https://ellieballantine.com theseatomsarenotmine Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:11:38 +0000 https://ellieballantine.com en https://ellieballantine.com/Mobile-header Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:51:29 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Mobile-header https://ellieballantine.com/Untitled-Disturbance Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:11:38 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Untitled-Disturbance Untitled Disturbance Sensing the Refuge: art-based approaches to multispecies temporalitie and naturecultural relations in Britain’s rainforests is a project of doctoral research through art practice.<img width="2433" height="3637" width_o="2433" height_o="3637" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f42849f9d56bfd49981f2ab9f9aef25930cd225ff80e9eec253cc355aca9aa5/000018.png" data-mid="241146675" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f42849f9d56bfd49981f2ab9f9aef25930cd225ff80e9eec253cc355aca9aa5/000018.png" /><img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81bf23e9825d0028a3d7be67b38c11d44b58cd25bc654ba2e5d9735d41c7fb50/000021.jpg" data-mid="241146674" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81bf23e9825d0028a3d7be67b38c11d44b58cd25bc654ba2e5d9735d41c7fb50/000021.jpg" /> https://ellieballantine.com/Pink-Purple-Dreams-of-Forest-Time Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:51:32 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Pink-Purple-Dreams-of-Forest-Time Pink-Purple Dreams of Forest Time 35mm photographic series, examining the hidden affective and psychological labour of rhododendron ponticum removal in Scotland’s temperate rainforest. This work and essay was presented at the 2025 Royal Geographic Society: IBG conference with the title ‘Active witnessing in active landscapes: Creative field practices in Scottish conservation’. <img width="3601" height="2409" width_o="3601" height_o="2409" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/80648f8dbaf5f853ee0a1dc34fb752454ced4ca3f4a9cc430dd1d17b1f5d5352/000043.jpg" data-mid="237863573" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/80648f8dbaf5f853ee0a1dc34fb752454ced4ca3f4a9cc430dd1d17b1f5d5352/000043.jpg" />Driving through Scotland’s Cowal peninsula, intermittent walls of rhododendron high as houses grow up and over the road to Tighnabruaich. Across the Kyles to Bute a bright purple-pink haze blooms on the shoreline. I am here to interview community woodland managers and advisers who together contribute to the Argyll Countryside Trust’s (ACT), Rainforest Restoration Package. I am also following a plant. I’m experimenting with photographic practices to consider the multi-layered roles that rhododendron ponticum plays in labours to conserve and restore Scotland’s fragmented rainforest, and how the plant weaves across conservation media narratives of forest degradation on the one hand and, through its removal, rainforest resurgence on the other. In the context of my interviews with conservation workers and their emotive descriptions of their work in holding the plant back from ecologically fragile places, I experience an unsettling feeling of threat as I witness the plants en masse. An embodied experience of Erin Despard and Michael Gallagher’s description of encounters with Argyll’s rhododendron as both ‘beautiful and ominous’ (2018). <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b703d88d4e99f5a1304d46345bb78ce1ce15b1e37d4ed701d96e92600c746b11/000033.jpg" data-mid="237863572" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b703d88d4e99f5a1304d46345bb78ce1ce15b1e37d4ed701d96e92600c746b11/000033.jpg" />Scotland’s temperate rainforest falls primarily on the west coast. The mild temperatures and high humidity provide a suitable climate for rare epiphytic lichens and bryophytes but also for r. ponticum. ACT notes that half of what remains of Scotland’s temperate rainforest can be found in Argyll and Bute, whilst the plant is present in 40% of this habitat (Saving Scotland’s Rainforest). Originally from the Iberian peninsula but hybridised locally in 19th century Scotland, R ponticum is a hardy, prolific seed-spreader. The plants form dense thickets in and around rainforest habitats, preventing direct sunlight from hitting the forest floor. Suppressing the establishment of new trees, rhododendron poses a threat to the rare lichens and bryophytes for which Scotland’s rainforest are of global ecological importance. Particularly affecting lichens that depend on older, acid-bark trees, such as tree lungwort, the plant undermines fragments of rainforests as sites of refugia and ecological continuity. In my photographic practice, r. ponticum offers a temporal lens through which to consider human-plant relations that weave across pasts, presents and futures. Its presence in Argyll offers a story in which the breakdown of rainforest resilience begins in part centuries ago with rhododendron’s hybridisation, and that in contemporary times is woven with human labour, calls by conservation organisations to ‘save Scotland’s rainforest’ and future-oriented modelling on anticipated climactic impacts on these habitats. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/88c8322361aae7775a38717c50b2a03282165b5816aca39fc0b623bdfd577e37/000047.jpg" data-mid="237863581" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/88c8322361aae7775a38717c50b2a03282165b5816aca39fc0b623bdfd577e37/000047.jpg" />In May, R. ponticum is in full flower and the bright pink-purple is markedly visible in multiple points in the woodland. A visual sense of volume, spread and ubiquity in Argyll’s temperate rainforest is amplified by the plant’s bright colour against the green of the woodland. I defer my practice to the plant’s phenological patterns for a set of photographs that seeks to draw on this stark contrast in order to map affective elements of this encounter through varying focus points in camera. In some images rhododendron lingers as a remote presence, requiring searching for, in others, the plant dissects the greens, its flowers in full view. Whilst participating in rhododendron removal and conducting interviews within the rainforest zone, forest wardens have described a hyper-vigilance that drives the emotional and affective labour that runs alongside the physical work of managing its spread. Such work requires constant scanning for the plant, whilst simultaneously being confronted with a deep concern for forest futures triggered by the pink-purple bloom sometimes on the very edge of vision. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8d6ca674166c01277e600102090f78032a2d21b97bc4f49f5085ea712e918de/000045.jpg" data-mid="237863574" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8d6ca674166c01277e600102090f78032a2d21b97bc4f49f5085ea712e918de/000045.jpg" /> Clearing and then preventing the re-establishment of r ponticum are acts of labour that are caught between competing narratives of rainforest futures within conservation organisation media. Where fragments of rainforest are connected and biodiversity is protected, or where lichens and bryophytes become further limited to shrinking patches of refugia. In these narratives, encounters with r. ponticum in specific places become also an encounter with a spectre of future lost forests, even following labours to remove the plant whole. Whilst restricted through root-stem injection or ‘lever and mulch’, travelling through Argyll it is easy to observe that the plant is consistently pushing and pulling at the edges of these habitats. ReferencesDespard, E. and Gallagher, M. (2018) ‘Media Ecologies of Plant Invasion’, in Environmental Humanities, 10:2, p.370-396 https://ellieballantine.com/Finding-Tongues-in-Trees Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:51:32 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Finding-Tongues-in-Trees Finding Tongues in Trees Using double and triple exposures of 35mm film as a means of manipulating chronology, multiple times and places become layered together. The images become palimpsestic, reworked without prioritising one exposure over another, exploring seasonality and what can be brought from one year to the next and what has been lost along the way. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d41aae1801b4135b9193ebf3cda402d7657585b323ccb3c8bda79eab45758177/000039.JPG" data-mid="237874493" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d41aae1801b4135b9193ebf3cda402d7657585b323ccb3c8bda79eab45758177/000039.JPG" />The series aims to also examine species loss as ash dieback is monitored and revisited across different times in the same photograph. As the film is lined up for a new exposure, there are mistakes where the image from one location is overlaid with another, confounding attempts to bound a sense of place within fixed parameters of space and time. The films are stored in-between use and as time elapses and the location of the previous frames becomes less certain, the multiple exposures too become embroiled in an entangled process of recovering memories of place and memories of the interaction between human and tree. The work's title references Shakespeare: 'And this our life...finds tongues in trees', with a question implicitly asked: is it the trees' story as the focus of the narrative or are the layered images only a reflection/projection of the photographer's absence, returns, forgetting and remembrance. <img width="2433" height="3637" width_o="2433" height_o="3637" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/62741a0b8ca59ae52b2cd938b0ac106a0f7563de764002d728aa8f7dd52ea48b/000038edited.jpg" data-mid="237874496" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/62741a0b8ca59ae52b2cd938b0ac106a0f7563de764002d728aa8f7dd52ea48b/000038edited.jpg" />Within the series, I have used this method to consider changing tree patterns within forestry plantations and biodiverse forests and rewilded ex-plantations. The resulting images, with their subtle and tricky boundaries of where and when, with their blurred and overlaid edges, are beginning to consider the mismatch between the gridded depictions of land types on maps and the eco-tones and blended ecologies that are navigated and crossed by multiple species across plant, animal and human.&nbsp; Placing such consideration alongside the grid of digital editing software and the rigid frame of the photograph, I'm also thinking about the ways in which trees and forested landscapes are framed and flattened within landscape painting, specimen herbariums and still life. Playing with chronology and trying to rebel against rigid boundary lines, I hope to find ways to navigate the liveliness of trees and landscapes as they refuse to be frozen in one time or form in the images. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/418fa639fc3d4a96d2299f960865f681754bc131d122bbab4eed93a38fba28ab/000034.JPG" data-mid="237874497" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/418fa639fc3d4a96d2299f960865f681754bc131d122bbab4eed93a38fba28ab/000034.JPG" /> https://ellieballantine.com/Current-Research Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:19:45 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Current-Research Current Research Sensing the Refuge: art-based approaches to multispecies temporalitie and naturecultural relations in Britain’s rainforests is a project of doctoral research through art practice. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2775b3535457e11eb55dd11f8c398bc2626310e0b65b0a65a4a408e0264aeb92/IMG_5842.jpg" data-mid="237968249" border="0" data-scale="100" data-draggable src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2775b3535457e11eb55dd11f8c398bc2626310e0b65b0a65a4a408e0264aeb92/IMG_5842.jpg" />I'm in the early stages of working towards a PhD by practice, supported by a SGSAH/AHRC doctoral training partnership award and am based at Edinburgh College of Art. I want to find ways to articulate multispecies experiences of time through making and curation, and how the stories we tell about time impact ideas about place and legacies of care. This research will explore the globally-rare habitat of temperate rainforests, focusing specifically on the biodiverse and fragmented rainforests that are scattered across Scotland’s western side. These forests act as refugia (Tsing, 2017), sites where threatened species are able to survive until such time that conditions allow them to spread. Drawing on geographic, ethnographic and multispecies theory, the project is led by an art research practice that navigates between extended fieldwork in Argyll and the Highlands and making practices at the studio. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3c9d75aaf33fef1101fbc8d41245443a5f17340a58476de1a7f3cd76fa21f143/IMG_3926-2.JPG" data-mid="237968218" border="0" data-scale="100" data-draggable src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3c9d75aaf33fef1101fbc8d41245443a5f17340a58476de1a7f3cd76fa21f143/IMG_3926-2.JPG" /> <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ff1e35fcb3f076eaaee09d56fc5f1ebe1dc22e5220ddf101f3652844a9024e7/filmy-fern.jpg" data-mid="237968222" border="0" data-draggable src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ff1e35fcb3f076eaaee09d56fc5f1ebe1dc22e5220ddf101f3652844a9024e7/filmy-fern.jpg" /> I am interested in finding ways to experience, articulate and share ideas about more-than-human time and how animal, plant and human temporal patterns and timescales are navigated and negotiated between species in these forests. This way of working necessitates a variety of approaches — interdisciplinary practice, return visits, learning from experts such as ecologists, foresters, conservationists, lichen biologists — and an art practice that utilises diverse methods for engaging with ideas of place and time, such as sound recording, field notes, camera-less photography, film making, drawing and sculpture. During these early stages of research, I have many questions guiding my fieldwork plans and practice Embodying Life Cycle Timing:Becoming Sensitive to More-than- Human Time As people interact with these woodlands, they come into contact with many kinds of rhythms and patterns of time -- migratory patterns of birds, seasonal processes of first leafing, fruiting, shedding and the long maturation timescales of trees. I'm interested in how these temporal rhythms are experienced through different senses and in how more-than-human time is embodied by people caring for these forests - how do they attune to animal and plant rhythms through their bodies: through sight, smell, touch or intuition? I want to find ways that art practices can help me to experienced the multiple and multi-natured expressions of time in these forests and how art is able to communicate something of this to community audiences. I'm interested in how creative fieldwork both mirrors and diverges from ecological or geographical fieldwork. How can interdisciplinary approaches to fieldwork complement each other when artist and ecologist work together to consider multispecies time in place? <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ba31915f8bfd3d1f7ee91e4096797c69196e69f13c3224513c4636b43b701db/000047.jpg" data-mid="237968363" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ba31915f8bfd3d1f7ee91e4096797c69196e69f13c3224513c4636b43b701db/000047.jpg" /> Planty and Lichenous Timelines:Deferring to Long Time-scalesof Lichen and Tree Time Scotland's rainforests are defined by the presence of key indicator species such as tree lungwort, and are crucial for the survival of rare lichen and bryophyte species. As forest fragments are reconnected and trees planted that will become the scaffolding for future lichens, future rainforests are planned. Trees and lichens are slow-growing in relative to human lifetimes. How are such long timescales navigated by humans working to regenerate or protect certain rainforest species in the context of uncertain environmental futures? What art practices can consider this negotiation between future forests and the labour and care that is undertaken now. <img width="3565" height="2385" width_o="3565" height_o="2385" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9eae239a97a0e372a41ea1168ed40de1638a6e371895eb9308c058f3e79efcbb/000044.jpg" data-mid="237968379" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9eae239a97a0e372a41ea1168ed40de1638a6e371895eb9308c058f3e79efcbb/000044.jpg" /> Multispecies Collaborations Across Time:Sharing Care Across Time and Bodies I'm interested in ethical questions that arise from object-based conservation interventions, such as wildlife boxes, lichen translocation materials, tree guards, nest installations and herbivore fencing, and how these conservation practices embody cross-species collaboration across diverging timescales. I hope to find out how art methods can consider the materiality of conservation materials, structures and artificial habitats, and examine how these human-made objects function as expressions of care between species and collaborations for survival across varying scales of time -- of human, bird, lichen and tree. https://ellieballantine.com/Dark-Castles Sat, 06 Sep 2025 14:02:51 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Dark-Castles Dark Castles The complex forms present in the Dimmuborgir lava field, North Iceland, provided a starting point of a material practice that embraced short expressions of violence as a method of creative formation. Using glass as the primary material enhanced the intensity of the process, since the glass was quick to harden in the studio air and prone to shatter if gestures were misjudged. To create echoes of the Dimmuborgir forms, I needed to work quickly and aggressively, engaging with the material akin to a process of attack. The objects themselves have an uneasy history, containing physical expressions that are discomforting -- formed through gestures such as cutting, pulling, hitting and stabbing. The emotive elements of these human gestures are starkly contrasted to the impersonal and objective volatility inherent in the formation of Dimmuborgir, calling in to question where humans personify and apply pathetic fallacy to the natural world and where theories of post-humanism can be sensitively explored through sculptural processes.The title of this piece comes from the English translation of Dimmuborgir -- 'dark castles', but is also translated as 'dark cities' and 'black fortress'. <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bf3e52e660d1ce584c4d70aece143a372aa7632ff7b27957d288a19119c1140e/DSC_0648.JPG" data-mid="237889424" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bf3e52e660d1ce584c4d70aece143a372aa7632ff7b27957d288a19119c1140e/DSC_0648.JPG" /> <img width="1438" height="800" width_o="1438" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2e0dac1b2b425baff5b158ba66689d76d3d40cda6e9c9f0521886fdfdfe69e36/fb794e_1d7549609a774d8cacbb2a607a74f049mv2-copy.jpg" data-mid="237889487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2e0dac1b2b425baff5b158ba66689d76d3d40cda6e9c9f0521886fdfdfe69e36/fb794e_1d7549609a774d8cacbb2a607a74f049mv2-copy.jpg" /><img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8778bc896c378bc5bedb377c944892487c13c7fe5291d7f2b198017f378cdc80/000019.JPG" data-mid="237889491" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8778bc896c378bc5bedb377c944892487c13c7fe5291d7f2b198017f378cdc80/000019.JPG" /><img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1331c3fa5dac6df57b5d6eeb0f55d892cc79d3e7abaf64a11f972a1aa6624302/000020.JPG" data-mid="237889489" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1331c3fa5dac6df57b5d6eeb0f55d892cc79d3e7abaf64a11f972a1aa6624302/000020.JPG" /> https://ellieballantine.com/In-the-Soil-in-the-Air Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:51:30 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/In-the-Soil-in-the-Air In the soil, in the air An experimental darkroom printing and 35mm photographic series that considers rhododendron ponticum’s impact on regeneration work on Scotland’s temperate rainforest. Building on ideas from spectral geographies, the photographs consider rhododendron ponticum through presence in absence, as a kind of haunting of forest futures, and its relations with forest pasts.This work and essay was presented at the 2025 Royal Geographic Society: IBG conference with the title ‘Active witnessing in active landscapes: Creative field practices in Scottish conservation’. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7eab730727215e0e2dbab823ae76340c32b69b4eb81fc067dd8dbf8b404cff2f/000032.jpg" data-mid="237863487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7eab730727215e0e2dbab823ae76340c32b69b4eb81fc067dd8dbf8b404cff2f/000032.jpg" />The Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest are investigating whether rhododendron initiates ‘a multi-decade pause in natural regeneration of vascular plants’ within temperate rainforest soil, even after intensive clearing. Theories include symbiotic relationships between rhododendron and ericoid mycorrhiza, an imprint of which may remain in the soil, disrupting broadleaf recovery. A lichen specialist described rhododendron within this context as a disrupter of possible future forests and of forest durational timings, as cleared areas recover rich levels of biodiversity more slowly than those recovering from storm damage, or a preventer of forest regeneration completely as new saplings cannot grow in time to meet the needs of habitat indicator lichens on failing trees — unmaking a potential rainforest into a never-again rainforest. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/018a732e39dbc3bbe14e5afef17b5e81f5706df1b2c63cc097c35e718162a6c4/000036.jpg" data-mid="237863488" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/018a732e39dbc3bbe14e5afef17b5e81f5706df1b2c63cc097c35e718162a6c4/000036.jpg" /> My photographic practice considers rhododendron through this spectrality, where the roots of contemporary rainforest degradation and future localised extinctions are woven together through a disorienting sense of presence even in absence of rhododendron in rainforest soils. Through an experimental printing process that navigates cyclically between the sites of forest - darkroom - forest, this set of images considers cleared rhododendron as a presence that lingers in the soil as a kind of haunting, as its imprint on subterranean ecological relations plays out across the human-eye view of the forest above ground. Responding to Despard and Gallagher’s writing on rhododendron as photomedia (2018) that which mediates light, I echo the plant’s propensity to block light by collecting leaves during volunteer clearing activities, soaking them in a home-made solution and printing with them on film in the darkroom. As the light at Glenan enters the camera, the imprint of the rhododendron-rich solution and the phenols from the leaves interacts with the photo-chemical substrate of the film to produce a trace image overlaying the forest. My process inherently retains traces of participation in rhododendron removal whilst echoing the nature of this practice by clearing the film of the solution and leaves, creating scratches and blurs on the images. The film, like rainforest soil, becomes an archive of relations between human and plant, between field and practice. It is this presence in absence highlighted by this experimental approach that allows me to consider rhododendron stories as both hauntings and inscriptions upon particular places and practices, and upon wider narratives of rainforest extinctions and resurgence. The hybrid photographic-print images offer a reminder that future rainforests and the human labours of care that connect them will unfold alongside negotiation and cohabitation with rhododendron ponticum across Gibson and Warren’s ‘stretched temporal plane’ of arboreal timescales <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b25b438953d00ea3f480122311069d99d7464154c91c74f4504073cef8792eaf/000027.jpg" data-mid="237863491" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b25b438953d00ea3f480122311069d99d7464154c91c74f4504073cef8792eaf/000027.jpg" /> References Despard, E. and Gallagher, M. (2018) ‘Media Ecologies of Plant Invasion’, in Environmental Humanities, 10:2, p.370-396 Gibson, C. and Warren, A. (2020) ‘Keeping Time with Trees: Climatechange, forest resources, and experimental relations with the future’, in Geoforum, 108, pp. 325-337. https://ellieballantine.com/Seasonal-Exposures Fri, 05 Sep 2025 18:43:11 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Seasonal-Exposures Multiple Exposures to Forest Time An experimental field practice and photo series in Scotland’s temperate rainforest, using multiple exposures in camera. <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/78b0f795d090334ee29c3623890642c63b25c14329682f409f06b781c9509cbb/000002.JPG" data-mid="237874565" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/78b0f795d090334ee29c3623890642c63b25c14329682f409f06b781c9509cbb/000002.JPG" />This experimental practice explores seasonality, changes to colour, light and canopy through the year and the role of memory and repeat encounters in building long-term relations with forests. Some images capture a sudden change in focus, responsive to forests sounds. Others map seasonal changes, requiring a synchronisation of the artistic process with first leafing and autumn shedding to capture the images. <img width="3565" height="2385" width_o="3565" height_o="2385" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/21ff76c645e3ac4fafbe683a3f12d5fb1dece0ec08b6485f87538265664dce26/000044.JPG" data-mid="239034085" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/21ff76c645e3ac4fafbe683a3f12d5fb1dece0ec08b6485f87538265664dce26/000044.JPG" /> Others images consider repeat encounters and their role in memory formation, whilst questioning the reliability of memory in building a cohesive understanding of place. In these latter images, layering through multiple exposures abstracts the image to the point of obscuration. The forms become clouded <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f3556d1c21b4ed826d819aa8f3fcb77e9ac908ba033e17321baed131bb47c62b/000028.JPG" data-mid="239034083" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f3556d1c21b4ed826d819aa8f3fcb77e9ac908ba033e17321baed131bb47c62b/000028.JPG" /> <img width="3637" height="2433" width_o="3637" height_o="2433" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/afb0680155aaf9d8fde36d617ddf971a08185a85c4be630b795a17390f114190/000001.JPG" data-mid="237874564" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/afb0680155aaf9d8fde36d617ddf971a08185a85c4be630b795a17390f114190/000001.JPG" /> https://ellieballantine.com/Listening-to-Ambiguity-Up-On-Peaton-Hill Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:51:30 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Listening-to-Ambiguity-Up-On-Peaton-Hill Listening to Ambiguity Up on Peaton Hill Recording Disturbance and Listening to AmbiguityUnsettling encounters with time and sound on Peaton Hill. Observations made during a 2023 residency at Cove Park, Argyll with the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network PhD researcher cohort <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eafcbbaff83425701c95d1d7765514bd5e81e4bae885ec1e9e376a789468fe17/IMG_2040-2.JPG" data-mid="237863363" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eafcbbaff83425701c95d1d7765514bd5e81e4bae885ec1e9e376a789468fe17/IMG_2040-2.JPG" /> This work was made whilst traversing changing ecologies between the residency complex on Peaton Hill and the shore of Loch Long. Through listening and writing reflective field notes, I found means of practicing Anna Tsing’s ‘arts of noticing’, reaching for a ‘passionate immersion’ (2011) in my surroundings, whilst simultaneously troubling the ethics of my practice as I became a force of disturbance through this immersion. My work during the residency and these listening practices formed a piece of writing called Recording Disturbance and Listening to Ambiguity: Unsettling encounters with time and sound on Peaton Hill,&nbsp;part of a compendium article with contributions from the cohort. Extract below: I used a variety of microphones — contact mics that record vibrations across surfaces; hydrophones that can be submerged to listen below&nbsp;fluid surfaces. Acting as sensory prostheses, the mics increased the depth and breadth of my listening field. They affected my means of engagement with the more-than-human world by opening altered spaces of encounter. However, such prostheses also created a space of retreat from my usual manner of hearing, creating a sense of disturbance of positionality and certainty — my position in place, position in time — distorting a sense of the dimension of my bodily boundaries. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9007d5f5b0c9976cbb10aad23091f072a67aa07e8213e7f37be62d4b5511c001/IMG_2041-3.JPG" data-mid="237863372" border="0" data-scale="65" data-draggable src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9007d5f5b0c9976cbb10aad23091f072a67aa07e8213e7f37be62d4b5511c001/IMG_2041-3.JPG" /> Positioning my body further into the woodland increased my ability to hear some sounds whilst precluding others, but there was no sense of leaving anything human behind. The human touch was thick on the landscape, on my recordings and the ambiguity of human/more-than-human signals intermingling could not be solved by retreating further from human-made sounds. As indigenous and postcolonial scholars have described, there is no separation of nature and culture (see de la Cadena, 2016; Tallbear, 2011; Todd, 2016; Trisos et al, 2021). So, too, there is also no ‘friction-free wilderness’, neutral position of the recordist, nor of conceptualisations of the field. Fieldwork as a term holds within it colonial histories of ‘masterful discovery’ (Crone et al, 2022, 12), whilst the recordist might be embedded within Western-centric conceptions of nature and time (Wright, 2023, p.3). In field recording, the equipment and access that makes such listening possible also implicates the recordist in a web of resource extraction and privilege that Mark Peter Wright argues implies ‘neither sound capture nor its consequent representations can ever be separate from the geopolitcal resources and networks that allow signals to be captured’ (p.4). My practice implicated me in a radiating web of disturbance from which I cannot retreat, but with which I must engage. &nbsp;<img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5cfb080f294c93fbb6b09da32077929824d4aec61b2d4e5a6f21eecb45749799/IMG_2043.JPG" data-mid="237863443" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5cfb080f294c93fbb6b09da32077929824d4aec61b2d4e5a6f21eecb45749799/IMG_2043.JPG" /><img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5ec548d800b8827da82ea25a3ee2ba92feb4045bc3ad67b5c2acf99bb5e38eb/IMG_2044.JPG" data-mid="237863411" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c5ec548d800b8827da82ea25a3ee2ba92feb4045bc3ad67b5c2acf99bb5e38eb/IMG_2044.JPG" /> References Crone, P., Nightingale, S., Stanton, P., (eds) (2023) Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-Based Research. Eindhoven, NL: Onomatopee de la Cadena, Marisol (2019) ‘Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen’ in Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., Nustad, K. G. (eds) Anthropos and the Material. Durham: Duke University Press. Tallbear, K (2011) ‘Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigeous Standpoints: Theorizing the Contemporary’’. Available from: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs- indigenous-standpoints [accessed 07.10.22] Todd, Z. (2016) ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29 (1) Trisos, C, Auberbach, J, Madusudan, K (2021) 'Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology', in Nature Ecology &amp; Evolution,&nbsp;v. 5 , pp. 1205–1212Tsing, A., L. (2011) “Arts of Inclusion, or, How to Love a Mushroom”, Australian Humanities Review, 50, pp. 5-22. Wright, M., P. (2023) Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. London: Bloomsbury https://ellieballantine.com/Field-Recording-Namafjall-Geothermal-Area Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:06:40 +0000 theseatomsarenotmine https://ellieballantine.com/Field-Recording-Namafjall-Geothermal-Area Field Recording - Námafjall Geothermal Area The Námafjall geothermal area is located in Northeast Iceland, on the east side of Lake Mývatn. At Námafjall, also known as Hverir, smoking fumaroles, geothermal pools and pits of boiling mud surround soil and sulphur crystals coloured green, orange, silver and red. The soil in the area has little vegetation due to the acidity caused by these geothermal processes. The air smells of sulphur. <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f619caddacdb54b4f76668f66f1b450b4331fab0e3e222f9f02f84830289ea2e/DSC_0594.JPG" data-mid="237940397" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f619caddacdb54b4f76668f66f1b450b4331fab0e3e222f9f02f84830289ea2e/DSC_0594.JPG" /> In October 2021, I conducted field recording in the Námafjall area, to continue sound research from a previous residency in Iceland. The recordings are formed by a combination of subterranean sounds gathered via a contact microphone and those sounds that reach the surface and meet the air, recorded via a field recorder and microphones. Permitting the listener access to sounds below the feet, the recorder becomes an extension of the body, whilst providing a vehicle to traverse the material boundary of the surface of the ground. Safely protected from the heat and tumult below, the equipment allows the listener to hear the pressure of the gasses as they built up below the fumarole, whilst simultaneously hearing them escape. Fumarole Excerpt is a sample of one of the data files taken from this fieldwork. The recording has been digitally edited so the lower frequency levels are brought up whilst the hiss of the higher has been taken down. In&nbsp;Fumarole Response 1, the track was edited whilst reacting instinctively across a digital theremin, playing in response to the increase in geothermal activity through an embodied process. The digital theremin allows for gestural processes that are not limited by precision as on a piano or a guitar, allowing a response that straddles musical playing but also an embodied movement practice.Following my first residency in Iceland, I worked with volcanological researchers at the University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences, to combine the field recordings with volcanological data taken of volcanos in the build up to eruption. Using these materials, in combination with vocals, I was interested in metaphors of expulsion and eruption, particularly in reference to repressed memory and embodied traumatic effects.Volcano Song is one piece arising from this process (extract below). <img width="6000" height="3538" width_o="6000" height_o="3538" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7112a72701db9da076967ab3e504df40d229d420977674bf3de4ca211f5241e7/Hverir3jpg.jpg" data-mid="237940402" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7112a72701db9da076967ab3e504df40d229d420977674bf3de4ca211f5241e7/Hverir3jpg.jpg" /><img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c3c8adca909ff1a20669e4d121ffb54afbe5ba0803936bfbbcb7d23b0da3b58/Hverir2.jpg" data-mid="237940401" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0c3c8adca909ff1a20669e4d121ffb54afbe5ba0803936bfbbcb7d23b0da3b58/Hverir2.jpg" /><img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc0a308278f69c4ac0f49825c67662257852991a2ab05655801b7b2f73b8be4f/Fumerole-editedjpg.jpg" data-mid="237940399" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dc0a308278f69c4ac0f49825c67662257852991a2ab05655801b7b2f73b8be4f/Fumerole-editedjpg.jpg" />