Sarah Peebles is a Toronto-based installation artist, composer and music improvisor. Much of her work explores digitally manipulated found sound and unconventional methods of amplification. She has also collaborated with artists, technicians and bee biologists on a series of projects addressing pollination ecology and biodiversity, entitled ‘Resonating Bodies’ since 2008. I loved her ideas on reciprocity, which, indirectly, is what this podcast tries to do by sharing the work of ecological artists like Sarah and their vision of a world where we can peacefully cohabitate with the more-than-human world.
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Imagine stepping into a world where the secret lives of native, wild bees are amplified, revealing a symphony of tiny movements and vital connections. Sarah Peebles’ art invites us to observe and listen closely to nature’s diverse, essential players and reconsider our role in its delicate dance.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Concept of Reciprocity
01:00 Meet Sarah Peebles
02:24 Engaging with Biodiversity
05:24 Art as a Medium for Science
10:14 The Role of Art in Healing
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Behind the Story
Sarah Peebles’ journey exploring art and biodiversity began with a concern: despite years of recording natural sounds, she saw no real change in environmental awareness. This led her to collaborate with wild bee biologist Professor Lawrence Packer, sparking a passion for native bees and a desire to make biodiversity tangible through art. Her ‘Deluxe Log’ and other "Resonating Bodies" installations are a testament to this dedication, offering a unique window into the hidden world of these essential pollinators and the habitat that supports them.
Transcription
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Sarah Peebles
What can we reciprocate? How can we reciprocate since, you know, the world keeps us alive on the one hand, and on the other hand, all these things, birds and you name it, right? Fish and moose and beaver, these are things we love. So if this is the world we love, we're going to have feelings about how we might want to do positive things to keep this world we love as nurtured as possible. And we also hopefully want to ask, how do we keep our own ability to be alive and thrive here as humans?
[00:00:51] Claude Schryer
Episode 230. Sarah Peebles is a Toronto based installation artist, composer and music improviser. I met her in her home and we had a lot of fun. Much of her work explores digitally manipulated found sound and unconventional methods of amplification. She also collaborates with artists, technicians and BE biologists on a series of projects addressing pollination, ecology and biodiversity entitled Resonating Bodies. I loved her ideas about reciprocity, which indirectly is what this podcast is trying to do by presenting the work of ecological artists like Sarah and how their vision of a world where we can peacefully cohabitate with the more than human world seems possible. How can we reciprocate?
[00:01:54] Sarah Peebles
I do a variety of arts, but of the different things I do, it's working with biodiversity, trying to address biodiversity and trying to create a mental image of biodiversity, especially in relation to native bees and pollination, ecology and habitat, as well as looking at feedback loops now and diversity. Not just diversity, but what happens with ecosystems with all of the feedback loops that go on and how we can be a part of that and how we have been a part of that interaction with ecosystems as human beings. Like recognizing this has always been the case and always will be the case. So I, you know, I make art that is environmental in that sort of way. I also play music and do, you know, free improv and composition. And that's sort of like a parallel life that's not necessarily looking at the ecological side of things, right? Sometimes it is.
But yeah, a long time ago I have to say I came to the conclusion that after spending a lot of time outside recording outdoor natural, quote unquote natural sounds and sound and the acoustic environment and specific sounds and making audio works regarding ecology, I didn't see anything change. I thought I'm spending an awful lot of time doing and energy doing this. What's changed now since 20 years ago I started doing some of that and I thought, well, absolutely nothing.
So is this futile or what? And I just kind of came into opportunities to, I Would say, pivot my approach to how I might want to engage in those same questions and engage my audiences specifically, just really through chance. I came across, through social connections, a really great bee biologist, does native bee stuff, Lawrence Packer, a long time ago, and got talking to him and realized what I learned from talking to Lawrence was really, really vital. And wondering, how do I. How can I, if I can at all, tell the story of native bees? Maybe agriculture, And I don't mean honey bees, I mean native bees, because you have to start there before you get complex with agriculture. I just figured, let me investigate this first.
And I found that a very rich subject matter, really. And so I got to know more and more about it and have honed in on how I want to get people to form a mental image of biodiversity or how I might be able to help facilitate that.
[00:05:24] Claude Schryer
Well, I saw some of your work at the Museum of Nature at the Rewilding show, and it reminded me of that connection with sound and music and how it crosses borders, you know, so maybe you can give us an example of a recent work so that people can make a mental image of what you're trying to accomplish in this sort of hybrid world of art and, I guess, science, art and environment.
[00:05:50] Sarah Peebles
I don't know how you define it. Well, it's kind of like science opens the door to art. And I'm not collaborating with scientists to do new science or to help them do science necessarily, although some people have taken inspiration from some of my designs in their science, which I found deeply gratifying. But a good recent thing is what I'm calling Deluxe Log, which actually goes way back to some of the beginning experiments I did with Deluxe Log, Only I did a lot better than I first did back in 2009. I think it was the first design I sought out. And it was taking a lock and slicing into it and using a router to create some channels that you can see, tunnels that you can see. So maybe people don't know what a router is.
It's helping me to mimic what beetles do when they vacate wood they've been in. So it's creating a partial tunnel, you can see, and covering that with plexiglass and then coupling to the wood, an accelerometer. So it's measuring the very, very minute accelerations of the wood within the wood. So it's not measuring, you know, air, but rather wood vibrations as the insects inside move. And that accelerometer becomes a microphone. It acts as a microphone, very, very delicate one that you access with headphones. And this is all.
This approach has been facilitated through working with Rob Cruikshank, who's my partner and also an artist who works with electronics himself. And he finds the subject matter interesting, too. And developing the approach with the tree that's been modified is really helpful because helps people to understand where native solitary bees and solitary wasps might live. About 30% of the diversity of native bees. I don't know if that's also 30% of native wasps. So we'll just talk about bees. 30% of the diversity of bees is going to be in vacated beetle tunnels and pithy stems and things like this, which you can see.
Most bees are tunneling into the earth. That's harder to work with. So this is repeatable. So you put the headphones on and you take a loop, a very nice small magnifier, and open the door, which is not really like a normal door, Part of the wood functioning as a door to these tunnels. And you can see bees coming and going and creating nests, bringing in pollen, bringing in materials around them, maybe having interactions with parasites, parasitic flies, parasitic wasps, other bees. Lots of stuff goes on inside the log.
[00:09:29] Claude Schryer
And if we were to walk over to the next room here, could we play with it?
[00:09:33] Sarah Peebles
Oh, absolutely. I.
[00:09:35] Claude Schryer
Let's do that.
[00:09:36] Sarah Peebles
Yes, let's do that. It.
[00:10:07] Claude Schryer
So now that we've heard a bit of the. The log, it's not fair to. To just leave so quickly. But I'm interested in your thoughts on. On the role of art in some of these complex issues and how working with. With bees, collaborating literally with bees and, and others more than humans, how does that help us heal some of the wounds that we have around us?
[00:10:35] Sarah Peebles
Well, I don't think I'm collaborating with bees. They're not collaborating with me. They don't care about me at all. They're doing what they do. So I'm helping to provide places they do what they do that we can access. It's not that these things are all that helpful for them in the long run, because what's helpful for them is how we manage land. But to give ourselves opportunities to see what goes on is potentially really powerful.
It's certainly very rich. I'm doing this because I believe it has the potential to help everybody who encounters it make different decisions in their lives. They might go away thinking about what pesticides might do to these very, very small things they just spent time with. They might think a bit more closely about if they're going to mow their entire lawn or are they going to put Some goldenrod in or whatnot, leave some dead logs. How are they going to manage their land? They might just want to find out more about native bees. Why are native bees around us still and in what way?
You know, they might want to dig a bit deeper. They might want to ask some questions about what happens when we, you know, farm and create food, our food systems. Do we do that in a way that is useful, valuable for bees, detrimental to bees? There's a lot I could say, but I'm trying to do what I can in a. I have a limited poss, you know, I have a limited sort of opportunity to interface with people. So instead of telling them in a five page or a 50 page booklet answers to all those things, it's a little bit easier to just allow people to have a sense of wonder and go from there. Although these things are backed up with some explanation about bee biology, usually in an artistic form as illustrations.
So I've collaborated with people who do these crafts, people who are wood burning artists, people who are woodworkers, you know, any way I can think of bringing in context, right, as well as the people at the venues who bring context to what's going on. So that combined can, I think, at least expose a decent number of people to this really important world. And of course, it comes back to feedback loops of life. So we're not just talking about only native bees. You start looking a little more closely and you see in your front yard, maybe inside your tulip one day, a spider that's caught a bee and who's going to eat the spider, do you think? And you know, it goes on and on, so it's quite rich and wonderful, but it does require some time and observation.
[00:14:02] Claude Schryer
Well, you've already answered my last question, which is what can people take away or action points. You observe the natural world, respect it and let bees be bees. But do you have anything to add to that in terms of, now that people know your practice a little bit, what do you suggest they do?
[00:14:21] Sarah Peebles
I just know my own response. My own response is, hey, this is pretty crazy how we do agriculture and we're backing ourselves into a great big corner and we don't have to, we don't have to do it like this. Capitalism is making it, you know, pretty tricky to change things around, right? But we do have choices. We do have choices. We do not need to use neonics, we do not need to do many things the way we're doing them.