Miranda Whall
I am a visual artist living and working in West Wales, where I currently engage in both solo and collaborative practices. I work from my studio, in the field (the Cambrian Mountains), and in the theatre. In the studio, I am engaged in an ongoing meditative and labour-intensive practice of durational drawing – drawings which present the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of written or pin-pricked data points derived from environmental scientific studies on the impact of climate change on natural phenomena such as soil, seeds, peat bogs, and glaciers. In the theatre, I invite musicians, composers, and dancers to collaborate in live, generative, experimental improvisations in response to scientific data. And recently, in the mountains, I staged an embodied durational performance where I lay in a self-dug ditch for 24 hours, reciting the live data stream emitted from a surrounding soil sensor network to global audiences via livestream video.
My practice evolves intuitively, generating research interests within the realms of post-humanism, new materialism, and multispecies studies. I approach environmental data from material, non-representational, and ethico-political perspectives using visual art, music, and dance to engage with the complex interrelationships between nature, scientific data, and human experience. I reflect on the disparity between the rapid generation of data and the slow pace of policy and behavioural change and consider the environmental and resource impacts of generating, processing and storing data. By integrating a data feminist perspective, I aim to inspire more equitable and sustainable interactions with both data and the natural world, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationships with environmental data and fostering a more nuanced engagement with ecological challenges.
My ongoing multi-modal project, When Earth Speaks 2024 draws upon a live data stream generated by a long-range, high-resolution soil sensor network installed in the Cambrian Mountains, Mid Wales, on the Elenydd plateau, known as the Ffridd (the upland fringe), approximately 600 meters above sea level. I was invited to develop the project in response to a NERC-funded cross-disciplinary research initiative titled Making the Invisible Visible: Instrumenting and Interpreting an Upland Landscape for Climate Change Resilience, led by Prof. Mariecia Fraser from the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS), Aberystwyth University.
My response to the scientific study has taken the form of a series of durational and expanded drawings, an immersive and emergent collaborative live performance, a site-specific solo performance, sonic/audio and film commissions—each inviting the maker, performers, and audience to engage with the data in its dynamic, temporal, and material vitality. In each of these responses, I suggest that we hang out with the data, akin to how Nan Shepherd describes her experience of hanging out with a mountain in her book The Living Mountain. Shepherd writes that she wants ‘to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’.1 Her approach emphasises a deep, attentive presence and values the act of being with rather than conquering or understanding.
As I hang out with scientific data through drawing and performance, I transform it into something wild and untamed—a raw, dirty material no longer fit for conventional analysis, littered with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. But, through my creative rendering it becomes matter, a substance that can be reshaped into something new—into a being, a data being. To borrow from Jane Bennett’s A Political Ecology of Things, the data is transformed into ‘matter that is active and alive, and that has a kind of agency’, ‘not inert or passively awaiting human use, but instead as a lively participant in the world, with tendencies, propensities, or trajectories of its own.’2 Jane Bennett’s idea suggests that materials, in this case data, could possess a vitality and agency that might allow it to become something beyond mere numbers—an entity or being with its own presence and potential.
If we consider raw, unrefined quantitative data as a being—not as a sentient, organic entity like a mountain, but as a data body with its own materiality, existence, and relationality—we can learn to coexist with it. By adopting an alternative, entangled relationship with data that transcends the typical means-to-an-end dynamic, we open ourselves to a richer understanding of its potential. This perspective invites us to view data not merely as information but as a material species with intrinsic qualities and agency with which we can build a co-creative relationship.
My drawings, which accumulate over time, store and archive thousands of digits inscribed onto paper over hundreds of hours. As the data settles layer upon layer, it becomes naturally impenetrable and indecipherable, resembling the gradual formation of geologies over millennia. The drawings take on an abstract beauty, with individual digits beginning to resemble the granularity of decomposed organic matter, generating a striking visual reference to soil. In these drawings and in the performances, the data possesses an inner life and vibrancy—a naturalness.
With the idea of spending time with data beings, non-human entities, in mind, I have recently begun to see myself as a shepherd(ess). Much like a shepherd herds their animals, I herd the data points—the entity—across the paper, stage, soundscape or livestream. I hold an image I recently witnessed in Rajasthan, India, of a shepherd sitting on his haunches, his white cotton robes tucked into his thighs and a cloth wrapped around his head. It was sunrise; he appeared as a small distant figure from where I stood on a sandy ridge. The low undulating hills rolled into the distance beyond him as he sat alone, silently watching his small herd of water buffalo grazing listlessly in the red sandy scrubland. He moved only to follow when they wandered too far or veered off course. I became curious about what prompted the shepherd to move. I wondered when he or the buffalo would feel they had lost connection. I was fascinated by the invisible thread that seemed to bind them, a connection of awareness and intuition. Like the shepherd and his water buffalo, I experience an invisible connection to the data being. And as I drift in and out of consciousness while transcribing or reciting the datapoints, I am uncertain whether the data being finds me, or I find it, to draw us both back into awareness.
When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble, an experimental improvised performance funded by LADA, Live Art Development Agency’s Live Art in Rural UK one-year programme, premiered in the Theatr yr Werin, Aberystwyth Arts Centre in June 2024. The performance featured Neil Luck (percussion), Mayah Kadish (violin) Angela Wai-Nok Hui (percussion), Tim Beckham (guitar), Ashley John Long (double bass), Constance Humphries (Butoh dance) and myself (performative drawing). The performance also included non-human performers, such as the mountain itself (a turve), a data being, and robotics (xylophone). Each of the 12 sensors in the network installed on the Elenydd plateau sent a datapoint live from the Cambrian mountains directly into the theatre every fifteen minutes, offering the performers and audience a unique real-time interaction with the soil approximately 10cm below the surface of a remote upland landscape. The data was channelled through a pre-recorded composite voice—a synthesis of all the performers’ voices merged into a single, layered data voice-data being.
The emergent performance unfolded in real-time as the musicians and Butoh dancer responded to the upland landscape, each other, and the fluctuating patterns of the data stream communicated via the data being. The performance reflected the shifting rhythms of the earth and the intricate soil ecosystem—interrelating micro- and macro-organisms, air, water, minerals, and organic matter. In my role as shepherd, I introduced a non-expressive, stabilising human vocal recall of datapoints, intermittently intercepting the sonic and somatic responses as they flew wildly, and wilfully back and forth across the stage. The musicians, like subterranean organisms, adapted and led each other through real-time shifts in tone, texture, and timbre, using micro-gestures, feedback loops, decay, and harmonics to bring forth a constantly evolving unpredictable soundscape. The vitality of the data and the earth itself seemed to resonate in the agitated, unsettled scraping, tapping, banging, bowing, scratching, rattling, and rubbing, as the musicians incorporated stones, leaves, and other objets trouvés, placing them between strings, across drum skins, between fingers, and into their mouths. Breath and vocalisations sometimes blurred the line between musician and instrument, embodying the pulse and presence of the landscape itself. The Butoh dancer fully embodied the sonic journey, interpreting the landscape and the essence of the earth, through both subtle and expansive movements. Her micro and macro gestures—writhing, wriggling, crawling, contorting, and stretching—interwove with the musicians and their paraphernalia, as if the earth itself was animating her form.
The scenography featured white metal furniture, a recurring element from previous iterations that has become a constant in my performances. The musicians wore head torches, sunglasses, and black boiler suits. The Butoh dancer appeared in a white boiler suit, with her face painted white – her lips and mouth appeared dark and cavernous as though a portal into the underworld – drawing a connection to a realm beyond the immediate, material world. The lighting moved from a dim glow to complete darkness, as the head torches cast shifting beams across the stage, intermittently illuminating the dancer, caught as if entangled within a mycorrhizal web.
The embodied earth and disembodied data seemed to coalesce momentarily on the stage. The fluid visceral sonic matter met with the authorial voice of the data being, to create a dynamic tension. Together, they seemed to form a co-creative, interdependent relationship, each influencing the rhythm and flow of the other, as if the earth’s pulse and the data’s cadence were in constant dialogue.
When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble embodies my pursuit of an alternative, co-creative relationship with environmental data, one that acknowledges it as active matter and a potent, communicative presence rather than numbers that are meaningless to anyone outside of the scientific study. By engaging with data in this way—through visual art and performance—I invite others to share in an experience of data not as a static resource but as a vital participant in the ongoing narrative of ecological interconnectedness. The drawing practice and performance challenge us to reconsider our own roles, asking whether we might see ourselves not as masters of data but as collaborators and caretakers, participating in a shared dialogue that honours the agency and dynamism inherent in our environment. Through this work, I hope to inspire a re-envisioning of our interactions with data and the natural world as reciprocal, adaptive, and richly entangled—an invitation to truly be with the earth and its many voices.
The project was conceived through a NERC funded cross-disciplinary research project: Making the invisible visible: Instrumenting and interpreting an upland landscape for climate change resilience led by Prof Mariecia Fraser from IBERS, Aberystwyth University, and developed through a subsequent NERC funded cross disciplinary research project: Multispecies Politics in Action led by Prof Milja Kurki, Interpol, Aberystwyth University. When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble was funded by LADA, Live Arts Development Agency’s Live Art in Rural UK, and Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
https://www.mirandawhall.space/when-earth-speaks/
https://www.mirandawhall.space/the-dirty-performance/
https://www.mirandawhall.space/the-dirty-film/
Miranda Whall was born in Cardiff, UK. She attended the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, Emily Carr School of Art Vancouver, Canada, The Royal Academy Schools London, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has been the recipient of numerous Arts Council England grants and the ACE-funded Berlin residency. She was awarded an Arts Council Wales Major Creative Wales Award and an ACW Large Production Grant. She was recently the recipient of the inaugural Live Art Rural UK fellowship with Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and is currently a recipient of a large grant from UKRI CO2RE – D Green House Gas Removal Hub.Whall has been a co-investigator in several recent UKRI NERC-funded projects. Whall has recently directed and performed two stage productions – When Seeds Speak; A Seedy Ensemble for the Seligman Theatre, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales and When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, When Peat Speaks; A Boggy Ensemble will be performed in August/September 2025. Solo exhibitions include When Earth Speaks, Vane, Newcastle, Crossed Paths – Sheep, Oriel Davies, Newtown, Passage, Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art, Bath, Is it ok if? Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Crossed Paths – Scots Pine is in the Art Collection, Carlow, Ireland. Whall has exhibited internationally for over 20 years for example at BALTIC Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Site Gallery, Sheffield, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Charlie Smith Gallery, London, Torrance Art Museum, California, Galerie Schuster, Berlin, and the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Lithuania. She is currently a postgraduate and PhD research supervisor and lecturer at Aberystwyth University. Up and coming exhibitions include Soil; The World At Our Feet for Somerset House in Jan – April 2025, a landmark exhibition examining the role soil plays in all our lives, co-curated by the Land Gardiners; Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy, curator and writer May Rosenthal and Claire Catterall, Senior Curator at Somerset House Trust.
