The exhibition explores the value of waterscapes at a time of environmental change through the sensory experience of bodies of water.
It presents immersive works that combine sound, story, moving image, visual art, and other mixed media.
Multidisciplinary artists Ellen Wiles and Arun Sood have created works exploring watery ecologies including South West rivers and lakes as well as tidal islands in the Outer Hebrides. They investigate issues of water resilience and nature restoration and examine themes including movement and memory
Each work responds 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 the works provoke questions around the entanglements between these waterscapes and their inhabitants, histories, and imagined futures.
Press
Read interview with Arun Sood by Marshwood Vale magazine
Watch ITV News story about Shifting Waterscapes
Coordinating events:
- Tuesday 17 February, 11 to 3: Half Term Workshop. Drop-in printing workshop for all ages. Free, donations welcome.
Image credits: © Simon Tutty
About the artists:
- Ellen Wiles is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and academic. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter and currently Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Resilience in Environment, Water and Waste (CREWW). Ellen is leading a two-year project, Storying Water about water system resilience. Her 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 an award-winning author of several books of fiction and non-fiction. Ellen is a judge for the 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”. His books include the novel New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan. 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 in international publications, for instance The Los Angeles Review of Books and New York Times.
