CO2RE Artists: Miranda Whall
When Peat Speaks
When Peat Speaks is a multi-modal, interdisciplinary project centred on the GGR-Peat Demonstrator Project at Pwllpeiran Upland Research Centre, Aberystwyth University.
In collaboration with Professor Mariecia Fraser and the Pwllpeiran team, artist Miranda Whall will utilise datasets from instrumentation installed across 32 plots on a degraded peatland to create drawings, paintings, sculptures, and both solo and collaborative performances.
When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Cloudy Performance will be a solo, 24-hour live-streamed expanded drawing performance staged on the peat bog deep within the Cambrian Mountains. When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Ensemble will be a collaborative performance on the same site, featuring an ensemble of international experimental musicians and a Butoh dancer, immersing a live audience in the landscape.
The works hopes to engage audiences with the cultural and ecological significance of peatland, foster a deeper understanding of Green House Gas Removal and offer a post-human perspective and connection to the Cambrian Mountains. The project will run from May 2025 to July 2026.
Images: Boggy Cloud in progress, April 2025. Photos by Ash Calvert
About the Artist - Miranda Whall
Miranda Whall is a visual artist living and working in West Wales. Whall works from her studio, in the field (the Cambrian Mountains), and in the theatre.
In the studio, she engages in a durational and expanded drawing, painting and sculpture practice which present the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of 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, Whall invites musicians, composers, and dancers to collaborate in live, generative, experimental improvisations in response to scientific data. And, in the mountains, she stages embodied durational solo performances. Whall’s practice, which resides at the intersection of art and science, evolves intuitively, generating research interests within the realms of post-humanism, new materialism, and multispecies studies.
She approaches environmental data from material, non-representational, and ethico-political perspectives to engage with the complex interrelationships between nature, scientific data, and human experience. By integrating a data feminist perspective, she aims to inspire more equitable and sustainable interactions with data and the more-than-human world, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationships with environmental data, and to foster a more nuanced engagement with ecological challenges.
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Image: Miranda Whall, digging a ditch for Soil Voices 2023. Photo artist’s own.