Multi-media installations
Undercurrents. A multi-media installation celebrating the River Allen, Dorset, presented at Walford Mill, Wimborne, during September 2021.
Glow Badbury. This was a major multi-media event that took place in Badbury Rings Iron Age hillfort, which is situated near Wimborne in Dorset, in 2023. The project was conceived and delivered by the Dorset arts organisation Emerald Ant. It culminated in a night time event that featured four illuminated artworks, some of which were live performances while others were projected, created by artists working with local schools and community groups over four months. All artworks celebrated the unique wildlife and human history of the hillfort. My role was to create the soundtrack to an animated film, describing the history of the site, which was created by local schoolchildren. A series of workshops with local children were held to create the material for the soundtrack; the workshops were led by Karen Wimhurst. I also created a ‘glow worm trail’ near the entrance to the event; this involved playing sound recordings of different species found at the Rings using a multi-speaker array hidden along the trail. The trail was lit by LED lights, constructed to look like glow worms. A film celebrating the event is available here.
Sacred groves. In many cultures, sacred forests or groves of trees are places of transformation. As Albertina Nugteren said: “In many sacred geographies, the botanical continues to connect the present with the past, the material with the symbolic, and the contemporary ecological with the traditionally sacred”. These installations represent an attempt to create sacred groves for the 21st century, made from the rejectamenta of modern society, to encourage a transformation of our way of life. Each of these was a collaborative project with maker, Lynn Davy.
Other recent projects exploring our relationship with trees include All Trees are Clocks and Heartwood 2014 / 2017.
Two additional explorations of creating sacred groves through use of sound were developed at the Dartington International Summer School in 2017: ‘Taxus timeline‘ and ‘I was sitting under a tree‘. In the first of these, a multi-speaker array was hidden within a hedge of yew (Taxus baccata) and used to disseminate a soundscape characteristic of the location. The second piece took as its starting point the famous composition by Alvin Lucier, ‘I was sitting in a room‘. This involves recording a person saying ‘I was sitting in a room’, then playing back the sound and repeatedly re-recording it, until all is left is the resonant sound of the space. This was adapted to explore the resonant characteristics of the ancient yew that grows in the churchyard at Dartington Hall.
