Mixtape
Happy New Year folks! I hope 2024 brings many nourishing, joyful, wonder-full adventures into wild nature spaces for us all.
I am still planting roots in my new home. In November I moved to New York to work with environmental historians looking into social and sensory impacts of climate change in the city. This promises to be fascinating if challenging work and I will share some of my creative explorations of how I can bring embodied ecology in to play with this research over the coming years (the project culminates in 2028).
In the meantime, while I am waiting to move into my new studio space, I thought I would kick start this year by sharing my Embodied Ecology Playlist on Spotify. A kind of mix-tape of tracks that in different ways help me to focus in on the sensations of and intentions behind this emerging creative practice. (Anyone else make mixtapes back in the day? So many happy memories of spending hours carefully curating different themed tapes and recording from the radio, rushing across the room to hit pause before the presenters voice came back in!)
Music has become essential to me as I incubate ideas for new works, and this playlist will undoubtedly grow as I research embodied ecology further. In the studio, I oscillate between needing either total silence or music full volume, and I often find that a painting becomes synonymous with one particular track that I end up playing repeatedly, becoming almost trance-like as it merges with the essence of a work. I can never predict what song will ‘sing’ to a particular work before I start painting but I love it when I discover some kind of synergy between my paintings and a song’s lyrics, vocals, rhythm, melody.
This will be an evolving public playlist so next time you’re in the mood to discover some new tracks just follow this link, perhaps hit shuffle, dive in, and let me know if a particular song resonates with you. Or if you have any recommendations to add. It’s pretty eclectic, and I expect it’ll become even more diverse over time.
Enjoy!
