An 18-month collaboration between award-winning poet Fiona Benson and sound artists Mair Bosworth and Eliza Lomas. Uncovering the fascinating world of insects, the commission culminated in a stunning series of sound poetry pieces split into three parts. Listen to the collection using the icon below.
Originally one of three projects commissioned as part of our 2019 Urgency Arts Commissions, this collaboration between award-winning poet Fiona Benson and sound artists Mair Bosworth and Eliza Lomas evolved into a much larger 18-month exploration into insects from across the world.
The fruit of the collaboration is a collection of poetry sound pieces split into three parts; Bioluminescent Baby, Insect Love Songs and Insect Chimeras. Featuring 60 poems in total, they include conversations with scientists, academics and experts as well as a selection of poems written and read by children and workshop participants.
Listen to the whole collection by clicking on the eye icon above. You can uncover the story of how they came to be below.
The sound pieces that Mair Bosworth and Eliza Lomas have created are works of great beauty. They take you on aural journeys deep into the world of insects, and the scientists and conservationists who investigate and protect them. In part, I love them because they tell you so much about process. Poems don’t emerge out of a vacuum, but out of a tremendous mulling over of information or experience, and a following of one’s interests and instincts.
Fiona is interested in the urgency inherent in an insect’s short lifespan, as well as the urgency of the environmental crisis and shrinking biodiversity. Her insect poems are love stories – capturing her fascination with these tiny creatures, painting wonderful images of insect life that we can’t help but relate to, and sparking a new appreciation for these small lifeforms that are all around us.
Filmed as part of their initial commission back in July 2019 at Ambios, a conservation farm near Totnes in Devon, the below video reveals more behind Fiona and Mair’s original motivations for the project and what they hoped it would achieve.
This project has been an attempt to enter the secret, bizarre, unseen worlds of insects through watching and listening to them, and speaking to experts and enthusiasts about their behaviour. Through recording, writing and listening deeply, we have tried to celebrate insects and to invite people to marvel at them with us. So really, these are love songs of a kind.
Travelling as far as the USA, Fiona and Mair have witnessed insect events including cicadas emerging in their tens of thousands, and mass illumination of fireflies. During these trips they made field recordings of the insects; interviewed entomologists, researchers, and enthusiasts; and responded creatively and collaboratively – via poetry and sound – to the insect world. The voices you hear in the first part of the collection, Bioluminescent Baby, are those of expert academics from the University of Exeter (both from our Penryn and Exeter campuses) and from further afield including the University of Columbia New York, and the University of Connecticut.
A selection of these sound pieces were originally presented as part of their initial commission and performed live at a sold-out immersive listening event at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum in November 2019.
As the project extended into 2020, sound artist and radio producer Eliza Lomas joined the collaboration to work on both the public anthology and Fiona's collection. To help form this part of the collection, Fiona ran a series of workshops which brought together the worlds of entomology and poetry and engaged over 200 people across the South West and beyond. These included The Poetry of Cell Division, a workshop which saw post-graduate Creative Writing and Biosciences students collaborate on creative responses to research into mitosis being undertaken by Dr James Wakefield at the University of Exeter’s Living Systems Institute. Also at the university she ran workshops with entomologist Clive Betts and small groups of students, staff and members of the public to discover more behind the moths that live around the grounds of Streatham campus.
A large part of this project has been the delivery of poetry workshops that encourage other writers – from the very young to the unmentionably old – to engage with insects. One of the most magical parts of this experience was listening to the recordings of people reading their own poems. Eliza Lomas has set them so beautifully; each piece has its own integrity.
As part of Insect Love Songs, Fiona also spent time in Cornwall running workshops with people from across the county. These included working with BA and MA Creative Writing and Professional Writing students at Falmouth University to inspire creative responses to her a collection of her own insect specimens. Poems generated from this workshop were recorded in Falmouth and a selection are included in the public anthology.
Also featured in *Insect Love Songs * are a selection of poems created at workshops that took place at the Eden Project. Using Eden’s insect collections, these workshops explored how the organisation uses predatory insects to naturally keep down pest numbers in their biomes rather than using chemical pesticides.
Similar workshops were also run at Thorverton Arts Exchange and Malika’s Poetry Kitchen in London.
It's been fascinating to learn so much about insects through the medium of language which crackles with descriptive power. From a sound design perspective, I consider the work analogous to scientists' focus on the minutiae around us: a microscope for the ears. The opportunity to be part of this chain of translation - from insect, to scientist, to poet, to listener - has been a joy and a privilege.
For the third part of the collection, Insect Chimeras, Fiona collaborated with printmaker and 2019 Urgency Arts Commissioned artist Catherine Cartwright to run a series of poetry and printmaking workshops at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum with children from Thorverton C of E and Stoke Hill Primary Schools. Inspired by insect collections held at the RAMM, the children created a series of colourful prints and poems.
I hope that these pieces will give their listeners new ways to approach these incredibly important cohabiters of our incredible planet, and to find ways – in these times of insect population decline – to protect them. We cannot love what we do not know.
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