*words from ‘We Become With Eachother or Not At All’*

Living Matter, an installation at Hidden Notes Festival

Living Matter is an immersive sound installation at the Hidden Notes Festival a collaboration with composer Mara Simpson, sound engineer Tobin Jones and artist Narna Hue. Find out more about the inspiration and evolution of the installation below, with a bonus poem thrown in

Living Matter pulses with imaginal resonance - a 40-minute spatial sound installation rooted in the ancient landscape, weaving poetry, music and song, field recordings, and mythic memory into a multisensory experience that invites emotional attunement with the more-than-human.

The roots of this work lie in the landscape – in the rivers that have carved their way through the wolds, emptying themselves into the mighty Thames and Severn, in the woodlands and commons, in the soil and mycelial networks and in the history of the people who have lived here for millennia.

A journey along the course of a river through the remnants of ancient Bronze, Iron Age and Romano-Celt communities, became an unexpected encounter with archaeology that revealed a history of matriarchal rituals performed on the riverbanks. Votive sculptures of mother goddesses were worshipped by the Dobunni and Roman settlers, along with the scuttling hooded figures of the Genii Cucullati, to invoke fertility, good health, abundance and protection.

Encountering these figures and the landscape at a time of ecological grief and emergency provoked a response in language and the written word, articulating a journey into connectedness and a deep and growing sense of kinship with the living matter of the land as family and ancestry. The poems and songs are also deeply linked to the contemporary lives of mothers and exploring the ways we have been mothered ourselves, raising families in uncertain times and recognising the importance of being good ancestors, nurturing a love for the land in those who will inherit it. Composition of song, music and field recordings have extended and enriched that initial response, transforming and renewing the narratives we encounter here again, creating an iterative story that is as spiralling and continuous as living matter itself.

Mother goddesses and guardian spirits have been the tropes and totems that crystallised our ideas around kinship, care and relationship with the nature / environment we call home. They are guides that connect and inspire, accompanying us into an imaginal realm and creating new mythologies. The spatial listening, made possible by d&b audiotechnik’s state-of-the-art technology, fuses with these ancient archetypes as a tool for imaginal perception, evoking atmosphere as well the sense of a threshold. Inside the space there are muslin hangings printed with poetry and painted using oak gall ink made from local materials. Permanent and indelible, oak gall is a ceremonial ink still used to this day on birth, marriage and death certificates.

As a visitor to the installation, you are invited to engage not just with place, but with its sentient memory, guided by listening posts that act as ritual waypoints and by the immersive experience in the venue itself. Through soundscape and poetic invocation of ancient spirits, the work seeks to dissolve boundaries between human and more-than-human, evoking brinkpoints where ancestral and ecological kinship resound. A windfall branch, a sweep of stones, a broken concrete slab creeping with algae, a spiral bowl filled with Slad Brook waters greet the arrival in this space. As co-dreamers, participants are called into reciprocity - leaving offerings, reflections, and presence in a shared field of myth, care, and transformation.

Gathering water from Slad Brook with gratitude, honouring Slad Valley for all that it gives, our home place for Living Matter.