Arts Council England's Develop Your Creative Practice grant
Towards the end of 2020, Alice received Arts Council England’s Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant to explore how she can include musical hardware creation and coding in her compositional practice. Over the course of her DYCP, she worked with data and environmental indicators, with a particular focus on plants, to create sound pieces that explore climate change & environmental issues.
Alice’s DYCP journey
Between 2020 and 2022, Alice completed three weeks of R&D. As part of this, she received mentoring from an amazing group of artists (in alphabetical order): Anne Langford, Axel Kacoutié, Chris Drohan, Gawain Hewitt, Jason Singh and Mileece.
Across these mentoring sessions, Alice learnt about coding, hardware creation, music making and performance with plants, speaker arrangement, songwriting, sound design for audio, as well as professional development. Through this, she was able to develop new skills, departing from my previous practice and developing a new side of my work.
Artist residency at the Eden Project
In August 2021, Alice carried out an artist residency at the Eden Project, Cornwall. With help from Gawain Hewitt and some self-led research, Alice built an Arduino device that detects changes in the electrical current across a plant’s leaves.
She then spent time in the Rainforest Biome, collecting musical data from the plants. These changes were translated into musical notes that are played by synthesisers and musical software.
Alice has used soundscapes created during her residency for a performance at the Eden Project, an interactive web game and her upcoming EP.
In May 2022, Alice took part in Dark Mountain’s ‘When the Mountain Speaks with Us’ five day residential course at Schumacher College, Dartington, Devon. On this course, participants explored how the arts can be used to communicate the issues of climate change and ecological crisis.
Finally, Alice completed a week of R&D with Haiden McGill, created sonifications and visualisations of Yuraq Janka, a Peruvian glacier melting as a result of climate change. We collaborated with Rupert Stuart-Smith Rupert Stuart-Smith, who provided us with the data and is a Research Associate in Climate Science and the Law at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme.
DYCP has been pivotal in Alice’s career, not only supporting her through the pandemic, but allowing her to take a huge step in her practice. Through DYCP, she has connected with amazing mentors, collaborators and partners, such as the Eden Project.
As a result of her DYCP grant as well as other support she has received since, she has written an EP of music inspired by her time at the Eden Project, which is due to be released in early 2023. It has also allowed Alice to shift from solely working as a collaborator on other people's projects to an artist with a self-led practice.
