Equipped with binaural microphones and a voice mic, artist, pedestrian and writer Bram Thomas Arnold has recorded a series of walks taken during lockdown. Using a mixture of found sound, field recordings, ambient music, archive footage and spoken word, these recordings explore the art and ecology of Cornish landscapes and act as a structural framework to explore research into his current project Transecting the Lizard: Field Station.

Field Station is a proposal being developed by Bram with the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter. It aims to be a mobile field laboratory developing a new space for transdisciplinary research between and amongst the arts and sciences live in the field. A mobile field vehicle equipped with the necessary equipment to undertake baseline eco-logical surveys using both arts and scientific modes of thinking, over time blending and creating new forms of understanding that blur the disciplinary lines between ecology, art and place. This trilogy of shows operate as part of the research and development stage of the proposal.

Split into three individual episodes, you can listen to all of them below. You can also hear them on Resonance FM throughout August 2020.

Episode 1

After Ant Farm / The Struggle for Utopia

Episode 1 uses the exhibition catalogue of Hippie Modernism at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis in 2016, to explore mobile forms of creative production.

Episode 2

Hedgerows

In Episode 2, with community action group Wildlife Groundswell on the Lizard, Bram completes a Hedgerow Importance Test, asking what is the value of biodiversity and how can we hold onto it in these ecologically fragmenting times?

Episode 3

Deep Adaptation

Episode 3 takes as its root the questions posited by Professor Jem Bendell’s virally distributed paper Deep Adaptation, which asks us to consider what we can relinquish, what we can restore and what can we make resilient in these times of ecological collapse.

Supported by Arts and Culture, University of Exeter.