Nik Forrest (Concordia) and Kate Paxman (Plymouth)


Nik Forrest is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Their practice includes experimental sound performance, installation and composition, as well as experimental video and video installation. Their recent projects explore the ecological potentials of sound and listening as techniques to heighten attunement to entangled human and non-human materials, bodies and forces, and to the interconnected affective, social and environmental relations. They are currently working on a PhD at Concordia University in the interdisciplinary humanities program.

Kate Paxman is an artist, educator and practice-led PhD researcher in Media Arts with the School of Art, Design and Architecture at Plymouth University. Kate works with film and sound, paying close attention to geologies, entities and systems and building speculative narratives which explore our era of unavoidable climate catastrophe. Her work has received a number of commissions and awards, most recently from Aeolus Online, BEAST FEaST 2021 and Arts Council England, and her published work includes writing for ‘The Ecological Citizen’, a peer-reviewed ecocentric journal and THEOREM 2018, Cambridge, UK, Ruskin Arts.

In this presentation, Kate discusses her research for her film and sound installation Sirens (2021). Kate’s research is focused on sea caves in the shore area of Torbay’s Marine Conservation Zone where she implements a proactive methodology of research through observation, inspired by the field work activities of natural history, but expanded to include other ways of measuring such as through intuition and imagination, and using conjuring, augury and ritual. In her work for Sirens these techniques allow Kate to engage in an acknowledgement of an ecology of the senses and how non-humans and humans sense the environment, as she attempts to decentre patterns of exceptionalist thinking and apprehend the diverse sensibilities of others.