About
Artist, Lecturer and Creative Coach
Miranda Whall lives and works in West Wales, where she engages in both solo and collaborative practices. She works from her garden studio, directly in the mountains, and in the theatre. In the studio she is currently developing an ongoing meditative and labor-intensive series of durational drawings and sculptures, which are the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of data points derived from scientific studies on natural phenomena such as soil, seeds, peat bogs, and glaciers. On stage, she collaborates with musicians, composers, and dancers to create generative, experimental improvisations in response to the scientific datasets. In the mountains, her recent work featured an embodied durational performance where she lay in a self-dug ditch for 24 hours, reciting the data points emitted from the surrounding soil sensor network to global audiences via livestream video.
Miranda Whall’s deeply immersive and posthumanist practice merges art and science in a way that is both performative and meditative. Her durational approach, particularly the many hours that she spends with scientific data, is a means of being present with the natural world, emphasising her strong sense of ecological awareness and care. She is interested in being with data as ‘one would be with a friend’ suggesting that data could be seen as a ‘being’ – not a sentient, organic living being but as a data body, that can exist through different means and to different ends, and that possesses its own kind of existence and relationality. Her dual practices—creating in the studio and collaborating in emergent live performance— explore how we can engage with and interpret environmental data from multiple ethico-political, material and non-representational perspectives, suggesting that Whall is not just processing information but also interrogating the power dynamics and environmental implications embedded in data. Whall describes herself as a “shepherdess” so adding a poetic layer to the laborious and detailed process of transforming raw scientific data into art. She is embodying a caretaker role for the earth, guiding not just the data, but the attention and awareness of her audience toward the natural elements and processes she engages with.
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 currently a recipient of the inaugural Live Art Rural UK fellowship with Live Art Development Agency (LADA). Whall has recently directed and performed two stage productions – When Seeds Speak; A Seedy Ensemble for the Seligman Theatre, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales and 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 and lecturer at Aberystwyth University. Whall is currently makign work for Soil; The World At Our Feet for Somerset House in Jan 2025, a landmark exhibition examining the role soil plays in all our lives, co curated by the Land Gardiners Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy, curator and writer May Rosenthal and Claire Catterall, Senior Curator at Somerset House Trust.