I am an artist, living and working in West Wales, where I currently engage in both solo and collaborative practices, working from my studio, directly in the (Cambrian) mountains, and in the theatre. In the studio, I am currently developing an ongoing meditative and labour-intensive 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, I devise, direct and collaborate with musicians, composers, and dancers to create live, generative, experimental improvisations in response to the scientific datasets, and in the mountains – a recent work featured an embodied durational performance where I lay in a self-dug ditch for 24 hours, reciting the data emitted from a surrounding soil sensor network to global audiences via livestream video.
My deeply embodied and post-humanist practice merges art and science in a way that is both performative and meditative. My durational approach, particularly the many hours that I spend with scientific data, is a means of being present with the natural world. I am interested in being with data as ‘one would be with a friend’ suggesting that data could be seen as a ‘being’ – not a sentient, organic living being but as a data body, that can exist through different means and to different ends, and that possesses its own kind of existence and relationality. My dual practices – creating in the studio and collaborating in emergent live performance – explore how we can engage with and interpret environmental data from multiple ethico-political, material and non-representational perspectives, suggesting that I am not just processing information but also interrogating the power dynamics and environmental implications embedded in data.
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 and the Planetary Thinking: From Relations to Politics: Pathways Toward a Planetary Praxis conference at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany 2025. 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.