Sound, Image, Ecology
Exhibition exploring the value of water in our landscapes at a time of environmental change through the sensory experience of different bodies of water. On display will be varied and immersive works involving sound, story, moving image, visual art, and other mixed media.
Created by multidisciplinary artists Ellen Wiles and Arun Sood, the works explore various watery ecologies in the UK, from rivers and lakes in South West England to tidal islands in the Outer Hebrides. They explore issues of water resilience and nature restoration, and themes of movement and memory, degradation and renewal, and relationships between human and more-than-human lives.
Each work has been created in response to a specific watery place: the Otterhead Lakes (Blackdown Hills), Porlock Vale (Exmoor), Countess Wear (Exeter), and the tidal island of Vallay (The Outer Hebrides).
All provoke questions around the entanglements between these waterscapes and their inhabitants, histories, and imagined futures.
Coordinating events:
Saturday 31 January, 5.30 – 6.45: Performance and Artist Talk. Live musical performance by the artists, followed by artist talk and Q&A led by Alan Puttock, beaver expert and scientist from CREWW. Free, limited to 15 places. Booking essential.
Tuesday 17 February, 11 to 3: Half Term Workshop. Drop-in printing workshop for all ages. Free, donations welcome.
Image credits: © Simon Tutty
Ellen Wiles is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and academic. A Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, she is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Resilience in Environment, Water and Waste (CREWW), leading a two-year project, Storying Water, which seeks to engage diverse audiences imaginatively with water system resilience. Her growing body of environmental literary audio work has been commissioned by organisations including The National Trust, recognised with a Creative Climate Award in 2025, and broadcast on TV news. She is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel The Unexpected (Harper Collins, 2024). She is a judge for the Society of Author’s Somerset Maugham Prize and writes for publications including the TLS. She previously worked as a barrister.
Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian artist, writer, musician, and academic. Through words, sound, moving image and collage, his works explore various intersecting themes including cultural memory, diasporic identities, colonial histories, and climate futures. With a particular interest in the relationship between sound, image, and text, his award-winning compositions have been described by Elizabeth Alker (BBC3) as like “fragments of memories that ebb and swirl like the tide”; while his books include the novel New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan, which won the 2024 Kavya Prize for Fiction. His debut solo album Searching Erskine was a Guardian Album of The Year in 2023, and he also writes extensively as an essayist and literary critic, appearing in international publications such as The Los Angeles Review of Books and New York Times.
