Shifting Waterscapes - Multimedia Exhibition + Performance + Visual Score
Shifting Waterscapes was a collaborative exhibition between Sood and sound artist/writer Ellen Wiles which ran at Thelma Hulbert Gallery between January and April 2026. The exhibition delves into a series of unique watery places in flux through multidisciplinary works involving sound, poetry, moving image, visual art, and other mixed media. The works explore the experiential wonderment of waterscapes, their affective and sensory qualities, while also addressing issues of water pollution and politics, and reflecting on themes of movement and memory, degradation and restoration, and entangled relationships between human and more-than-human lives. Featured bodies of water range from wetlands and rivers to tidal islands, distributed from the South West of England to the Northern Isles of Scotland.
At the heart of the exhibition is an immersive installation titled 'Springs and Seepages' conceived by Wiles and Sood as an imaginative response to Otterhead Lakes: a watery nature reserve located by the source of a river in Somerset. The title draws on a unique feature of its ecosystem: a rare sequence of springline mires that support hundreds of species of insects and plants. An ambient audio work was composed from field recordings and elements of improvised live musical performance recorded in situ by Sood and Wiles. The film explores watery distortions of temporality; hanging canvases, made in collaboration with printmaker Emma Molony, were been dipped in the mulch of the mire itself a; and a series of polymer photogravure prints were produced by Sood with water from the site. The exhibition opening featured a live improvisation by Sood and Wiles.
