Where dose sustainability show in my work?

As mentioned in my previous blog posts and throughout my academic and sonic work, sustainability has been at the heart of everything I do. Growing up in the Dorset countryside I was lucky enough to live a very slow-paced life in which every field, hilltop or stream was the perfect place to build a den and every bird, animal and insect was a cause of fascination that would last for hours. This isolation in ‘nature’ itself, I believe prompted my questions of why throughout my adult life. Each stage I started to understand more and more the effect of my people and my kind have on the very things I was so fascinated with as a little girl. Naturally from this, once I was put in a university setting and handed the tools to express my curiosity and question, I fell into sustainability and ecological practices such as environmental field recording.

The themes of sustainability are prevalent in the majority of my works. Most recently in my booklet ‘a methodology to collaborate with the more-than-human’, where I created my own wildflower seed paper made out of scraps that I scavenged from recycling bins wherever I could find them, to wanting to create a more sustainably mentality within the practice of field recording and push for an ethical sonic future between recordist and more-than-human collaborator.

 Another work ‘Reciprocity Leads the Heart Through Death’ utilizes and documents the changing of the seasons through foraged items to create elixirs, tinctures and teas, that highlight alternative forms for documentation that have no use of consumeristic and unsustainable unethical recording equipment.

 A sister project of this, ‘Forever Landscape,’ soundscapes the exact spot in which I will be buried through a tree pod burial. It encourages the notion of sustainable deaths and graveyards where bodies are buried in a seed pod which eventually turns into a tree, forever giving back and rewilding our lands once again. The actual installation of ‘Forever Landscape’ was created out of completely foraged materials which were then given back to the land or reused in other exhibitions.

Another project ‘The Sound of Quality’, highlights the poor quality of soil health around southeast England up to the north of Wales, where parks, gardens, forests, fields and community gardens are assessed to understand which soil sounds the healthiest. This project was meant to carry on to understand how different farming methods contribute to a happier and healthier soil to gain the awareness of our broken food system but due to other university work I have yet to follow through. This will be something that I will carry on in the following years.

Through my set design, I focus on sustainable practices once again where I ethically forage the majority of my materials where I can. I choose to work with the seasons which means that nothing has to be shipped, bought or manufactured. Throughout the next chapters of my career I will continue to focus my practice around sustainability and sustainable approaches.