We Are Nature

How does nature make you feel? Discover Wild Chorus and Voicing Silence, two new artistic responses to the beauty, complexity and decline of wildlife, now on display at Manchester Museum.

Both Wild Chorus and Voicing Silence audiences us to pause and think about their relationships with the natural world: the times when they find joy and beauty in the life around us, or the times when they feel sad and angry at the threats to wildlife.

Wild Chorus was recorded and composed by sound artist Harry Ovington in the summer of 2020, reflecting a unique moment of global quiet. It acts as a time capsule of the first lockdown, blending field recordings of nature with weather pattern data transformed into sound. The soundscape captures three separate perspectives of the dawn chorus; the birds, the insects and a person walking through the landscape as the sun rises.

Voicing Silence ask what extension means, what has happened to biodiversity and how we have empathy with the world around us and with our non-human kin? The work has been created by artist Laurence Payot who worked with a variety of other artists to use dance, poetry, music and animation to answer these questions.