Red Creek is a project of entanglements: ecological, temporal, material, imaginary. Frenchmans Creek in Cornwall has been a site of extraction: hunting, global trade, colonial passage, industrial production and literary romance. The forest of oaks growing and collapsing on the steep sides were cut for shipping and burned to fuel mining, disturbed over centuries by waves of human consumption. During this time of existential environmental anxiety, and in the context of a global pandemic Hughes re-read H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds. Aliens brought to Earth a plant called the red weed clogging streams and rivers. The story ends with earth-bound micro-organisms destroying the invaders. The parallels are obvious. Knowing that we face a warming planet with water problems provides the context for this project. Uncanny nature is present: fallen oaks draped with bladderwrack; mingling with flows of thick, alluvial mud which suck down and spew up black decaying matter continually folding into each other. False-colour infra-red reverses certain natural signifiers, variegated foliage turns psychedelic, vampire red and delicate branches become tortured arteries. A carpet of vermillion curdles on the edge of muddy, tidal waters, fallen branches become a gothic fantasy with running veins or bloody bones. The work also references Charles Darwin “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Both Darwin and Wells futuristic visions initiate haunting dialogues. Estuaries across the globe are infected by human waste, contaminated with various chemical compounds including toxic run-off. These images reflect on the wider impact of pollution, damage to habitat and climate change by combining science, fiction and the imaginary into the visible. This is our emergency, what the IPPC has called ‘code red for humanity’. Andy Hughes 9.12.2021