RAMM has announced SoundTracks, a Creative Arc project to connect people, nature, and history through guided walks.
Creative Arc is a unique collaboration between the University of Exeter, Exeter City Council and RAMM to explore how the museum and its collections can help shape a better Exeter. SoundTracks will bring groups of local Exeter people together this autumn to explore their interests through nature walks along Exeter’s iconic Green Circle network of paths and lanes. Community members such as mother and baby groups, local history groups, schoolchildren and local ramblers will be invited to take part in routes around Exwick, Redhills and Mincinglake.
Local sound artist Emma Welton has been working with RAMM curator Tom Cadbury to explore the past and present of the Green Circle. The walks will explore the history and archaeology of the area, while also helping to improve participants’ wellbeing by getting out into nature and connecting with other people and their own thoughts and reflection.
Emma Welton is a composer and performs on violin and viola. Her practice includes leading creative listening workshops and walks, and her Exeter Sound Walks were shortlisted by Walk-Listen-Create for the Sound Walk September award in 2020 and featured in 2022’s Art Week Exeter and Cygnet Theatre’s Dream Festival, as well as BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Emma is an activist composer whose practice is driven by the climate emergency and our place in it, combining recordings, live instruments and tools/objects.
“Rather than highlight sonic beauty spots, I spend equal time with sounds that we turn away from or filter out. I ask, what is the music? How is it made? What happens if we move or is revealed when we wait? Are there patterns? As quiet as I try to be, I hear my breathing, footsteps, clothing. I hear myself as part of an endless realtime composition.
Listening can reveal our relationships with each other, and with all of nature.”
Emma Welton
SoundTracks is informed by research into the benefits of nature on wellbeing by the Rowan Group www.rowantree.uk, and University of Exeter Professors James Clark and Stephen Rippon. Stephen is a landscape archaeologist whose work includes the Exeter: a Place in Time (EAPIT) project with RAMM. James is a medieval historian who is particularly interested in the monastic houses such as St Katherine’s Priory.
