Nan Shepherd, in The Living Mountain, wrote that if one manages to walk out of the body and into the mountain, they might briefly become “the soil of the earth,” at which point she says, “one has been in… that is all.” And that “all,” writes Robert Macfarlane in his preface to the book, should not be heard diminutively or apologetically, but expansively—vastly. To walk out of the body and into datastreams—emitted, sensed, and extracted from peat—is, for me, a way of going ‘in’, and a way of briefly becoming the data, through which I can then briefly become the peat. It is a way of getting closer. Of being with. Of attempting to live, as Donna Haraway says, “all the way through”.
The Boggy Gassy Bubble is a drawing/sculpture in progress. Hundreds of thousands of fragmented datapoints are dispersed across the exterior skin of a large white custom-made inflatable bubble. The datapoints are from two continuous live data streams: one from a ‘remote’ agri-sensor network monitoring a degraded peatland in the Cambrian Mountains, West Wales, and the other from a ‘local’ data stream emitted from sensor probes in buckets of peat.
The work renders raw environmental data as a migratory, precarious, volatile, and delicate accumulation of marks.
The work is the result of patience, ritual and a durational attention to ecological processes and matter, digital and organic. The accumulation of inscribed digits, drawn across the bubble, reflects the accumulation of semi-decomposed matter that forms peat almost imperceptively over millennia and the accumulation of ‘big data’. By immersing myself in this labour-intensive process, I seek to embody and materialise what usually remains unseen and often overlooked.
A proximity emerges through this repetition. By converting raw data into an embodied process, the work moves beyond representation into a relational intimacy, one not defined by accuracy or analysis, but by bearing witness and “being with.” The bubble becomes an analogue archive of coexistence between a human and a peatbog; through slowness and engagement, it invites the viewer into a similar mode of attentive looking and so knowing.
