When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble by Miranda Whall, film stills from the film by Amy Daniel, 2024

When Earth Speaks: Miranda Whall on Drawing, Performance Data and Gentle Activism

This month’s interview with Miranda Whall, based in Wales (UK), was conducted by fellow ecoartspace member and performance artist Colette Copeland (TX, US). 

Whall studied at UWIC Cardiff, Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, the Royal Academy Schools, and Goldsmiths, University of London, and was 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. 

Her work was included in the groundbreaking exhibition Soil: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House, London early in 2024, work that is also featured in the current ecoartspace publication Soils Turn. Whall is a postgraduate and PhD research supervisor and lecturer in Fine Art at Aberystwyth University, a creative coach, and mentor for Arts Council Wales.

When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble by Miranda Whall, photos by Ashley Calvert, 2024

CC: Miranda, there is so much to unpack with your work. While it is very complex your website beautifully clarifies your concepts and process. As I reflect, a few threads recur: collaboration with humans and other-than-humans, embodiment—embodying process, embodying data, embodying what cannot be seen, the role of the artist as a witness and as you eloquently described in one article “gentle activism.”

Let’s begin with collaboration. In your performance works, you collaborate with scientists, filmmakers, dancers and musicians, but also with other-than-humans who inhabit the land. You’ve collaborated with trees in your crawling performances. In the series When Peat Speaks, When Earth Speaks and When Seeds Speak, you collaborate directly with all the living aspects in the environment. Data is also a key component in these works.

How do you approach collaborating with non-sentient beings such as data and how do you negotiate that relationship in your spoken word performances and durational drawings? 

MW: Thank you Colette for your generous and layered questions, it is a great pleasure and privilege to spend time answering them. In my recent and current work, I am attempting a non-anthropocentric, non-sentimental, post-humanist approach, and so there is purposefully no direct influence running in either direction, between me and the data, and no decision-making based on what the data is actually conveying. I am not translating the data, adjusting my drawing, composition, or musicality in response to it. And I am not interpreting it or aestheticizing it. Similarly, the data is not communicating, responding, or negotiating with me. The data and I, and the musicians and dancers, simply coexist. I ask the collaborators to think about the material ecology the soil, seed, or peat, but not about the data per se. My drawings, sculptures, and performances unfold through their own internal logic, and the data unfolds through its own internal logic. Neither bends toward the other. They meet only because they occur in the same temporal and spatial field. What is shared is time, not meaning, and an appreciation of that fact that we don’t understand each other. We are like parallel systems, or, as I like to think of it, like friends who are comfortable enough to coexist in silence.

This way of being together establishes a deliberately matter-of-fact relationship rather than an expressive or interpretive one. I am interested in a refusal to translate, a refusal to respond, and a refusal to represent. The data is allowed to remain data, and I am allowed to remain human, and we encounter each other and the gap between us. I am drawn to the illegibility and impenetrability of vast numerical fields; their opacity and strangeness are part of the data’s presence. I see other artwork with data leaning towards anthropomorphizing, where it is treated as if it has intention, character, or narrative, in my thinking—this can be left to the scientists. What I am interested in is a non-anthropomorphic empathy: staying with what is strange about it, and problematic with it, and so ‘staying with its trouble’.

Translation, where it might happen momentarily, for example in the collaborative performances, is without sentimentality; this is why I work with improv musicians rather than composers and interpretive, or score-based musicians. Patterns in the data stream might be followed; errors and absences might be noticed, but they simply prompt improvisation that moves quickly on. The musicians and dancers do not attempt to sonify, translate, mirror, or respond to the data itself. The performers are not improvising to it, synchronizing with it, or using it as a score. Their actions unfold according to their own internal logics, durations, and constraints, just as the drawings do. Instead, sound, movement, drawing, and data occupy the same temporal field in a kind of non-negotiable way. They run alongside each other as independent systems, co-present but non-interactive. The ‘ensemble’ is therefore not built on dialogue or responsiveness, but on simultaneity and coexistence.

Underlying this approach is a shift from using data to being-with data. I treat it both as raw material and as a co-presence: a non–sentient being whose behavior I spend time with and witness. My role shifts from author to mediator, or caretaker of a material that simply keeps being generated.

A Boggy Gassy Cloud: Jumping in progress by Miranda Whall, photo by Ashley Calvert, 2025

CC: Your body is always active in the durational data drawings and in spoken word performances, live and on film. Many artists visualize data; you embody it to cultivate environmental awareness and empathy.

Could you walk us through your preparation—somatic, cognitive, and technical for your durational work? How do endurance and concept inform one another in your practice? When does time become a method, and when does it become the material? 

MW: My preparation for durational work is practical and rather mundane. I don’t do somatic or cognitive warm-ups in a performance sense. Instead, I make sure I have set the right conditions: that I have enough time, and that I have all the right equipment, tools, and materials to enable me to step into the temporal and spatial field, a bit like preparing for a long walk into the mountains.

In the Boggy Gassy Drawing I have just finished, where I inscribed half a million digits in ink onto a 152 × 101 cm sheet of paper. I set myself the task of writing in increments of one thousand data points, roughly 6,000 digits per hour, and to work for around four hours a day, inscribing approximately 28,000 digits. At the beginning of the process, I worked in 30-minute increments set by my phone alarm. Both approaches gave me clear goalposts and a reward system that made the work sustainable. Someone once suggested that I allow myself to fall into the process more deeply, over longer, unbroken periods, but that would have made the work unsustainable—I would burn out, damage my body, and ultimately render the work impossible.

When making my drawings or pin-pricked Boggy Gassy Cloud, I make sure I am warm in my studio, stable enough—physically and mentally—to stay with one task for a long time. This usually means very basic things: checking posture, organizing the space so I can reach what I need, confirming that batteries are charged and cables inserted correctly. In the breaks, I make drinks, look out of the studio window, stretch, catch up with emails, or message people I have been thinking about during the work. 

The mindset while writing/drawing is sometimes very challenging. When caught within what can feel like an endless stream of numbers, reciting internally, thousands of digits, the process can be mentally demanding. Because I cannot escape the stream, move or leave the activity, a single negative thought can get stuck and loop itself again and again, becoming difficult to manage and, at times, overwhelming. 

I can’t listen to podcasts, but I can and do listen to certain kinds of music, for example, Arvo Pärt or Max Richter. The nature of their music is slow, repetitive, restrained, with limited harmonic movement, and a steady temporal pulse. The music fills and holds time without demanding my attention. It somehow supports the durational work rather than distracts from it.

The Boggy Gassy Bubbly Ensemble, photos by Ash Calvert and film stills by Gilly Booth, hijack film

I keep the structure very clear. I decide the rule I will follow and once the work begins, I do not adapt or interpret. The rules hold. The data runs, and I run alongside it. We remain independent. Technically, the setup is precise but not complicated. When there are sensors involved—the ‘talkie boxes’ (custom-made microcontrollers), I check that they are working properly i.e., speaking to the sensor network in the peatbog for example, but I do not react to what the sensors generate. In When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Cloudy Bubbly Ensemble, for example, the real-time peat data runs continuously from the sensor network installed on the peat bog, but my own and the musicians’ actions do not change because of it. Our bodies and the data simply occupy the same time frame.

Duration and concept meet in this non-interactive commitment. The duration creates the conditions: staying in one action long enough so that it becomes factual, almost procedural. The concept is sustained by endurance rather than expressiveness. I follow the instructions I have set for as many hours as it takes, and drawings and sculptures accumulate because time accumulates; nothing is performed in response to the data.

Time becomes a method when it is the structure that holds the process in place. Speaking numbers continuously for an hour, for instance, forces a mechanical pacing that does not rely on emotional interpretation. Time becomes the material when the trace of that pacing, on paper for example, shows the body doing one thing for a long period. The content does not shift, but the body inevitably registers fatigue, pressure, and repetition.

The main idea is that I do not try to embody the data in an expressive way. I do not translate it, react to it, or use it to guide my actions. My body is simply present with it. The data continues as data, and I continue as myself. The work comes from the coexistence of those two ecologies over time.

CC: Your projects generate extensive documentation, yet the films operate as artworks in their own right—with an uncanny, sci-fi charge that feels dreamlike or like an alien encounter. The lighting and sound deepen that sense of mystery and otherworldliness.

How do you envision the films functioning within the larger project—evidence, portal, score, autonomous work, or something else? What are the relationships between fieldwork, documentation, live performance and film?

MW: The films sit in a deliberately ambiguous position within the larger projects. They are not straightforward documentation, and they are not simply autonomous artworks either, although they can operate as both. I think of them less as evidence and more as a kind of trace of what has happened in a performance, maybe a witness, but they do not attempt to explain it. What matters to me is not recording what took place but creating another platform where the work can continue to unfold in a different temporal and sensory register.

I love that you have picked up on the uncanny, sci-fi quality of the films. I have been surprised and so pleased that both filmmakers; Amy Daniel and Gilly Booth (Hijack film), who made the films of the three ensembles performed so far, have created this atmosphere. This has emerged through their own interpretations, or sensed readings of the ensemble performances, and perhaps also from my own articulation of a refusal and resistance to representation.

If you are referring specifically to the films of the tree-crawling projects, which I filmed and edited myself, I think it is Bert Barton’s tree-generated composition, which forms the soundtrack to the crawls, that so strongly defines the atmosphere of that series of films. 

In the recent filming of the Dirty, Seedy and Boggy ensembles, the films do not tell the viewer what the data means, or what the action signifies, instead, they sustain a sense of strangeness, opacity, and distance that feels closer to how I experience the work in situ—as something unfolding around me rather than something I am interpreting.

I think live performance and film operate as parallel but connected. The live performance is where conditions are inhabited in real time and the film attempts to engage with that experience and encounter, as present but separate. I think the films are not so much a record of the encounter but a re-materialization of it—another iteration that has its own internal logic and temporality. The film and performance affect each other, but neither of them stands in for the other.

So, the film is not a score, and it is not simply evidence. It is closer to a kind of after-image—something that carries the trace and residue of the performance, while also being autonomous.

When Seeds Speak: A Seedy Ensemble by Miranda Whall, photos by Ashley Calvert, 2024

CC: You’ve written about artists as conduits, connectors, and processors.

In your role as witness/observer, what have the earth, soil, bog, and seeds communicated to you? What does deep listening look like in practice? And how might “gentle activism” guide concrete actions that help audiences serve as conduits and connectors for the earth?

MW: The soil, seed and peat do not communicate to me in any direct or legible way. I do not experience these encounters as messages to be interpreted or translated into a meaning that humans can understand. Instead, what I hope they offer is a deeper understanding of how to be present in time, in a time different from our own human time. Through fostering a kind of attunement to the data—a language we have offered to these material ecologies, I have come to understand the slowness and density of matter, the way moisture, pressure, decay, and time shape everything quietly and without spectacle. What I learn is not content so much as scale, rhythm, and endurance. The bog has taught me about accumulation, about holding rather than revealing, about futures that are measured across centuries rather than in human attention spans.

Deep listening, in my practice, is therefore not an act of interpretation but a kind of suspension. It means ‘getting out of the way’ or ‘staying with,’ setting aside the impulse to extract meaning, to represent, and to narrate. ‘Being with’ the data and one repetitive action for a long, uncomfortable time, without the anticipation of an outcome, becomes a form of protest or resistance. It involves mindless boredom, fatigue, and discomfort as much as insight. I believe there is a kind of profundity in the mundane. I have always been drawn to the overlooked, and in this current work it is through sitting with the overlooked—the soil, seed, and peat, that a form of deep listening is cultivated, and with it, a gentle insistence that this is worth doing.

I invite audiences into durational encounters where nothing is resolved or explained. Thousands of numbers are deposited onto a sheet of paper and add up to nothing more than the sum of their parts—no form, no image, no picture, just the material evidence of repetitive action over time. Audiences are asked to look into these ink-on-paper data landscapes or clouds, or to step onto the bog, to share time with material processes that exceed them.

The activism is gentle because it does not instruct people what to think or feel; it instead offers a space in which they might begin to sense their own position within larger material, ecological, and temporal systems—planetary systems. To serve as conduits and connectors for the earth, in this sense, is not to speak on its behalf, but to learn how to walk into it, and to sit with it. I believe that if we can learn to sit with material ecologies, to remain in their company, we can learn to understand their value beyond resource.

More on Miranda Whall here

Miranda Whall, Multimodal Project When Earth Speaks