Sounds from Quex Gardens

As part of our Sunshine Project, the Quex Garden team and project participants recorded sounds from nature and hand-made clay instruments.

This audio work was created between September 2025 and March 2026 in the Walled Garden at Quex. It uses a mixture of found sound, using different microphones and recording techniques, and improvised responses on instruments that were made as part of a series of workshops called ‘Sound and Clay’. During these workshops, Sunshine Project participants used listening as a tool to understand the gardens we work in from different non-human perspectives.

To make this piece, we thought about biodiversity and seasonal change in the gardens, as well as considering what is invisible to the naked eye. We used ‘pocket scion’ devices to record electrical data from the plants transformed into music, which you can hear in the piece, and we created our own clay chimes and singing bowls to use as percussion. We used hydrophones and contact microphones to pick up sounds in water and in the soil. What you are listening to brings together sounds made by humans but you can also hear the sounds of microbes, insects, birds, water, wind, and lots more.

We were inspired by the work of the Artist in Residence, Sam Parsons. to bring the living garden inside – as a celebration of the natural world, our place in it, and our duty as gardeners to protect it – and the soundscape will be played as part of Sam’s exhibition ‘Field  Guide – Future Edition’ in Gallery 1, from 1 April – 1 November 2026.

Sound recordings by: Sunshine Project Participants, Pedro Figueiredo, Rosie Carr,

Field Recording workshop led by: Pedro Figueiredo

Sound and Clay workshop led by: Julia Ellen Lancaster and Rosie Carr

Garden Soundscape edited by: Rosie Carr