Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast

The final episode of the Love + Light season of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast is a new audio work by regular Fermynwoods collaborator, artist Sapphire Goss. Entitled Light Sensitive Materials, the luminescence we are so accustomed to seeing in her video work, is transubstantiated into audible vibrations, offering a rare insight into how light, dark, and everything-in-between might sound...

In this episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast, we hear a layered soundscape of voices responding to fire and forest sparked by Tipping Point , a powerful artwork by internationally renowned artist Luke Jerram, presented by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art in September 2025 in Hazel and Thoroughsale Woods — the largest ancient urban woodland in the UK — at the heart of Corby town centre,...

In this episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast we hear from a trinity of voices - artist Tobias Zehntner, composer George Turvey, and curate Chad Chadwick - discussing place, community, spirituality and creation in relation to Tobias' Halo installation, shown at the Grade I listed Anglo Saxon, All Saints Church, Earls Barton in April 2025. Originally commissioned in the Abbaye de...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast presents Ear for the Other - a sonic exploration of the importance of being receptive to, sensing, and feeling for 'the other', by Scottish artist Adrienne Murray. The other is felt in all things outside of the realms of self: within and around space, in the things which space contains, and in the voice and dreams of others. Adrienne...

Sarah Long's Tread softly because you tread on my dreams performs a fluid girlhood that invites the listener into the confidence of the autofictional character, Mary. She shares her strange visions in an effort to decipher their meanings. The work plays with the notion of the aisling, an Irish poetic genre where the nation appears to the poet in a dream in the form of a woman. Mary’s dreams of...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features Tread softly because you tread on my dreams, by Irish artist and writer Sarah Long. While the title carries a tongue-in-cheek tone, much like Sarah’s broader body of work, it also captures a quietly sparkling sentiment of love, light, and the intertwining of bygone pasts and potential futures. Through its poetic and fluid narrative,...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features a fragmentary and poetic discussion between Beccy Mccray and Jason Singh, facilitated by Marie-Chantal Hamrock, which melts together into a rich audio tapestry. Beccy tells us about Intuition Maps – a co-created artwork set in the woodland of Irchester Country Park that leads visitors on a journey through the landscape prompting us...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast with David John Scarborough presents a new work, Dead Wood Burning - a musical tapestry grounded in the idea of Ubi Sunt - a rhetorical question asking where are those that have gone before us. Deftly weaving together samples of music from Pete Seeger's anti-war song 'Where have all the flowers gone?' to moments of David's own music - this i...

The first episode of our Love + Light season of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast presents Of Immeasurable Consequence by Pale Blue Dot Collective. Pale Blue Dot Collective (artists Louise Beer and John Hooper) spent four months in residence with Fermynwoods to create Of Immeasurable Consequence - originally an immersive photographic and sound based installation installed in All Saint Churc...

The final episode of the Xylophobia season presents a radio play written by our podcast guest curators, SUBTERRA: Marie-Chantal Hamrock and Astrid Björklund. Told through the voice of the Narrator, we are presented with an eccentric cast of characters living and contending with an ever diminished and hostile landscape, made up of old mines, towering blast furnaces, an inexplicable blackness which...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast presents a new work, O' God of Weather by Saoirse Horne . O’ God of Weather combines elements of ambient music, folk song, and field recording, which together paint a vivid and imaginative world, rooted in messages of phantasm and fabrication. Somehow, through a painterly appreciation of texture, patience and solitude, the artist manages...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast with artist Tosca Terá n draws from fungal mycelial communication research to create a soundscape which the artist herself describes as ‘perhaps a bit ominous with a dash of science fiction’. Working with the bio-electrical activity of living mycelium, in Forest UnderSound = Ways of Knowing , Tosca reveals the ethereal fungi frequencies of t...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features a rich and profound work by A Ton of Worms - a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose primary focus is an immersive communing with Taxus Baccata (the English yew), through both classic art forms as well as field recording, whittling, fermentation, and propagation. Their work also addresses the conservation of persecuted wildlife...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features the work of Maja Zećo. In September 2022, Maja negotiated Hazel and Thoroughsale Woods from Corby town centre, Northamptonshire, as Silencer . Silencer is a performance in a sensory impairment soundwalking suit complete with earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones. Where Maja experienced the environment in complete silence the suit...

For this episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast artists Danny Treacy and Johannes Zits from our Treewilder exhibition at Barnwell Country Park, share a drink and conversation with Marie-Chantal Hamrock, one half of our podcast curators SUBTERRA.  With both artists work speaking to and of the trees, it has been suggested that Danny might represent the dark, whilst Johannes the lig...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features a new audio essay, The forest will answer in the way you call to it , by Hanna Tuulikki, encouraging a conversation with the woods, exploring her Finnish heritage, and weaving together family stories, folklore and song. The piece reflects on how ideals of ecology, identity, and nationhood are constructed and entwined. The essay feat...

A new video by Sapphire Goss in response to episode 16 of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast by Maya Livio. Episode 16 features an original sonic essay by Maya Livio and JP Merz, followed by a discussion with Maya Livio: Salvaging Birds contains a chorus of human and non-human voices, drawing attention to biases within avian conservation datasets. Here she has set a research-driven essay aga...

This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features Salvaging Birds , an original sonic essay by Maya Livio and JP Merz, followed by a discussion with Maya Livio. Through the use of what Maya calls expanded nonfiction, she constructs a haunting and lyrical sonic essay containing a chorus of both human and non-human voices. The work draws attention to the biases and misclassifications...

The first episode of the new season of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features an original audio work by Samm Anga and a discussion with Veronica Petukhov, who is part of the collaborative audio-visual duo Muto Major, with Samm. The pair responded individually to the theme of Xylophobia. Xylophobia is Fermynwoods Contemporary Art's new two-year programme funded by Arts Council England. T...

Musician and artist Rebecca Lee returns with a new sound work and discussion in the last podcast of our 2021 season. This is the second work Rebecca has made in response to and collaboration with the students from The CE Academy as part of our Alternative Provision programme. Last year, Rebecca’s You Can Hear The Wind presented student recordings made during workshops in the previous school year i...

In this episode, artist Simon Faithfull is in discussion with curator Yasmin Canvin about his influences, his work, and the dark humour of Sisyphus. Simon's work Going Nowhere 1.5 is part of the group exhibition Where to Stand in the Wind at East Carlton Countryside Park. More at http://fermynwoods.org/fermynwoods-podcast-13---simon-faithfull/

In this episode, the Fermynwoods Podcast shifts slightly from our current programme theme of how humans influence and affect the landscape around them, to how a history of changing landscapes can shape a human. Sayed Sattar Hasan is a British-born artist based in Oslo, Norway. His work explores the parameters of national identity, heritage and belonging and the faultlines between tradition and cha...

An enhanced discussion between Fermynwoods Director James Steventon and David Blyth. David Blyth is an artist and Course Leader in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. His work is informed by the craft skills of taxidermy and draws upon narratives of folklore, shamanism and cultural memory. David's work will be in included in our upcoming exhibitio...

Artist Lucie McLaughlin mines her everyday for sounds in the three-part audio work Clickety-Clack. In this work, we can hear the sound of seagulls, a printer dancing, music leaked through walls, the quiet rabble of voices outside a pub and the purr of a washing machine. In the form of a triptych of sound works, Clickety-Clack comprises field recording and constructed narrative sequences. Here, the...

Artist Marie-Chantal Hamrock presents new audio work The Iron, The Pitchfork & The Sow in this latest episode of the Fermynwoods Podcast. Building on her film There is Something in the Ground, There is Something in the Sky from our online Triple Harvest exhibition, Marie combines real and embellished Northamptonshire histories in this tale of ritual. Thank you to Corby Borough Council Archives and...