I Turned and Looked
Conversations between Music & Photography
by Music & Being:
Jess Dandy, contralto & Brantwood artist-in-residence; Debbie Green, movement artist; Alex Mills, composer; Clare Park, photographer; Dylan Perez, pianist; Bobby Williams, sound engineer.
I turned and looked is a music & photography installation created by the interdisciplinary group, Music & Being, for the Severn Studio at Brantwood, Coniston – the home of 19th century polymath, John Ruskin.
Emerging over two and a half years of residencies, the work asks what it means to attend seriously, sensuously, and collectively to a place – and to be changed by it. At its heart is a desire to create an installation space soft and intricate enough to engage with the deepest parts of our shared human existence. Brantwood is not scenery but solvent, source, provocation, and living environment — a place whose lifeforms and histories exert cumulative, visceral force.
…to perceive this world, you must remain very quiet, prone to whisperings…
I turned and looked speaks ‘truth to nature’ (Ruskin). Copper mines and brickworks meet picturesque postcards, and become entangled in a deeper, somatic sense of ecological consciousness. The natural world is not mute but sensuous and many-tongued. The music, recorded in the sandstone cocoon of Cartmel Priory, already lay dormant at Brantwood – it merely had to be perceived, channelled, and carefully re-assembled by the collaborators. Field recordings fly and crawl their way through storeys and strata of piano, voice, and spoken word to create a temperate rainforest of sound. This is biological music – dense, layered, filigree – alive with interdependent intelligent forms. Robin wingbeats trace their way over rockfalls in deep geological time, RAF fighter jets collide with the foliate musics of lichen & fern – the delicate and immense interfused. This is not monoculture but site-specific ecosystem — polyphonic, porous, and full of hidden continuities.
The photographs actualise the decisive, embodied power of turning towards. I turned and looked is the recurring Biblical phrase of revelation – of true sight through active re-orientation – what Ruskin referred to as the artist’s ‘innocence of the eye’. Both observer and observed look with incision and compassion at an environment at once breathtakingly beautiful and marked by centuries of deforestation, mining, and hardship. The images belong to a longer lineage of allegorical iconography, and through them, we catch glimpses of a restless, metamorphic world, infinite in its complexities and dilemmas, hot in its searing evidence of love.
Running through this forest of symbols is the figure of Hengerdd — from Old Cumbric, carrying the sense of Old Song. It is her world that we encounter in the Severn Studio. Hengerdd is not simply a character, but the ensouled Earth itself, an animating force, a visionary into the imaginal realm. She is Ruskin’s ‘genius loci’ (spirit of place), a shapeshifter, the Ancient of Days. Masked and unmasked, it is this multiform Hengerdd we glimpse – like a wild animal – in the photographs. We hear her voice in the music and spoken word, oracular, chthonic, invocatory. The music she leaves with her footsteps becomes a glistening trail, her spoor, a matrix of Old Song.
Music & Being treats John Ruskin as a living interlocutor, whose thought is not monolith but living philosophy, open to re-purposing, change, and challenge. I turned and looked explores a new Gothic methodology of granular coarseness, imperfection, variety, and a fresh Northern art of ‘mountain brotherhood’. Ruskin’s writings on Truth as Impression influence both the photographic and musical use of montage, showing reality to be greater than the mere chronicling of ‘fact’. It is not without thought however that the protagonist of this piece is a mature female body and a mature female voice. We first meet Ruskin in his own time and with a shared heritage through our engagement with Brahms’s 1896 work Four Serious Songs, settings of the Bible and Apocrypha, before allowing this to unravel and mulch in the steep wood; to find its way into fresh, new life. The installation thus positions heritage not as a tribute to the past but as a re-animation of it. It asks what we might do now that we have – for our time – inherited the Earth, and what responsibilities we carry in making anew ‘that which exists under the Sun’.
Part listening room, part secular chapel, I turned and looked invites visitors into an ecological matrix in which sound, image, history, and the more-than-human world are woven together in one charged and living space.
Opening Weekend Events
The Making Of I TURNED AND LOOKED
Intelligences as old as sunrise
Saturday 11th July 2026 4-6pm, followed by dinner on The Terrace
Sunday 12th July 2026 4-6pm, followed by dinner on The Terrace
Join Music & Being as they explore the making of I turned and looked through live performance, conversation, and a guided view of their new music & photography installation in the Severn Studio.
About Music & Being
Give thanks for a life entwined
Music & Being is an intergenerational group of artists working with music, photography, and movement, to explore what it means to live, die, and make art in an endlessly complex, entangled world. They are particularly interested in the ways in which human beings have interacted and continue to interact with the Earth, problematising the perceived binary between nature and industry, and exploring deeper, ensouled ways of belonging to a vast, interconnected web of life.
Brought together by Cumbrian contralto & Brantwood artist-in-residence, Jess Dandy, Music & Being comprises movement artist, Debbie Green, composer Alex Mills, photographer Clare Park, pianist Dylan Perez, and recording engineer Bobby Williams; each leading practitioners in their fields.
Since February 2024, over five residencies at Brantwood, Music & Being has developed a shared language of collaboration that refuses the narrowing effects of professional identity. Artists are not confined to their disciplines, but invited to bring the full breadth of their lives and interests into the work.
The pianist is thus composer, improviser, parent, philosopher; the movement artist re-imagines the world through her readings of medieval mysticism and contemporary stained glass; the composer sings to the stars and explores Jungian archetypes. One of us becomes a father; two become grandmothers, and an aunt and a grandmother are lost. The work emerges from lived experience as much as from craft. Rather than tidying artists into defined roles, Music & Being creates a generous, permeable space in which practices expand, overlap, and are transformed through shared seeking.
Photography © Clare Park
no images are AI generated
Digital artwork by Matthew Tugwell
For more information on ‘I turned and looked’, including individual artist information, please see: