We are Coast and Wild
Home is on the wild and windswept coast of Pembrokeshire, West Wales. With expansive beaches, secret coves and sheltered bays, it embraces us with its quiet magic. A place to belong, to meander, explore and gather.
Our background is design and photography. Observing and recording the natural world on our doorstep, we have naturally evolved into avid coastal foragers. Seeking the ocean’s hidden secrets and story as it unfolds.
Noelle Pollington @coastandwild
Jon Jones @the.map.merchant
How We See things
We embrace nature, and find beauty in the smallest things.
Find rest in roaming, pausing to look and to listen.
With family we enjoy the long slow months between Autumn and Summer. We make pebble sculptures on the beach, skim stones until our hands are numb with cold, gather seaweed and firewood and bones. Run through the dunes, jump off rocks, tell stories, laugh and swim.
The Way We Work
Foraging seaweeds to press and produce as seaweed art has become something of an ongoing obsession and delight for us. Originally collecting seaweed as shape and colour references for designs and paintings, we soon realised that the pressed seaweeds were pieces of art in themselves.
Mindful to collect only small amounts of seaweed that are floating loose or washed up on the beach, the seaweed is then pressed in a similar manner to pressing flowers. There is a child like joy in foraging seaweed, observing the tides, listening to the waves and rummaging in the sand.
Then a magic, once home, in seeing the seaweed unfurl in water, before carefully capturing it onto watercolour paper. The paper is then pressed, taking care to flatten and preserve the seaweed without any mold developing on the paper.
Once the pressed seaweeds are finished and dried, we use high resolution digital capture to preserve their delicate details and produce beautiful fine art prints - almost unrecognisable from the original. This way, ensuring the original colour and details are not lost to time.
Jon’s maps were born from his passion of old place names, they are carefully cleaned to reveal what they may have looked like when they were first created, and Jon is mindful to keep any feature details present on the final prints.
