I am an artist, living and working in West Wales, where I currently engage in both solo and collaborative practices, working from my studio, in the Cambrian mountains and in the theatre. In the studio, I pursue an ongoing meditative and labour-intensive practice – building a series of durational drawings and sculptures, which are the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of data points derived from scientific studies on natural phenomena such as soil, seeds, and peat. On stage and in the mountains, I devise, direct and collaborate with musicians, composers, and dancers to create live, generative, experimental improvisations in response to the scientific datasets.
Earth, Seed, Peat: A Trilogy is a recent and ongoing triptych of interdisciplinary projects developed through performance, sculpture, film, and expanded drawing. These works result from a durational attention to ecological processes and matter, both digital and organic. Through an accumulation of pin-pricking, mark-making, rolling, hole-punching, and cutting, the processes reflect the granularity of soil, the cellular composition of seeds, and the layering of peat, while mirroring the invisible accumulation of ‘big data.’
Immersing myself in these labour-intensive processes and digital measures of the landscape; temperature, moisture, humidity, and gas, is my way of being intimate with these material ecologies, and to embody the divergent timescales of the earth, from the dormant potential of a seed to the deep-time memory of a bog. By converting raw environmental data into embodied processes, the work moves beyond representation into a relational intimacy. This mode of ‘being with’ rejects the extractivist nature of data generation, grounding the weightless ‘digital cloud’ in the physical and temporal. I do not extract a narrative; instead, I choose “merely to be with the data”.
In this raw, malleable state, numerical data becomes a resource to explore formal questions central to art practice; weight, volume, light, and mark for example. By translating these digital values into physical gestures, mark-making and sculptural forms, I create analogue archives of the coexistence between human, data, soil, seed, and peat. Through slowness, the works invite the viewer to walk out of the body and into the data, where quantitative metrics are reclaimed as material. Ultimately, the work offers a visceral aesthetic encounter: data as a matter that matters.
Bio:
Miranda Whall (b. Cardiff, 1969) studied at UWIC Cardiff; Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver; the Royal Academy Schools; and Goldsmiths, University of London. Whall has received numerous Arts Council England grants, including the ACE-funded Berlin residency, and was awarded a Major Creative Wales Award and Large Production Grant from Arts Council Wales. Whall is currently the recipient of a creative commission from UKRI CO2RE – Greenhouse Gas Removal Hub, Oxford University 2025 – 2026 for When Peat Speaks (2025–26). In 2024, she was awarded the inaugural Live Art Rural UK Fellowship by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). Whall has been a co-investigator on several recent NERC-funded cross-disciplinary projects and works at the intersection of performance, expanded drawing, film and environmental science. She is the director and performer of two recent stage productions When Seeds Speak: A Seedy Ensemble, Seligman Theatre, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff 2024, and When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble, Aberystwyth Arts Centre 2024. Notable and recent solo exhibitions include When Earth Speaks, Vane, Newcastle 2024, Crossed Paths – Sheep, Oriel Davies, Newtown, and Passage, Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, Bath. She was recently included in the groundbreaking exhibition Soil: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House, London 2024, and is exhibiting in The Trinity Bouy Wharf Drawing Prize, London 2025, touring until 2026. Whall was the keynote speaker for Digital Ecologies III; Machine/Material/Land at Bath Spa University, Bath 2025, presenter at TBWD Drawing our Worlds Symposium, London, 2025, the Planetary Thinking: From Relations to Politics: Pathways Toward a Planetary Praxis Conference at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, 2025, presenter at IUCN Peatlands Under Pressure Conference, Swansea University, 2026, Finding Common Ground: An Interdisciplinary Soil Symposium on Soil, Sheffield Hallam University 2026. Whall is currently a postgraduate and PhD research supervisor and lecturer in Fine Art at Aberystwyth University, a creative coach, and mentor for Arts Council Wales.