A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
A project of embodied listening, as absent presence, to places of increasing marginalisation, where the uncompromising, non-negotiable ‘rural’ and industrial simultaneously intersect and elide; unearthing the inaudible, unnoticed, unremarkable, or inescapable in a Suffolk landscape.
Each sound is an unedited field recording with no assigned sequence, accumulating as they become unearthed; captured with equipment discrete and light enough to be carried while out walking.
The Caged and the Free emerged after relocating to rural Suffolk and being confronted by personal memories, assumptions and expectations with regard to the concept of ‘rural’. In this project, field recording has become a way of processing witness to this fragile place of eerie disquiet.
Through the practice of walking and performing, acoustics are gathered evidencing the conflicting demands of extraction and extinction associated with perpetual growth and expansion, where genetically engineered technologies are quietly turning fields into labs blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic.
In reaction to the wider Suffolk landscape, field recordings are gathered through the practice of quiet activism forming a score for the Forest Garden Project in collaboration with the non-human, within the framework of a quarter-acre, nature rich, edible forest garden initiative, created and maintained since 2016.
‘…to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.’ David Abram.
© Sophie Standford, 2022-2025 ongoing
Sound and Moving Image Collection, British Library
Listen