The Boggy Gassy Drawing (in progress) is an intensely laborious process work. Using a Rotring pen, hundreds of thousands of datapoints are written in ink, accumulating across the surface of a 161 x 106 cm piece of paper. The drawing archives datasets of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels gathered from chambers across 32 treatment plots (20m x 20m each), installed from 2023–2024 on the ‘cinderella’ degraded peatland in the Cambrian Mountains, West Wales.
The drawing, its materiality, and its making become a medium and method for attuning to the deep time of ecosystems, placing time not only at the centre, but as a material in itself. The work visibilises the tension between the immense scale of “big data” and the slow, granular nature of the peat.
The work is the result of patience, ritual, and a durational attention to ecological processes and matter, both digital and organic. The accumulation of digits reflects the accumulation of semi-decomposed matter that forms peat almost imperceptibly over millennia. By immersing myself in this labour-intensive process, I seek to embody and materialise what usually remains unseen and 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 drawing 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 a different way of knowing.
In the Assembly Room…Spring 2026
In the studio… Winter 2026
All photos by Ash Calvert 2026