With Pebbles Under my Tongue - ACT I

The inaugural event of this series presents an odyssey in language – both human and inhuman. Erin Robinsong, interdisciplinary artist and poet in residence at the AA, and Nick Ryan, BAFTA and Emmy award-winning sound designer, will join us for an evening exploring unexpected interpretations of language.

This intimate event will examine soundscapes and what they can reveal, teasing out the accidental poetry of the world around us and communion between species. This event includes live performance by Erin Robinsong, and the installation of an interactive artwork by Nick Ryan.

SPEAKERS

ERIN ROBINSONG is a poet and dance artist whose work explores ecological relations and imaginaries. She is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Rag Cosmology and Wet Dream. Collaborative performance works with Hanna Sybille Müller and Andréa de Keijzer include Polymorphic Microbe Bodies, This ritual is not an accident, and Facing away from that which is coming. Her writing and performance work is grounded in somatic practice, sensory experiment, intersectional ecological scholarship, and interspecies communication & collaboration. A PhD student at Concordia University (Montreal), her research focuses on ecological imagination in contemporary poetry.

NICK RYAN is a multi-disciplinary artist, composer and sound designer widely recognised for exploring the future of audio, data sonification and immersive experiences through his novel sound installations, film sound design, bespoke sound instruments, generative music compositions and interactive audio experiences. Nick is the recipient of an Emmy for Sound Design (2023), a BAFTA for Technical Innovation (2003) and is currently an artist in residence at Somerset House Studios, London.

With Pebbles Under my Tongue is a series of events and displays looking at creative responses to contemporary conflicts in our landscapes, organised by Jumanah Bawazir, Inigo Minns and Aoi Phillips.

With increasing pressures placed on the planet through resource extraction and territorial tensions our occupation of the land is under immense scrutiny. And with this we are seeing an increase in creative responses to landscape and the natural world. Our voices and the words we choose to use are soaked with political and poetic power and can help us define and understand the spaces we occupy. The series looks at how practitioners from different fields use media to explore these conditions and what languages and forms of voice they adopt. It is seen as a celebration: of the forms of expression that we find to understand our environment and to coerce and resist the powers that exist around us.

Over three weeks a number of different practitioners have been invited to share their work through the reading of poems, live performance, screenings and audio installations

Image: Kate Davies, By the Sound of Things