Maple Farm Artist in Residence
As part of our ongoing outreach ambitions at Maple Farm, Youngwilders have been trying out a number of experimental and creative engagement approaches to get young people of all backgrounds excited about nature and restoring it. Core to this ambition is the recently founded Artist in Residence programme, which works with a young artist to create boundary pushing work rooted in Maple Farm and the rewilding movement. Our first iteration of the programme sees Dee Sharma as Artist in Residence. Dee is an amateur ecologist and writer interested in analysis of bioacoustics and sound led ecological epistemologies. Their work with bioacoustics aims to study social behaviors across taxa. Below is a blog post covering some of their work at Maple Farm so far!
Maple Farm: BioAcoustics Project - by Dee Sharma
I am an amateur ecologist. And I often get asked what sparked my interest considering I do not have any formal background in ecology or natural sciences. A lot of people who want to work in the nature and conservation sectors often feel they need some sort of institutionalised understanding of our ecosystems. But I think there are so many ways to get involved with nature, and I say that because that’s how I have always accessed ecology. From a place of curiosity. Nature became accessible to me for the first time when I joined Youngwilders for a building project on Maple Farm. We were building an outdoor classroom on the site out of recycled materials found on the Farm. It was my first time experiencing a space where people who were a part of this project were teaching me so much about ecology. It felt like I could finally learn a lot about our ecosystems by just being there !
We were also camping that weekend and it was that time of the year when the nightingales are particularly loud. It was also my first time hearing them at night and their name suddenly made a lot of sense ! And it was at that moment I started to think a lot about these sounds which have been lost and almost forgotten because of rapid industrialisation of our cities and just general way of life. I started to think about my childhood where even our cities had so much natural diversity. The bird calls in the morning, the insects hitting our windshields and many instances where nature didn’t feel like this utopian reality. But especially in the past two decades we have witnessed such a large decline in biological diversity across taxonomies.
After I came back home from this trip I started researching different field recordings from across the world. My initial interest in ecology was bioacoustical analysis of a landscape. What can these field recordings tell us about the health of our surroundings and how can we use these datasets for both biological and anthropological purposes. And that was a rabbit hole I still haven’t come out of. I wanted to make soundscapes for beetles and see if they respond back, then I was suddenly curious to explore bird calls and so on. So I spoke to Youngwilders and they proposed I can work on a project at Maple farm where I can record the landscape and use it as a soundscape to log the acoustical health of the farm. It started as an academic intervention where I was primarily interested in building a database of insect and other landscape recordings, but I soon realised the sounds were an end in themselves. Elements of the project then became more explicitly artistically minded, the raw sound would be maintained, with mild edits to stir wonder, interspersed with the man made sound of people interacting with the landscape. This work eventually formed the core of the first Maple Farm Artist in Residence position. All with a view to bring peoples attention to their ears as a means to connecting with landscape. I eventually started showing these meandering, hypnotic soundscapes to people who usually live in cities, running workshops and making soundscape installations. People started becoming more curious about the sounds of the natural world and eventually about ecology and conservation. I thought to myself how can young people who have always grown up in cities, where there’s not much biodiversity, learn more about ecosystems which they don’t inhabit. The answer to me was I will make a cassette of soundscapes from Maple farm and hopefully the raw and beautiful sound will inspire people like it did me, and encourage young people of all backgrounds to get into the countryside more frequently.
I think nature belongs to everyone and not just landowners. People have built fences around landscapes and ecological access points which discourages a lot of people from exploring different ecosystems. Through bioacoustics there’s a wonderful opportunity for people to start becoming more in tune with nature, by accessing sounds not only to understand what potentially inhabits a surrounding but also just for a positive impact on one’s mental health. Studies show that time spent in nature and listening to these ecological sounds has a drastic positive effect on people’s psyche.
These realisations were definitely a result of all the time I have spent at Maple Farm, Youngwilders and Colleen have been so amazing in encouraging young people to access this rewilding project in different capacities. There’s amazing architects, entomologists, ecologists, artists and just great people who come to Maple Farm to open up a space for symbiotic interventions amongst each other and with the ecosystem at the farm.
I wish to use all the recordings as a way to understand the ecological health at the farm but also as a soundscape which soon will be available as a recording for people to access from anywhere in the world and imagine what Maple Farm is for themselves !