Work Process and Research Methods part 2

-Empirical research Interviews:

Collaborators: When I started the Soil project, I collected soil samples, comparing and contrasting them, not knowing why they looked so different nor how to talk about them. I inferred that I needed to learn about soil. That’s an example of why I need collaborators – some of whom also became co-creators of the project. There are three kinds of collaborations:

Working with the Advisory Group is the most vital collaboration. Nick Read from the Bright Space Foundation sponsored the project by identifying participants and communities involved in current soil challenges. This saved vast amounts of time.

Voicing the soil, Advisory Group, December 2018

Working with Interviewees: How do I choose who to interview? I seek interviews where the encounter is relevant, the person concerned has values, perspectives and information that relate to the project, and where I am able to draw that out in the course of the interview.

I let conversations drift. Most are recorded by the sound engineer, Perry Walker, who is also a member of the Advisory Group. My role is to question and listen and not to advance a point of view.

Perry Walker, sound engineer, with an affectionate cow at Will Edwards 's farm near Ross on Wye, December 2018

To illustrate my method of collaborating, I found my way to Tim Monckton (January 2019), a local soil biologist. I asked Tim questions about the types of soils in Herefordshire. What of soil and its health in differing contexts:  intensive agriculture, medium, small farmers? Soil biodiversity? How did Tim see the future of soil in Herefordshire: Precision agriculture? Agrochemicals? Protecting soils? Carbon capture? Future generations and food security? Should his voice contribute visibly to the project, Tim’s prior agreement will be sought.  

No artist has all the knowledge required for an Anthropocene project; hence the value of several viewpoints plus a discursive and multidisciplinary approach. The views of specialists and people close to the soil were collected and they inform the project. The participants are four farmers: Will and Debbie Edwards in the south of the shire and Malcolm Lewis and Antony Williams, his adviser, in the north west of the county. Then there is Duseline Stewart in the east, a very experienced gardener and a member of the Royal Horticultural Society.  Tim Monckton is a soil scientist. I met Lucinda Lewis, a Herefordshire ecologist, agronomist and a farmer also working for an NGO (the Wye and Usk Foundation) at a meeting organised by Hereford Wild life Trust in November 2018. An unnamed Herefordshire farmer and Councillor from the Conservative party said he did not believe in climate change. His ideas also inform the project. Moira Jenkins is a member of the Woolhope Club. In a January 2019 interview, she describes the Anthropocene from a geological standpoint and evidences the changes in soil over hundreds of years. Moira concurred with the idea of William Smith’s map. 

I attended a meeting with the Herefordshire branch of Extinction Rebellion (XR), whose demands in a letter to Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) include that soil health be part of ‘public good’ within the Agriculture Bill.

Moira Jenkins, geologist and member of the Woolhope Club, January 2019

Will and Debbie Edwards's worm rich pastures, near Ross on Wye, December 2018

Working with artists-fabricators: At the XR event, I met two militant youngsters who are on the Art Foundation Course at HCA. One of them, Sam Townley-Evans, contributed to exploring soil as audio experiment (see blog, October 2018) and later as part of a performance. After this, I made one of the many decisions that the project has required: I decided to omit humans from future sound and video  in order not to distract from soil.  

Sam Townley-Evans, performing art student, impersonating a flower blooming. HCA  green screen studio,  December 2018.







This led to another problem. Could the sound of soil have been replaced by another material such as flour or sugar, like with Foley, the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film? 

I answered this by observing myself, to discover how my brain was seeking to put a name to a first-time-heard sound and associate it with an identifiable sound. This almost inevitable brain process could obscure my critical listening to a new phenomenon: instead of listening to understand, I was probing my memory for something familiar. Which if extrapolated could be strange: for example when I listened to spiders’ mating call, I saw a moped running in the street as both sounds can be similar. So who would know sugar from soil? In this project sound has a direct link to its origin, there is no manufacture.  This is an aesthetic decision. The intention is for the listener to discover, in the directness of real life, mediated by a microphone, how a realm beyond human auditory perception feels. This solicits a different hearing which challenges limits, as ‘sound is always moving away from a source; it abandons its origins…in migrating…it sweeps through the social field’ (Brandon LaBelle, 2018).

It took me four weeks to form a team of collaborators (January 2019) comprising Nicky Barter a technical illustrator, Alison Barter an aquarellist, Christine Oxley a calligrapher, Katie Brymer a graphic designer and sound designer Hayden Bail. The project cannot happen without them. I chose them because they live locally, are skilled, with a variety of experience, are reliable, and enjoy working as a team. I have to accept, though, that, in the context of the art market, viewers are not familiar with multiple authorship.