Lillygol and Cory in Residence at Promenade Exchange

Lilly and Corrie stayed over 3 weeks in September 2026 at the Promenade Exchange. Here is what they say:

‘We woke up every morning to the deep blue of the sea. Sometimes the sun would shine, sometimes the clouds cast a light gray, but everyday was an opportunity to read, explore, experiment, and learn.

The Promenade Artist Residency offered us an incredible library and experimental kitchen space. We spent the mornings pulling books off the shelves and reading, learning about Robert Long’s walking journeys through the British countryside, Susan Derges’s moonlight experiments with light-sensitive paper in the River Taw, herman de vries’s collection of 6,000 earth samples and his rewilding efforts in the Netherlands.

Then we began to experiment. We knew Portobello was once an area where salt was produced from the sea, so we made our way to the Joppa salt pans and spent time exploring the geology and intertidal area, discovering a rich array of broken blue shells and green sea glass and rocks of all shapes and sizes and colors. These moments felt like the happiest ones–crouching over the shore, discovering treasures from Earth’s long and layered history.

Originally, we had come to Scotland because Cory was pursuing a master’s degree in Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Following his year entrenched in Tibetan texts and Buddhist concepts, we came across the idea of transience, a recognition of the temporariness of all things. What if, he thought, we could combine the Buddhist notion of transience with the historical salt production from the sea? An idea was born. We would create a Japanese-inspired rock garden along the tidal zone with salt distilled from the sea, and then watch as the ocean reclaimed the salt we’d come to borrow from it.

For two weeks, we collected seawater and distilled it, pot by pot, into salt. The kitchen table became an ideas space, where we played with color and form and broke down chunks of salt into tiny grains.

On our final day, we walked out to the sea, and built the installation at low tide. Over two hours, we stood and watched as the water drew closer and closer, its own movements pulled by a celestial body of olivine basalt. And then, within a matter of moments, the ocean reclaimed the salt and the stones.

The residency was a wonderful period in our lives–we grew, we created, and we recognized how one day, we too will return to the sea.

Lillygol Sedaghat and Cory Howell Hamada are a multimedia storytelling team exploring ideas about people, place, and cultural heritage. Lilly loves Taiwanese boba milk tea and Cory’s favorite chippy in Edinburgh is L’Alba D’Oro.