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Welcome to WOOD.LAND., 2021
Portraits and soundscapes from the urban woods pre-imagine a warm, woodland welcome not always extended to those from marginalised groups.
Welcome to WOOD. LAND. aims to gain access to deeper research on the emotional and social connections between ethnicity and nature, and the environmental implications of exclusion.
Drawing on forest ritual and oral traditions, Welcome to WOOD.LAND. creates conversations in nature. It challenges and re-negotiates ‘urban’ narratives, which often do not include green space.
In the woods, we bear witness to our collective experience of disenfranchisement in nature. Walking together, we welcome ourselves, and inhabit the urban woods on new terms.
Natural soprano and bass tones from bird calls, rustllng trees, scrambling squirrels, beats on hollow logs, runners on gravel, dogs in puddles, and planes rumbling overhead.
Field recordings from Highgate Wood and Queens Wood North London.
Birds, squirrels, woodland sounds and percussion of woodland runners accompany Debi Tinsley's (www.debitinsley.com) vocal performance of a deconstructed version of Maya Angelou's epic poem 'When Great Trees Fall'.
Portrait of wood walker in ‘protective’ red sculpted leather cape with orange grosgrain ribbon tie.
Intimate armour ‘fittings’ to open conversation formed part of the methodology for portraits and relational research.
Portrait of participants in organza masks
Protective cape from sculpted and fired leather offcuts is lined with vintage Japanese brocade.
Portraits of wood walkers in protective armour
Ocean Drifters, Tyler Moorehead & Lucy Papadopoulos, 2019 - 2022.
Ocean Drifters was a live sound experience that used sonic composition, real-time sound capture and embodied learning to stimulate human empathy with life at a microscopic scale.
Inspired by indigenous philosophy, Ocean Drifters was a provocation and a collective meditation that aimed to place empathy at the centre of ecology, and reconnect us to the waters from which we emerged and still need to survive.
Ocean Drifters aimed to use the transcendence of felt experience to rekindle human relationship to underwater primordial life.
Tens of thousands of marine creatures drift our ocean waves to feed and to breed. Many of these are the microscopic plankton that make up 90% of all marine life, and which form the foundation of our ecosystem.
Sonic submersion invites participants to temporarily recapture their place within the infinite ambiguity of the ancient ocean.
Ocean Drifters opened a speculative enquiry into the serious question of human impacts on marine organisms’ ocean drifting way of life. The soundscape accompanied abstract marinescapes and used an array of analog and digital sounds, including the sound of air guns and found materials in the sea, to convey the distortion of sound in ocean water.
As part of this speculation, the reflective phase of Ocean Drifters asked visitors to respect intuitive forms of knowledge, trusting their own experience of physical vibration and sound as one valid form of understanding.
Showcased at IRCAM, Paris, 2020 and included in ‘Design in an age of crisis’ selection at London Design Biennale 2021 .
EXCERPTED AUDIO: Listen to an Ocean Drifters Sample soundscape.
Ocean Drifters was designed to help visitors connect to other species as kindred spirits, in order to stand in a more humble space as fellow earth citizens and guardians.
