Molly Basterfield
Mixed media artist, underwater performance artist, and creator of ‘Dreaming Waters’.
Molly Basterfield is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of water, dreams, embodiment, and the unconscious. Living for the past six years in the Dahab, Egypt, beside the Red Sea, she works across performance, movement, ritual, writing, and immersive participatory experiences to investigate water as both a physical medium and a psychological landscape.
Her artistic journey began during her studies in Fine Art (BA Sculpture / University of Brighton / UK), where she departed from conventional methods of art-making to engage with natural processes as mirrors of the human condition. Through process-based performance, ritual, and site-responsive actions, she developed an interest in how altered states of consciousness, emotional release, and transformation can be accessed through direct encounters with the natural world.
Central to Molly's practice is a long-term inquiry into the relationship between the human psyche and aquatic environments. Drawing upon her experience as a freediver, underwater performer, dreamworker, water therapist, hypnotherapist and researcher of depth psychology (MA Jungian Psychology / University of Essex), she creates works that blur the boundaries between performance, ecological engagement, somatic experience, and mythic imagination. Water functions within her practice as both material and metaphor—a space where gravity, identity, memory, and perception are reconfigured.
Her current research explores the parallels between dream states, underwater immersion, and creative consciousness. Through underwater movement, participatory rituals, writing, and durational performance, she investigates how submerged environments can facilitate encounters with liminality, surrender, and transformation.
Above Sea Level ————————-
S A L T W O R K S
T E T H E R E D Salt, fabric, rope, wire Part of the ‘IN-BETWEEN” Exhibition at ‘DARB 1718’ Cairo, 2025
'Tethered’ refers to the space of the womb, the first space we exist within that is truly between realms of the spirit and the material. When we are born, the umbilical chord that binds us is cut, however this connection to womb space, the source of life, stays with us in spirit throughout our human journey. It is from this open channel that that our intuition and powers of manifestation flow. As we grow through the life, each vibrating at our own frequency, we remain connected by this invisible chord to the spiritual plane, balancing the spiritual and material within our lives.
Salt heals. Salt purifies. Salt is needed in delicate balance within the body to sustain life. ‘Tethered’ incorporates salt from Egypt’s Siwan Salt Lakes. Siwa is a place that I feel to be deeply connected to healing and transformation, specifically for the feminine energy.
Above Sea Level ————————-
W A T E R W O R K S
A S C H A N G E A B L E A S T H E T I D E S Photography series & poem.
One photograph, for each of the 65 days spent at sea.
Taken each day at 4pm, as the day drew to a close.
In various locations around the Philippines. 2019.
The mind of man and the ocean both have their storms and their tides
when you can’t see the ocean for the waves be still
all will subside after time
from the heaviest of waves come the calmest of seas
they are one as are you and I
Being stranded without communication from the outside world for months at a time, with three previous strangers, in the middle of the Sulu Sea, is the hardest thing i’ve faced throughout my life. Sometimes I’d find myself bursting into tears whilst swimming around the boat, the vast blue ocean was the one private place I had to let out my emotions. Plunging into its depths each morning was the one thing that made me feel alive. The touch of the water embracing my body the only touch I felt in months.
Below Sea Level ————————-
W A T E R W O R K S
Documented Research: Submerged Bodies: Choreographies of Pre-Language Documented research video. 2026.
I am currently in the process of developing a series of underwater performance works informed by somatic aquatic practice and Butoh-derived movement research. My practice investigates the body as a site of pre-linguistic and post-linguistic consciousness, where water functions not as setting but as choreographic and perceptual condition. This video documents the initial experimentation.
Through prolonged engagement with submerged movement, breath disruption, and sensory disorientation, I explore how the body reorganises itself in states of suspension, resistance, and release. The work draws on Butoh principles of transformation, slowness, and embodied imagery, while extending them into underwater space as an environment that alters gravity, time, and muscular intention.
The project will result in an underwater performance in a custom built above ground glass front pool and series of single- and multi-channel films combining performance, voice, and poetic text. These works examine themes of origin, memory, and relational embodiment, including the womb as a conceptual and physical reference point for submerged consciousness.
Rather than documenting performance, the films will be constructed as experiential fields where choreography, water, and voice operate as interdependent systems of perception. The outcome will be presented as an installation-based body of work.
It will explore:
-the body before identity (pre-birth / womb-state metaphor)
-relational embodiment between two or more performers
-dissolution of linguistic structure into breath, rhythm, and gesture
-the body as a site of transformation rather than representation
The movement language is to be developed through:
-somatic water-based practices (breath, buoyancy, sensory reorientation)
-Butoh-informed principles (slowness, decomposition, transformation, non-psychological movement)
-underwater improvisation and constraint-based choreography
-poetry read through underwater speaker
-butoh scores created from dream narratives from the group of performers
These practices will be used as research tools for generating embodied material for live performance, film and installation.
Voice and text from the live underwater performance will not be audible to the audience, but for the installation of the video afterwards will be integrated as:
poetic structures
fragmented narration ritual or incantation-like elements that interact with movement rather than explain it
O F W A T E R A N D T H E S P I R I T Video Work. Part of the ‘IN-BETWEEN” Exhibition at ‘DARB 1718’ Cairo, 2025
Featuring Molly Basterfield & Gaya Rathinavelu. Directed by Molly Basterfield. Cinematography by Pavel Natarajan & Iulia Gavrilina. Edited by Ali Khaled. Music: Sit around the Fire by Jon Hopkins, Ram Dass & East Forest
'Of Water and the Spirit' portrays the act of moving in, be with, and being held by water as a form of prayer, a gateway to the celestial. To move with water is to move within the fabric of existence itself, to surrender oneself completely to what is and what will be. Through this act unfolds a gentle balance between both completely dissolving, and meeting and accepting the depths of oneself. Two female performers engage in underwater relational choreography informed by a Ram Dass text. The work investigates mirroring, dissolution of self-other boundaries, the polarity of psychological shadow and light and the tension between spoken spiritual language and embodied experience.
W A T E R W O M B Video Work. Part of the ‘IN-BETWEEN” Exhibition at ‘DARB 1718’ Cairo, 2025
Cinematography: Diana Ahudsa
Performer: Molly Basterfield
Spoken word: Molly Basterfield
A submerged solo performance accompanied by a poem exploring womb-state consciousness. The film functions as an inward, singular field of perception where movement and water generate a closed experiential system.
W A K I N G D R E A M Video Work. 2024.
Featuring Molly Basterfield. Directed by Molly Basterfield. Edited by Molly Basterfield. Cinematography by Hesham Aboul-Fetouh Music: I had a dream - East Forest
In dreams, we travel through symbols and unseen landscapes. Beneath the water, we enter that same realm—where time stretches, intuition sharpens, and movement emerges from somewhere deeper than thought.
‘Waking Dream’ explores allowing the energy of the night's dreams to continue it’s journey through the body in water, rather than being left behind upon waking, I invited the dreams energy to move, dance, unfold, and reveal itself through fluid motion beneath the surface- giving the subconscious a voice through movement.
It has become so apparent to me that the dream state, the freediving state, and the water dance state all exist within the same frequency. A softening of the boundaries of the mind. A surrender of control. A remembering of a language older than words.
More and more, I see how these states are not separate. They are all portals that help us listen to the deeper currents within ourselves.
I F I W E R E T H E W A T E R Photo series & poem. 2025
IN-BETWEEN,
Darb 1718, Cairo, Egypt, 2025.
Monthly Milk,
Patterns, Brighton, UK, 2015.
Lunga Festival,
Outdoor Exhibition, Seydisfjordur, Iceland, 2015.
Shift,
Brighton University Gallery, Brighton, UK, 2015.
University of Brighton Degree Show,
Brighton University, Brighton, UK, 2015.
After Image,
Artista Studios, Hove, UK, 2014.