The Boggy Gassy Clouds are a series of 31 pin-pricked drawings on Japanese paper (21.5cm x 26.5cm). Each drawing translates one day of a continuous data stream from an agri-sensor network monitoring a degraded peatland in the Cambrian Mountains, West Wales. Each drawing consists of 5,376 pin pricks, each representing a single digit of a seven-digit datapoint from 8 sensors.
The work visibilises raw environmental data as clouds: amorphous, delicate accumulations of holes. This is a critique of the digital “cloud,” a metaphor that suggests something light, transient, and ethereal, while the actual infrastructure of the digital cloud is heavy, static, and environmentally damaging.
The work is the result of patience, ritual and a durational attention to ecological processes and matter; digital and organic. The accumulation of digits, and pricks, 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 clouds 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.
In the Assembly Room…Spring 2026
All Photo’s by Ash Calvert, 2026