Vraiqu’sie is an artist-led exhibition produced by The Moving Arts Collective, reimagining vraicking — Jersey’s traditional seaweed-gathering practice — as a ritual connecting land, sea, creatures and people.

Created by the Vraiqu’sie Collective — six artists: Karen Le Roy Harris, Margarida Lourenço-Olivier, Natasha Dettman, Esther Rose Parkes, Kerry-Jane Warner and Blessed Ndlovu — the exhibition brings together film, sculpture, sound, costume, textiles, dyes and drawing, developed through a shared process of research and making. Newly composed songs in Jèrriais run throughout the work, connecting language, land and sea and recalling knowledge held within the tongue of the island.

The project was collectively developed through archival research, coastal walks and engagement with foragers, marine biologists and ethnobotanists. Vraiqu’sie explores the rhythms, labour and ritual of vraicking. At its centre is a film following a procession of vraiqu’rêsses (female seaweed gatherers) along historic vraicking paths, moving through the landscape as a gesture of collective remembrance and care for the relationship between land and sea. Performers wear sculptures made from willow and locally gathered seaweeds, embodying elements of land, sea and memory — horse, bird, sea creature and cart wheel. Vrai (seaweed) becomes both material and metaphor — carrying heritage, shaping the body and informing sound and visual forms — while re-establishing connections between language, labour and landscape.

The work invites reflection on reciprocity between land, sea and all who inhabit the intertidal environment, offering a space to consider Jersey’s intangible cultural heritage, communal practice and the interconnection between human and non-human life.

Find out more about the current exhibition at Elizabeth Castle, Jersey (4 April - 31 October 2026) here.

Supported by: Jersey Heritage, Barreau Art Scholarship award from Société Jersiaise, The Jersey Community Foundation with funds from the Channel Islands Lottery & Government of Jersey Creative Island Partnership. Support in kind from the Aspiring Jersey Island Geopark.