Ripple Effects: Performance Showcase
Water is making headlines more than ever before, often in alarming ways. The Ripple Effects microfestival showcases environmental artists who focus on water, and celebrates the power of the arts to re-imagine and re-story our water systems, increasing their resilience.
In this performance showcase event, hosted by Ellen Wiles, a cast of award-winning South West-based environmental artists will present a sequence of their latest short works exploring water system resilience in playful, ambient and innovative ways, spanning audiovisual media, live music, film, poetry, movement and spoken word.
The line-up features:
Kathy Hinde: River Traces. A performance with film created in collaboration with the River Frome in Bristol by exposing samples of river sediment and algae directly onto 16mm film, and developing using eco-processing techniques such as coffee and plant developers. Physical traces are generated through a direct encounter between the material qualities of the river and the film itself, affecting both the visual and audio track.
Jason Singh: Water Songs. A collage of field recordings made by the celebrated sound artist from around the world from various bodies of water played alongside live vocalised improvisations of water sounds: a form of nature beatboxing.
Sarah Blissett: Marking Tidetime. An experimental performance exploring embodied encounters with beachcombed objects, involving an unfolding dialogue with a whale bone found at the Plymouth Fisheries in April 2025, through text, sound and movement.
Dan McKay: Rock Pool. An extract from a slow film nominated for a ‘Green Oscar’ that moves from murky kelp forests to scallop burial grounds and a UV lit cosmic expanse, with a non-narrative flow that reveals rock pools as cauldrons of primordial wonder, and animates them with an innovative experimental soundscape and seamless, layered montage.
Bryony Gillard: Upstream. An essay-performance involving humour and discomfort that examines how waste, illness and toxicity are managed, hidden or displaced, and how responsibility is deferred “upstream”, interweaving domestic plumbing failures, bodily illness, protest and wastewater infrastructure.
John Wedgwood Clarke: Red River. A performed extract from a long poem exploring the polluted Red River in West Cornwall which runs from Neolithic standing stones on the moors above Camborne down to Gwithian in St Ives Bay, its troubled past and its present. This river, now little more than a stream, has been impacted by tin-mining since Roman times and played an important part in Cornwall’s industrial revolution.
Arun Sood and Ellen Wiles: Springs and Seepages. A performance developed in collaboration with the Otterhead Lakes nature reserve, exploring its unique wetland and acoustic ecology and the complex more-than-human history of the waterscape, involving performance involving field recordings, spoken word, layered film, and live improvised music on flute and guitar. An immersive installation iteration of this work is currently showing at the artists’ exhibition, Shifting Waterscapes.
This event is part of Ripple Effects: A Micro-festival of Environmental Artists on Water Systems and Ecologies.
Water is making headlines more than ever before, often in alarming ways. This microfestival showcases environmental artists who focus on water, and celebrates the power of the arts to re-imagine and re-story our water systems, increasing their resilience.
Also in the festival:
Aquatic walking and listening workshop with artist Kathy Hinde
Microsymposium on water resilience and the role of the arts
Barnfield Theatre
Book Tickets
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