a bit windy so we have about three different types of weather all at once which is very Scottish so it's a nice thing about living in a place where you can see such a wide expanse of the landscape, often the weather will be one season on one side of you and then another season on the other side and that's very much the day to day. I think the lovely thing about living somewhere like this in the winter is you get to see every single part of the day from sunrise to sunset, the sun paints the sky and all these really amazing colours. Move, what do you have there? I have got a little bird whistle which I have in my pocket at all times. This one specifically is a curly whistle so it's meant to sort of imitate the sound that curly's make. It's not, it's not perfect but have you ever had a curly come up and respond after that? Quite often they're actually quite conversational birds which is nice so if you get a group of them and you time it right then sometimes you can have a nice little curly conversation. So we've just got to the beach and more than you're going to collect some shells indeed. Can you tell me a bit about this shell creature that you're going to create? Yeah, so I'm going to be telling a folk story soon all about the Shelley Coat. It's actually specifically a piece of Edinburgh based folklore all about a little creature who used to live down by the docks at least when there used to be a beach there back in the 1800s and it's quite a sad story about a creature who was very feared by the locals and he was called the Shelley Coat because he was known for wondering the shoreline with collecting shells and making himself this coat out of the shells and so he made this rather terrifying noise whenever he was approaching with all the shells rattling at this coat and I really wanted to tell a folk story about the Shelley Coat and maybe perhaps make my own folk costume out of shells so that I can recreate that a little bit I think that would be really fun. So today you are becoming the Shelley Coat and accounting the shells? Yes, hopefully not as terrifying as the real folk creature may have been but yeah I'm aiming to try and collect specifically little limpet shells which have had a hole naturally borne through so that I can tie them up with some ribbon and we're going to create a little sort of body adornments made out of shells and ribbons and yeah I think it's going to be fun. All ready you can see that for some reason I don't know what it is particularly about this little bay but all the white shells in the world it seems just end up being washed up here and it's great that it's a really beautiful white shell beach. Yeah it's incredible so as you say a beach of just white shells with some rocks with some rocks as well and it's actually a really lovely little spot to go for a wild swim when the tide is more in because it's very sheltered. It's one of my favourite spots since moving here I think I must come here just about every day and it's an excellent spot to look for shells and also moving potentially some pecs here's one that'll be a good contender. I think I can get some lost in a place like this I think the world could end and I wouldn't know so I just be staring downwards and looking all the lovely shells. I think it's so sad that we don't think of ourselves in the same way that we think of shells or rocks because this beach is far from perfect it's full of holes and imperfections and these shells are all broken and battered but we think of them as beautiful because they've left a life and I think it's sad that we don't think of our own bodies in the same way you know. How many shells do you think you need to collect to make the whole coat? Whole coat I reckon I need to spend many many hours collecting but I think I'm gonna try an aim for maybe more of a shell adornment, although maybe that would be an entire year project so more than you found a good collection here, wouldn't be that yes, we have a little old licorice tin and I have filled it up to the very most of these with all wine and limpi shells which all have holes in them and there were quite different shapes and sizes so it's going to be interesting to see what kind of thing we can make with them all but that's the beauty of it when we have even some conical shells here. Oh my goodness! Oh you found a haxtone! That was literally just, it has a very perfect circle on one side and then the other in large as it's a little bit. Well that's interesting, what a nice way to end our little sea forage with a haxtone I think you should have that. That's a gift to you from the Scottish coast. Thank you! All right, back to the studio! Back to the studio here. So you've got your shells? Yes, here I have my ocean bounty that we've collected. We actually got a lot which I'm really happy about and so now that we have all these lovely little limpi shells with our holes in them, I'm going to start threading some lovely colorful ribbons through them and hopefully once they're all combined together they should make a lovely noise. So Movin's just splitting the ribbon through the shells. This is kind of what I was talking to about on the beach where I'm trying not to worry too much about making something perfect. Because I am a printmaker and a visual artist I spend quite a lot of time making sure that all of my print making work is very precise and done properly which is a lovely thing but it's also quite nice to have little crafty things on the side that you can just do without too much expectation if they don't come you know you're just maybe you just get an idea and then you wander outside and you collect some things and then you make it and just see what see what happens. Do you think the Shelley Coat character will do a little dance with the shell? I think that they will have to be honest to generate this amazing sound. You can see why people would have been so terrified by the story of the Shelley Coat from this ominous kind of shells if you didn't know where it was coming from but I like to think that the Shelley Coat was actually quite misunderstood and that actually they were very friendly and people were probably just more scared of the idea of them and didn't really give them a chance. So that's kind of the angle that I'm going to approach the Shelley Coat story with. Particularly being in Scotland where the days are shorter than places further south. What do you find January has to offer? I think January is a really nice time for some stillness and some inward reflection. I think it's a bit mad that the traditional modern New Year is in January because it's a very strange time to suddenly overhaul your entire being and set all these new goals and be really ambitious because I think naturally we want to just gravitate inwards and it's one of the things I really found about moving out of the city to a place like this is that our days are governed by completely different schedules now. You know, we don't have artificial light and traffic noise. Instead we have the tides and the bird song and the light coming in and the light going away again at the end of the day and you notice all those things so much more. So you're kind of forced to live in tune with nature but there's something really harmonious about that and this January I'm enjoying embracing a little bit of slowness and trying to put to bed some of that pressure to be ultra productive during this dark cold time of year and just take some time for rest. And as this is your first year living here and being an artist here, are there any things you're looking forward to as the year goes on? I'm very excited to be more aware of the moon phases and to continue marking all of the solstices and equinoxes with folktales and storytelling videos and I'm excited to celebrate all the small things in nature that sometimes get a bit overlooked like the gradual returning of the light and celebrating all the little individual snow drops as they book their heads through the soil in the coming months and yeah just exploring this new home of ours as well here on the windswept Scottish coastline and I'm very excited for the year ahead. I think it's going to hold great things I hope. Thank you for listening to my found sound for January. Episodes of as the season turns are released on the first of each month and found sounds on the middle Friday of the month. Please do like and subscribe. I'm Alice Boyd and if you enjoyed this podcast you might also enjoy my music which underscored this episode. The track playing now is the instrumental of my song The Favorite. You can find the favorite and my other music under Alice Boyd on Spotify, Apple Music and all other major streaming platforms or via my website www.aliceboyd.info. This episode was produced by me with support from Catruon Abolt at Fern. The intro song is by Sam Lee with James K and Nico O'Brien. Thank you to Marvin Graham for a conversation at her studio on the east coast of Scotland. You can find out more about Marvin's artwork and storytelling at www.morvingraeme.co.uk or morevin.studios on Instagram. This podcast has been created by Fern. Fern is an organic fragrance maker based in Somerset. Working with the rhythms of the seasons they blend, barrel age and bottle four fragrances a year. Each fragrance is made to order for their names on the firm production ledger. To join the ledger and find out more visit www.furn.co or visit the link in the podcast description.