Going through old work is always interesting one it’s like excavation. It reminds me that of the many ways in which I work. For example creatively for me is to explore different environments or spaces through bringing different experiences to highlight change. Whether that is bringing the sound of boots to what are now “peaceful” (very much quoting there because I don’t believe in such things) historic mining valleys and encouraging loud walking or just performing a train that will never come as the line was ripped out with my breath alone. Sometimes beneath is the inevitable of past, nostalgia and loss.
I encourage those around me to listen, sense, exist me as a defiant act of being. To care. To be. To understand. To exist.
Above is pictured one of my many birdsong teapots. It is one of my favourite pieces because I always had sound recordings of the Dyfi Valley forests playing but always got a new teapot given to me by whoever was hosting me. The one above is the one Nerea in the Basque Country gave me she kept laughing at how comical it was in an exhibition space. Glaring out refusing to sit in the lines. From shelf to contemporary art. Shared tea and equally bizarre teapots. It became one of the many story telling devices that I used or one the valley told of itself. People would often walk around with them holding the handle and just listening. Playing it helps guide the gentle salve of experiencing life.
I always have many sound recordings of the natural world chipped next to the sound of people speaking smaller languages about fields and nature. I’m not sure when I started or why but there is now an archive of voices and spaces of places and people I won’t see again in my heart and in field recordings too.
When I took this work to different islands it had a profound effect. It told the story of the poetics of space and history, one person in Skye clasped the headphones tightly , “I don’t normally hear a forest of birds I guess that’s what used to be here, I do love the seabirds too though. I feel that though. I really feel that. “
The act of sensory listening and clywed is integral to my work. Imagining the past and future as one where only language and the palimpsest of deep ecologies hit the personal movement. Always with others telling me their stories of places and life. Always with wildlife and moments in time. I’m constantly editing time as if it just slips out from me.
Recently I had a long conversation with a friend Sarah who as a conservationist brought a little more light to the profound responses to the teapot by explaining the Shifting Baseline which is the gradual change and erosion of our natural world that is accepted across generations. The act of understanding it is to change our own perception to it.
The act of witnessing is experience. Experience makes us, us and more ready to act. To protect our habitats, natural worlds and communities.
Naomi Heath 