Following her sell-out performance of When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble, at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, we’re delighted to present the premiere of Miranda Whall’s When Seeds Speak: A Seedy Ensemble. Performers Miranda Whall, Owen Lloyd, Neil Luck, Yumino Seki and Angharad Davies will collaborate at the intersection of arts, sciences and farming to tell the story of the recently rediscovered Ceirch du Bach (Black Oat seed) – a resilient crop that once grew on almost every upland farm in Wales. The performance highlights the grain’s potential to contribute significantly to sustainable farming practices in the face of climate change, and to the broader hyper-local conversation about the management and farming of the uplands of Mid Wales.

Together, a visual artist, musician, dancer, musical improviser and composer respond and interact with the raw unprocessed dataset generated by the metabolomic fingerprint analysis of a Black Oat seed as well as conversation, interviews and audio from the lifecycle of the grain – sowing, harvesting, threshing, fermenting, cooking and eating.

The project offers a timely critique on how we understand and manage the complex relationship between nature, scientific data and humans, and how each element influences and is being influenced by the other.

About the artist

Miranda Whall was born in Cardiff, UK. She attended University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, The Royal Academy Schools, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has been a recipient of numerous ACE grants, and the ACE funded Berlin residency. She was awarded an Arts Council Wales Major Creative Wales Award and a Large Production Grant. She’s been co-investigator in several recent NERC funded projects and is a recipient of the inaugural Live Art Rural UK fellowship with Live Art Development Agency (LADA). Whall has recently directed and performed in a stage production When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble, Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Solo exhibitions include When Earth Speaks, Vane, Newcastle, Crossed Paths – Sheep, Oriel Davies, Newtown, Passage, Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art, Bath, is it ok if? Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and Crossed Paths – Scots Pine is in the Art Collection, Carlow, Ireland. Miranda is a postgraduate and PhD research supervisor at Aberystwyth University.

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