GETTING INTO HOT WATER
BEING HERE
MAY
INSTALLATIONS 2026
General Office Gallery
Being Here grew from a 24-hour inhabitation of Alder Coppice woodland in 2025. The gallery installation translated aspects of that experience into an immersive environment through which visitors could encounter something of the sensory intensity of sitting beneath the trees in May: the deep green of the woodland canopy, birdsong and the calls of deer, and the gradual transition from daylight into dusk and darkness.
The installation explored learning and ways of knowing through artistic practice as an embodied and experiential process. Colour, sound, movement and changing light became ways of paying attention. As daylight faded through the gallery’s glass skylight, cushions, blankets and candlelight created a space to settle into darkness, accompanied by woodland sounds and music composed by Bill.
Visitors described being “transported” by the soundscape and installation, while one response described an “intense experience” that was “in turn calm and comforting then distracting and disrupting – disorienting – beautiful.” Another visitor reflected, “I didn’t know you could do that with sound…”.
The gallery became a place for correspondence with time: light changed, sounds emerged and faded, and attention could shift from looking to listening, from activity to stillness, and towards something less familiar. The sensory experience opened up possibilities for discovery, including an expanded sense of what sound might do.
An evening event extended this experience into conversation. Through an artist talk and informal exchange, we shared what we had encountered in the woodland and explored the significance of wet woodland — a landscape that can be easily overlooked, yet is increasingly important in relation to climate change and ecosystem loss.
Rather than presenting information about wet woodland, Being Here created conditions for curiosity and questioning through atmosphere, sound, colour, darkness and conversation. What might we notice if we slow down? What happens when overlooked places are lost? And how might different ways of attending change our relationship with the places around us?
Being Here became both an immersive installation and a space for learning through experience, deep listening, correspondence with time, conversation and exchange.
Listen to the Radio Public Show #39 Being Here Settling Into Darkness
SONIC LIGHTHOUSE
JULY
Elena Thomas adjusting her fish headdress – part of the installation at General Office, July 2026
In the summer of 2026, our creative chain reaction reversed, and we began exploring the visual and sonic fallout of Sonic Lighthouse. Reflecting on the body of work helped us realise it was unfinished and that the ongoing story of fish injustice requires our continued attention. Rather than generating another outward response, the accumulated body of work became the catalyst for further inquiry. Reflection itself became productive, revealing Sonic Lighthouse as an evolving practice rather than a completed project.
This prompted us to revisit Stolford Beach and the Hinkley Point nuclear site. The return trip was not a repeat of our earlier journey, but an encounter with the place differently. Returning to the beach, catching up with Rick and his more recent nuclear poems, and searching for developments in the fish-pipe situation at Hinkley Point C reinforced the importance of sustained attention to this place and issues that continue to evolve over time. Revisiting became both a creative and ethical act rather than simply a means of gathering new material.
In July we created a new installation at General Office Gallery that reimagined and reworked earlier visual and sonic pieces, treating them as living materials that could be rearranged into new relationships, allowing reflection itself to become a generative part of the artistic process.
With support from Simon and Sarah at General Office Gallery, we presented a new four-hour ambisonic sound work that sought to immerse listeners within an entangled sonic ecology. The composition wove together the pulse of fishes, the recurring call of the Sonic Lighthouse, the rhythms of tides and deep time, the mechanical presence of nuclear power and the extended temporalities suggested by the half-life of radioactive materials. Rather than separating natural and industrial worlds, the work explored how these diverse rhythms coexist, overlap and shape one another.
A new video and photographic series similarly worked across changing scales of attention. Beginning with the micro-growths and subtle movements of Stolford Beach, expanding towards the accumulating cloudscape above the reactor, and returning to the instructional and warning signage encountered on site, the work invited viewers to consider how ecological processes, industrial infrastructures and everyday acts of observation are held together within the same landscape. In doing so, Stolford Beach emerged as a place where multiple human and more-than-human stories continue to unfold.
The gallery installation created an unexpected and surprising environment. Mannequins wearing our Sonic Lighthouse apparel stood alongside film of the performance on Stolford beach, a sound world, poetry, and still and moving images of the shoreline. Close-up views of stones, rivulets, lichen, seaweed and waves brought the small details and rhythms of the place into relation with the imposing presence of the nuclear power station.
The result was deliberately strange: a different way of encountering nuclear power, through water and the lives of the creatures who inhabit it.
Sonic Lighthouse explored learning and ways of knowing through art by shifting attention beyond the human. Through sound, poetry, moving image and attentiveness, the installation offered visitors another perspective on a familiar story of technological development.
Conversations with visitors suggested that this unexpected environment could unsettle their existing understanding, opening up questions about what is usually left out of accounts of nuclear power: the water, the shoreline and the lives drawn into its systems.
This was a more direct and provocative mode of learning than Being Here. Where Being Here created conditions for slowing down, listening and corresponding with time, Sonic Lighthouse used juxtaposition and strangeness to prompt reconsideration. In this way, the installation created conditions for learning by making something familiar strange enough to be seen differently.
Visitors described the installation as “interesting, informative, thought-provoking” with “wonderful images and poetry”; others found it “thoughtful and inspiring”. One response simply said: “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!”
Sonic Lighthouse became a space for learning through encounter — unsettling assumptions, shifting perspective and bringing attention to more-than-human lives and relationships that might otherwise remain overlooked.
Collaboration extended beyond the works on display to shape the exhibition itself as a space of shared inquiry.
A selection of Rick's 51 Fishes poems, inspired by The Observer's Book of Sea Fishes (1962), was exhibited alongside his more experimental nuclear redaction works. Together, the poems moved between careful observation and poetic disruption, echoing the wider themes of ecological fragility, industrial intervention and more-than-human entanglement explored throughout Sonic Lighthouse.
During the exhibition, Rick's live poetry reading transformed the gallery into a participatory event. His spoken poems acted as invitations to conversation, prompting visitors to reflect on their own relationships with fishes and the often-unseen consequences of nuclear infrastructures.
In the same spirit, we (Helen and Bill) consciously chose to remain present throughout the exhibition, recognising conversation as an integral part of the work. We wanted the gallery to function as a place where artworks, poetry, sound and dialogue could come together, enabling visitors to share their own experiences, questions and perspectives.
These exchanges became another layer of the installation, extending the creative chain reaction beyond the exhibited works themselves. Rather than presenting a finished statement, the exhibition remained open to dialogue, with the artworks acting as catalysts for reflection, discussion and renewed attention to our relationships with fishes, nuclear infrastructures and the more-than-human world.
The creative chain reaction continued beyond the gallery through another collaborative outcome. Bill produced the hour-long radio programme Sonic Sea and Digital Fish (Episode 39) for our Radio Public series on Resonance FM.
The programme did not simply document the exhibition; it translated and extended its themes into a different medium, carrying the inquiry to new listeners while weaving together sound, conversation and reflection. In doing so, the radio broadcast became another stage in the evolving life of Sonic Lighthouse, with the work continuing to generate new forms of artistic response and public engagement rather than reaching a fixed conclusion.
A selection from 51 Fishes
by Rick Sanders
The Armed Bullhead
Strange
Little fish
Armed Bullheads wish
For a simple existence
Eggs laid against the resistance
Of winter conditions their small fry
Hatch out in spring swim up try
To survive at the surface with stoic persistence
Then away to the depths as if in remembrance
Of past generations called down to the shadows to die
Upon the seabed of life spent on the bottom rung shy
Little barnacled survivor rarely venturing out happy just to
ride the tides
The Cod Kind
Carnivorous
Cod kind
You will find
Them in many forms
Deep sea fishes avoiding storms
Coalfish Whiting Pollack Ling Bib Cod
Greater Forkbeard and even the Poor Cod
Are all familiar fish on trawlers metal platforms
Argued over Cod Wars paved the way for reforms
Redrawing boundaries fishing rights bureaucrats capitalists
seeing themselves as God
Poisidon looks on unimpressed urging cod kind fishes to ride
roughshod
Wherever they wish and they do of course they do they're fish
The Angler Fishes
Angler
Fishes fish
For other fish
Cannibal lurer victim attracter
Taken in by seabed lurker
All teeth in its bristling gape
Flap of shiny skin attached to ape
An easy bite bobs on dorsal fin projector
Irresistible it seems yet this fish is a strander
Washed up on shores for folk to mock its shape
Freak show gatherers ponder on its cause its method of escape
From depths unseen and unexplored where monsters such as
these take ward
NOTES FROM THE REVOLUTION BOOTH
OCTOBER
Revolution Booth - Monarchs Way, 4th World Congress of
Stourbridge Canal, 2021 Psychogeography, Swansea, 2024
Notes from the Revolution Booth is the third and final exhibition arising from Getting Into Hot Water, our three-year collaboration with Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice. While the earlier exhibitions explored water and our relationships with it, this exhibition turns to the hot water of the title as a metaphor for the climate and ecological crisis.
The Revolution Booth began in 2021 as a cardboard structure for human-to-human dialogue. We invited passersby along the Monarch’s Way and Stourbridge Canal to discuss different kinds of revolution. In 2025, we brought the Booth into Getting Into Hot Water, intuitively wondering whether it might contribute to our explorations of water, climate change and ecosystems.
Instead, an encounter at another public event along the canal became a turning point. Conversations about revolution repeatedly became dominated by toxic politics, prompting us to question what the booth's invitation to open dialogue was enabling. This led us to look beyond human-to-human exchange and towards more-than-human relationships.
At the same time, we were exploring toxic ‘forever chemicals’ and developing Amuletics, the irrational art of warding off toxins, particularly plastics, through contemporary amulet-making. The Revolution Booth and Amuletics developed alongside one another, allowing ideas, materials and processes to move between them.
Together, these works document a shift in our practice: from facilitating human conversation to exploring how materials, objects, places and more-than-human forces might participate in the questions themselves.
The exhibition is not intended as the conclusion of this inquiry. Rather, the installation becomes another iteration of the Booth, a temporary meeting place and ground for further encounters, conversations and speculation.
We invite visitors to consider what a more-than-human revolution might mean. What might revolution look like if humans were not its only protagonists? What might materials, waterways, weather, plants, animals or other forces have to say? And what might change if we understood revolution not as something we do to the world, but as something we participate in?
The questions remain open.
Amuletics as a participatory element of the installation. Visitors created stone sounds, which were incorporated into the Revolution Booth sound world.
Unmute to hear.
Notes from the Revolution Booth brought together several strands of our practice, recording how an idea can change through making, encounter, and time.
We deconstructed the Revolution Booth – a structure that had travelled with us through several iterations of the project – and transformed it into a series of panels that divided the gallery space.
Images of more-than-human life, including fishes referencing Sonic Lighthouse, atom-inspired forms referencing Half-Life, and patterns suggesting chain reactions and nuclear power, traced the Booth’s trajectory toward becoming increasingly more-than-human.
Alongside the Booth panels, the installation introduced Amuletics, our practice of making contemporary amulets: the irrational art of making intended to ward off toxins, particularly plastics. Amulets made with Dudley people during previous workshops were displayed alongside magical motifs from The Art of the Grimoire, feathers, small diagrams and other amuletic assemblages.
Two interactive sound works invited visitors to move stones and trickle water, amplifying their actions through the sound system and allowing them to contribute to the evolving Revolution Booth sound world.
The installation explored learning and knowing through artistic practice as a process of transformation. Ideas accumulated, connected and changed over several years, with earlier experiments resurfacing in unexpected forms.
The Booth moved from being a container for conversation about revolution to a participant in an enquiry into more-than-human change, while Amuletics introduced questions of protection, toxicity, belief, and material agency. Bringing these strands together made the gallery a space in which connections could be noticed and new ones could emerge.
An artist talk gave visitors an opportunity to follow this trajectory and reflect openly on where the work might go next. Rather than presenting a resolved conclusion, the conversation became part of the work's ongoing development. Visitors contributed ideas, questions and suggestions, opening up possibilities that we could not have anticipated before entering the gallery.
Notes from the Revolution Booth therefore became both an account of change and a space for further change: a place where previous ideas could be reassembled, new connections could be made, and the direction of the work remained open.
