Sarah is a cellist, singer, and poet who explores our relationships with nature. She creates immersive performances blending live-looped cello, vocals, and poetry, inspired by direct experience with the environment - from Arctic glaciers to mossy peat bogs. Alongside collaborations with Greenpeace, COP26, and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, she bridges art and science to highlight climate and ecological issues to inspire connection, wonder and hope. 

In this guest blog, Sarah shares her recent work 'Bog Breathing'.

Bog Breathing

Bog Breathing is a creative response to experiencing Denton Moor alongside groups of people; leading writing workshops, taking sound recordings of the mosses on site, and learning about the site’s restoration and potential future through Yorkshire Peat Partnership’s restoration work and data collection. As the soundscape and poem unfolded, it became integral to tell a story of reciprocity with the land; one which invited people to be part of the future to the moor.

Denton Moor is a patchwork of data, history, timescales and potential. I wanted the work to reflect the site as place where lots of different voices intersect. The italic sections in the poem are a collection of data entries relating to the measurement of key indicators on the moor, and quotes from poets, community groups and school children who spent time on site with me. The visual design of the poem is inspired by data visualisations illustrating fluctuations in the site’s water table.

The cello and voice were recorded in the colloquially named “bog bothy” over two days and were all improvised. I had planned to use these improvisations to inspire recordings for a composition, but the more I worked on the project, the more it made sense to keep these improvisations as they were, held in time and place.

Babbling pops of sphagnum moss rhythmically accompany the improvisations. They were captured via a contact microphone which was probed into hummocks and pools across the site. This perspective on the plant world was a new discovery for me, and the sounds captured offer a stark contrast to the bleak and windswept stereotype of the uplands. 

Much like the landscape in recovery, this soundscape is not a fully sculpted piece with a visible end point. It was breathed into existence collectively, gently nudged into being by the place and time we found ourselves in, and it will never be the same again. 

Bog Breathing forms part of a multi-media exhibition as part of Yorkshire Peat Partnership’s ACE Bogs project. It is currently exhibiting at Leeds City Museum until April 2027.

Yorkshire Peat Partnership

This exhibition is the culmination of a two-year project led by Yorkshire Peat Partnership to help people in West and North Yorkshire get closer to the region’s peatlands – closer in the physical sense but also closer in understanding.

It’s only when people understand something that they come to care about it and want to see it restored or protected. The aim of ACE Bogs (Access, Citizen science and Engagement on Bogs) was to help people to understand what a precious resource they have right on their doorsteps.

Working with and on Denton Reserve, at the southern end of Nidderdale National Landscape above Ilkley, the project recruited volunteers from community groups, colleges, local schools and naturalist societies to engage with their peatlands through citizen science. Through their monitoring activities, ACE Bogs volunteers played a vital role in assessing how restoration has been improving Denton Reserve’s peatlands. They also gained an understanding and sense of responsibility for these magnificent brooding landscapes.

Throughout the project, a series of artist-led workshops enabled volunteers to express their responses to peatlands through drawing and spoken word. Participants worked with Keighley-based visual artist, Naseem Darbey, and Skipton-based musician and poet, Sarah Smout, to reflect upon and respond to their experiences on peatlands. The entire project was documented on traditional photographic film by photographer, Juliet Klottrup.

What you see in this exhibition is the product of a collaboration between a community of people learning together, exploring and responding to a habitat in transition.