“There’s a lot we don’t understand about chemically the simplest materials. They remain beyond our comprehension in terms of what they actually do. So the maker is less like a scientific chemist than an alchemist.”
‘An ecology of materials’ Tim Ingold₁

My project is an experimental platform to consider the notion of the transect, its exploration as a creative act and the role the artist in embodied encounters and methodologies to consider the structures around which nature is framed.
Following a transect as an artist₂, can offer a way into understanding a specific area, but can the methods and processes used be separated from practices of categorization, othering, or colonial legacies toward land and people? A transect is typically understood as a line across an area used to measure change in a specific environment over time. The role of the artist in studying an area in this instance, rather focusing on specific data gathering, evolves into a different type of ‘gathering’ altogether, that pushes back on structures of categorization and considers specific institutional research alongside local knowledge and mythology.
I became interested in the role of the artist in following a transect during research on a canal in the North West of England. The distinction between transects, margins, borders and all that moves and shifts amongst these, became a thread to follow. Matthew Gandy’s considerations on urban transects, posits that transects can be a creative act for artists. How might this act alter when the space cuts across urban and rural, or shifts in scale?
Alongside Gandy, another practitioner who influenced my approach in listening to waterways is in Annea Lockwood, who I was introduced to by the recordist Jez riley French. Lockwood’s father was a climber and skier, who helped inspire her interest in rivers. Lockwood’s fascination with the ‘structural intimacy’ of a river and letting the river tell its own story over time, is a unique method₃. On this short trip, my own time with the different water bodies was short and clutching, often involving scaling boulders and navigating different types of small to large scale land disturbances. Our conversations at each site moved around the trauma and dangers close by and stemming from the region where GLOF incidents are unrelenting.
I found a synergy with Pak Khawateen Painting Club’s performance-research and my own research, through the notion of the artist-in-transect. Where Pak Khawateen Painting Club create a speculative frame with uniforms and vast collective, embodied knowledges shifting between science and art - I aim to create a space for - observation-as-a-concept - using a number of methods aiming for a non-hierarchical collection.
The photographs, videos and field recording created in this series, consider how an embodied method of transect study might include audio, sampling, visual studies and interviews in an attempt to create a lateral study of a place in time.
So in this instance, what is it to follow a transect? Is it a period in which to follow a thread, a sampling of time and space? Is it a moment for distant observation or microscopic study? Is it purely a moment for categorization and conceptualising of zones, linked to land and power? Is it possible to study a transect purely by listening?
Field recordings are mediated by specific technologies and expertise, and other specifications. As audio documentaries, they can help develop understandings of transects from multiple view points, using resonance and dissonance to shape space. In this project, field recordings were made from listening moments at shear margins at different glaciers including Passu and Shishper. Shear margins meaning in this case, an evolving place between ice and rock. Recordings were also made walking in the space connecting urban and rural, and at interstitial locations on our journey including roadside infrastructure.
The listenings also include moments with individuals and researchers, recording histories and current climate considerations. The trills of the glacier merge with the road noise and day-to-day life in Hunza, pollinators on lavender and conversations around the sites. The collective audio asks the listener to consider what constitutes a sensibility towards nature.

1 Ingold, Tim. An Ecology of Materials, 2012.
2 Gandy, Matthew. Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space, p185. 2022. MIT Press.
3 Lane, Cathay. Carlyle, Angus. Annea Lockwood Interviewed by Cathy Lane for ‘In the Field: The Art of Field Recording. 2013, Uniform Books.