When Peat Speaks
Nan Shepherd was strikingly prescient in her understanding of our relationship with the landscape. In her meditative and visionary book written in 1940s, The Living Mountain, she suggests 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 a data-stream – 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”.
A Boggy Gassy Cloud (In the Air) Summer 2025
When Peat Speaks is an interdisciplinary, multi-species project. It is a collection of works in progress, developed through performance, sculpture, film, and expanded drawing, each the result of patience, endurance, ritual, and a durational attention to ecological processes and matter – both digital and organic. The work is developing through an accumulation of pin-pricking, hole-punching, mark-making, writing, cutting and rolling; these processes reflect both the layering of organic matter over millennia to form peat, and the vast, invisible accumulation of digits that comprise ‘big data.’ Immersing myself in these labour-intensive processes, and in the digital measures of temperature, moisture, humidity, air, and gas, is my way of being attentive; of being present, proximate, and intimate with peat. I seek to embody the slow time of a bog, to materialise the fragility of a degraded ecosystem and to intervene, momentarily, in a continuous environmental data-stream – generated by a soil sensor network installed on a peatland in the Cambrian Mountains, West Wales.
A proximity emerges through repetition. By converting raw environmental data, the assigned ‘voice’ of the non-human, into an embodied process, the work moves beyond representation into a relational intimacy. This is a mode of “being with” that rejects the extractivist and colonial nature of data generation, storage, and analysis, and challenges the metaphor of the weightless “digital cloud” by grounding data in the physical, the material, the temporal and the spatial. I do not extract or construct a narrative from the data; instead, I choose, perhaps radically, “merely to be with the data.. as one visits a friend, with no intention other than to be with it”, just as Nan Shepherd described visiting her beloved Cairngorm mountain plateau. I spend time in the wildness of data, where it is raw and malleable, before it is processed and analysed. Numerical data is a rich resource with which I can explore the aesthetic and formal questions central to art practice, such as weight, volume, space, light, movement, mark and form.
These works form an analogue archive of a coexistence between a human, data and a peatbog. Through slowness and engagement, they invite the viewer to “walk out of the body – into the data – and then into the peatbog,” entering a mode of attentive looking where data is stripped of its role as a quantitative metric and reclaimed as a material with its own potential. Ultimately, I hope that the work offers a visceral aesthetic encounter – with data and with the peatland, somehow collapsing the distance between the digital cloud and the degraded bog.
When Peat Speaks has been funded by CO2RE – The Greenhouse Gas Removal Hub, Oxford University, Rural Futures Hub and The Worlds We Want Hub, Aberystwyth University. The project ran from May 2025 – June 2026.
The commission formed part of the UK’s national research hub for Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR), part of a broader £30 million initiative funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The creative initiative within the hub was supported by a flexible fund of £150,000 from which seven grants were awarded to 7 arts projects.
I have worked with the UKRI GGR Peat Demonstrator Project, one of five interdisciplinary GGR demonstrators funded by UKRI and CO2RE. My focus was on the Pwllpeiran Research Upland Centre at Aberystwyth University, which was one of the three key sites within the GGR-Peat initiative.
The project was developed in consultation with Professor Mariecia Fraser and the team at Pwllpeiran. The work incorporated datasets reading methane (CH4), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), temperature and moisture levels, and air humidity gathered from a ‘remote’ soil sensor network, from ‘local’ sensors inserted into turves of peat in buckets, and from 8 high-resolution soil sensors installed on the peatbog, and chambers installed on 32 treatment plots (20m x 20m each) from 2023 – 2024. The 8 ‘Talkie Boxes’ that formed a central part of the project were designed and made by Dr Neal Snooke, Abersytwyth University Computer Science Dept, following the original prototype designed and made by Dr Pete Todd, Aberystwyth University.
With special thanks to Prof Mariecia Fraser, Dr Fred Labrosse, Dr Neal Snooke, Prof Andrew Thomas, Dr Pete Todd, and the staff at Pwllpeiran Upland Research Centre, Ashley Calvert and Lilly Tiger.