Talk – Future Forest at Hooke Park, Architectural Association

I’m very much looking forward to talking at Hooke Park this Friday for the Future Forest. It’s a great array of speakers encompassing scientists, foresters, architects, curators and artists. Information on tickets (including travel to the Dorset location are available below).

FUTURE FOREST

7th Nov  | Hooke Park | 11.30 - 17.30 

Future Forest is a one-day multidisciplinary event set within the 140 hectare working woodland at Hooke Park, the Architectural Association’s rural campus in Dorset. Bringing together voices from forestry, ecology, art and architecture, the day explores how creative and scientific practices can co-evolve in the age of climate emergency. 

The morning grounds us in the technical and ecological — with talks from forestry and silviculture experts. This is centred around the future of forestry and the AA Wood Lab’s 100 Year Forest Project - a framework for the long-term management of the working forest at Hooke Park. In the afternoon, the conversation expands to explore how artistic and speculative practices can shape our understanding of environmental and ecological futures.

Tickets for the event are free, tickets including cooked lunch are £7

For anyone coming from London there’s also an option to book a free shuttle bus from Dorchester South and back.

More info here: 

www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogramme/whatson/future-forest

Direct link to book tickets here: 

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/future-forest-tickets-1794615135179?aff=oddtdtcreator

 

 

Film – Lost for Words at Sheffield Doc Fest

Lost for Words, a feature documentary directed by Hannah Papacek Harper will be shown at Sheffield International Documentary Festival this June. The film features the forest-based sound artwork Living Symphonies by Jones/Bulley.

More about Lost for Words here.

More about Living Symphonies here.

 

Reviews – 'New Beginning' at the Grand Theatre, Luxembourg

“Entering the Grand Théâtre Studio these past few days was like taking a break, opening a parenthesis in space and time. It was responding to an invitation to participate in a return to the most distant sources of our universe, to take the time to relive what emerged and developed from nothing. An invitation to understand that this has always been our story. And to spark an awareness that can only change our view of our threatened, already compromised world, perhaps leading us to finally react and act.”

Stéphane Gilbart, Luxemburger Wort
23 May 2025

https://www.wort.lu/kultur/les-jeunes-nous-racontent-comment-repenser-notre-lien-a-l-univers/68246560.html

“The result is a strong and intense theatre - conceived and designed by David Shearing - with essential images that question our place and the meaning of our lives. The music and the soundtrack (by James Bulley) contribute to this in large measure, skillfully combining recorded texts and musical vibrations. […]
Culture opens the debate, highlights the important subjects for today's society and tomorrow's... Nothing is more jubilant than an artistically accomplished show that knows how to denounce and raise awareness, while involving the younger generations to the highest degree.
[…]
All dressed in black, as if in mourning, very dignified and grave, these young people are our whistleblowers. Their conscience awakens ours. It's up to us to act. The message is received 10 out of 10.”

Alexandre Pham, Classique News
19 May 2025

https://www.classiquenews.com/critique-spectacle-musical-luxembourg-grand-theatre-le-17-mai-2025-new-beginning-variable-matter-creation/

More information about Variable Matter’s New Beginning can be found here.

Event – 'Breathing with the Forest' at Compton Verney

Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Breathing with the Forest, for which I created the spatial sound score has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. The exhibition runs until April 2025, and you can find tickets and visiting information here. More about the piece here.

‘Breathing with the Forest’ at Oxo Exhibition, 2024 (Image courtesy: Marshmallow Laser Feast)

Review - 'Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I' in the Observer

“The most spectacular work in the show concerns this secret labour. The artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast take us on a psychedelic film journey underground to reveal the astonishing role of fungi roots in breaking down and recycling dead plant and animal matter to enrich the soil. This flowing network twinkles like a highway by night, glowing with miraculous colours and sending up the life force into a mushroom above, which in turns sheds its spores out across the air – altering the world’s weather. Merlin Sheldrake’s commentary – about the wild intimacies of our coexistence with soil, how being is always being with, and so on – is pure poetry. And the film continues without cease in the most perfect ecological loop.”
— Laura Cumming, The Observer (26 January 2025)

More about ‘Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I’ here.
The full article in the Observer can be found here.

 

Marshmallow Laser Feast’s ‘astonishing’ psychedelic fungi film Fly Agaric 1-Poetics of Soil screening at Somerset House Photograph: David Parry/PA

 

Event: Pontefract Giants – Pontefract Castle, Yorkshire, 25–26 September 2021

The weekend of the Autumn Equinox (25-26 September 2021) will see the opening of a forthcoming film-sound installation, Pontefract Giants, created with Matthew Rosier and Daisy Lafarge at Pontefract Castle, Pontefract, West Yorkshire:

Pontefract Giants will transform the castle into an immersive landscape where the ancestors of past residents of Pontefract will greet you and transport you on an expansive and poetic journey through time from the first inhabitants of the area some 300,000 years ago.

Featuring projections of current residents representing the towns ancestors, an immersive soundscape and musical score, this light and sound show will allow you to appreciate the site and history of our town like never before.

(Pontefract Castle website)

More information and tickets here.