Lagg

Artist-in-residence with Natural England‘s Geodiversity team in 2024–25.

A collaboration with Dr Jonathan Larwood and Dr Barbara Silva, creating an installation exploring the deep-time and cultural histories of two National Nature Reserves on Morecambe Bay: Roudsea Wood & Mosses and Gait Barrows.

Lagg is an experimental radio play and sound installation ‘voiced’ by the more-than-human elements of these landscapes. Built from field recordings made in rock, earth, water, peat and moss – using geophones and hydrophones to listen beneath the surface – the piece is narrated through a series of non-human landscape ‘characters’: slate, limestone, water, moss, pollen, yew, ostracod and gunpowder.

The pieces are formed from fragments of text written in the field by Jonathan, Barbara and Rob, from conversations with local communities and experts, and from technical papers, scientific articles and local history ephemera. Together they form a polyphony – the many overlapping voices, rhythms and timescales that make up any single place.

These voices are narrated by people who live around the two sites: environmental managers and woodland restorationists, hill farmers, artists and schoolchildren, ranging in age from eleven to eighty-something. Giving the geology a speaking part in this way was central to the work. The play invites communities to lend their voices to the ground beneath them – the rock, water and living things that have shaped this place, and been shaped by the people who have worked and walked it for generations.

Across the two sites, the work follows a few connected threads: water in its many forms and timescales; deep time as something that can be felt as well as understood; and edges – the lagg, the shore, the unconformity, the gryke – as the places where change and diversity are richest. It also uncovers the hidden histories held in the ground itself. Research into Roudsea’s woodland led to a gunpowder works founded in 1798, whose powder – milled from local charcoal, Sicilian sulphur and Indian saltpetre – was carried across the bay and traded in West Africa for enslaved people. At Gait Barrows, the more recent scars of covert limestone quarrying mark the pavement. The piece holds these entanglements of slow geological process, ecological change and global networks of trade and violence together, letting the materials narrate their own histories.

The title – Lagg – refers to the transitional edge of a wetland, like those at Roudsea, shaped by the underlying geology, where the processes of diversity and change are at their most intense.

The work weaves the spoken voices together with field recordings and an original musical composition. Initial presentations were at the Royal Geographical Society and the National Gallery, London, in 2025, with the final work presented across 2026–27, including at Sonica Festival, Glasgow.

Voiced by: Jim Turner, Jane Routh, Eily St John, Ken Read, Elizabeth Clough, Deniz Johns.

This work is supported by a grant from the Geologists’ Association Curry Fund.