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 Bubbles are a series of large, white, custom-made inflatables designed for the Boggy Gassy Bubbly Ensemble performance, to be staged on the degraded peatland in the Cambrian Mountains in May 2026.
These ‘talking’ bubbles serve as architectural signposts within the peatland landscape, containing the performance, drawing the audience in and creating a space for connection with the performers. Each bubble houses a live ‘local’ data stream – measuring peat moisture, temperature, methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), and air humidity, sensed by probes inserted into turves of peat in buckets placed within each bubble.
The bubbles are a physical manifestation of the “gaseous” nature of the raw environmental data. As expansive, transient volumes, they visibilise the invisible emissions of the bog, turning environmental data into an architectural presence. They act as temporary membranes between the human observer and the ecological processes of the peat.
This performance is the culmination of a durational attention to ecological processes. By moving the data from the studio and the archive back into the landscape, the work seeks to create a live, relational encounter between the audience, the performers, and the bog.
If the drawings and sculptures are archives of coexistence, the Ensemble is the act of coexistence in real-time. It is an invitation to step ‘out of the body and into the data’, to experience the ‘being with’ not as a record, but as a living, breathing presence.
In the Assembly Room…Spring 2026
Photos by Miranda Whall, 2026