I TURNED AND LOOKED
Conversations between music and photography
Saturday 11th July-Monday 31st August 2026
The Severn Studio, Brantwood
East of Lake, Coniston
LA21 8AD
MUSIC AND BEING
Jess Dandy, contralto
Debbie Green, movement artist
Alex Mills, composer
Clare Park, photographer
Dylan Perez, pianist
Bobby Williams, sound engineer
I TURNED AND LOOKED is a music and photography installation created by the interdisciplinary group, MUSIC AND 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, in Ruskin’s words, ‘truth to nature’. 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 AND 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’.
…intelligences as old as sunrise…
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.
Photography © Clare Park no images are AI generated; digital artwork by Matthew Tugwell
MUSIC AND BEING
give thanks for a life entwined
MUSIC AND 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.
JESS DANDY
‘a revelation’ – Richard Morrison, The Times
Cumbrian contralto, Jess Dandy, was born and raised in nearby Barrow-in-Furness, and has been Brantwood Artist-in-Residence since November 2023. She holds the 2025 Critics Circle Award for Female Voice and has been featured as a soloist five times at the BBC Proms/Royal Albert Hall, London. Her recordings have been nominated for Gramophone and BBC Music magazine awards. She sings internationally at major venues such as Carnegie Hall, Salzburg Festival, Berlin Philharmonie, and Palau de la Música Catalana. She makes her debut at Royal Ballet & Opera, Covent Garden, later this year.
Jess says of the project: After fifteen years away from the North – Modern & Medieval Languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, Vocal Studies & a Fellowship at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and half a decade between the road and London as a freelance classical singer – I wanted to grow back down into my Cumbrian roots and challenge the notion that a creative life would have to be a life lived elsewhere. With historic family ties to Coniston and Hawkshead, and a childhood at the water’s edge, I felt myself to be inextricably of this place. I love being a singer, interpreting the works of others, often long since past, but I also felt drawn to exploring my identity as an artist in my own right, a creator of fresh works, in collaboration with like-minded artists of music & other disciplines. I had given recitals at Brantwood, inspired by Ruskin, and seen my own thought patterns in his omnivorous, insatiable appetite for multiform truths. I wanted to cultivate a new cosmology with Ruskin as a living interlocutor, where the Sciences & Humanities, all times & all places, the everyday and the epic, might converge and concentrate themselves into a space for people to experience the wild complexity of our shared inheritance, a space soft enough for future possibilities to emerge.
ALEX MILLS
‘Music of supernatural poignancy, melodic but otherworldly, narratively urgent but poetically impressionistic’ – The Guardian
Alex Mills is a Welsh composer based in London whose work spans opera, choral, orchestral, chamber, film and installation. He and Jess began working together in 2017. His music explores emotional expression, ritual, and transformation, often drawing on nature, spirituality and ancient history. His work has been performed widely at major venues and festivals including the Barbican, Wigmore Hall and the Cheltenham Music Festival, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. He has a strong commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, working across visual art, performance and installation. His debut opera Dear Marie Stopes was widely acclaimed, and his work continues to be supported and performed internationally. His debut album, Look How Brightly, is due for release in May 2026.
Alex says of the project: As a composer, my work is often solitary and introspective. The gift of this project has been to be part of a process that is altogether more rich, expansive, and deeply collaborative.Working alongside five remarkable and distinctive artists, and in dialogue with the monumental landscapes of the Lakes and the intimate worlds within Brantwood, has opened up a seemingly infinite field of shared making. Feelings, emotions, sounds, memories, ideas, images, conversations, and shared moments have been woven together into a body of work that reflects both the depth of our co-creative process and the individuality of each voice within it. The result is a deeply layered work—something fundamental and life-affirming—that none of us could have made alone.Our offering weaves together Ruskin’s world, the deep, layered histories of the surrounding landscape, and threads of personal, local, and universal histories. It invites you to listen, to look, and to encounter Brantwood and the world beyond in new and expansive ways.
DYLAN PEREZ
‘Sublime and completely intuitive’ — The Sunday Times
Originally from Michigan, pianist Dylan Perez is a recitalist, chamber musician, and coach specialising in vocal repertoire. He has worked closely with contralto Jess Dandy for over a decade, and together they were awarded the Oxford International Song Young Artist Platform in 2018. His performances have taken him to major venues and festivals including Wigmore Hall, Milton Court, Cadogan Hall, La Monnaie, and the Copenhagen Opera Festival.
A dedicated collaborator, he works with leading singers across the UK and internationally, and performs regularly with his husband, tenor Nicky Spence. He is the founder of re-sung and co-curates Opera in Song for Opera Holland Park.
DEBBIE GREEN
to behold and be beheld
Debbie Green is a movement artist, performer and educator whose work centres on the expressive potential of the body in relation to sound, silence and space. Trained as a classical ballet dancer at the Rambert School, she worked professionally before moving into choreography and teaching. She spent three decades as Senior Lecturer in Actor Movement at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama and is co-author of Actor Movement: Expression of the Physical Being. Her long-standing collaboration with photographer Clare Park has produced numerous photographic series. Her practice integrates movement, intuition and responsiveness as a conduit for meaning within collaborative image-making.
Debbie says of the project:
A North London child; The Lakes beyond belief for me then but now an ongoing connection through my father’s Cumbrian relations. Brantwood is a place of wonder and it has been a privilege to work alongside music artists generationally younger than me and to choreographically respond to the text of Brahms ‘Four Serious Songs’. As photographic subject: my movement artist expressivity burgeons in front of the camera yet in total integration with Clare. We find rich symbolism through our language of props and clothing. Even so, great was my surprise emerging as Hengerdd - protagonist, narrator and visionary of ‘I turned and looked’.
CLARE PARK
‘...it would be inaccurate to suggest her focus is introspective - her photographs could be seen as depth soundings’ – Mary Powell, Creative Review
Clare Park is an award-winning photographer (MA RCA) whose practice explores identity, the body, and lived experience through long-term, collaborative image-making. Through her initial training as a dancer at Rambert, she brings a strong physical awareness to her work, often using self-portraiture, recurring props, and close creative partnerships—particularly her 30-year collaboration with movement artist Debbie Green—to construct layered visual narratives. Her images span theatre, portraiture, and personal projects, with commissions for major institutions including the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre. Widely exhibited and published, her work is held in major collections – National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, and the Parliamentary Art Collection – and reflects an ongoing engagement with transformation, memory, and the expressive potential of the human form.
Clare says of the project:
When I arrive at a new place, my senses are on high alert. This rapid visual scanning of infinite possibilities is an intense experience, an exciting moment that can never be repeated. The photographs I take embody a very personal way of seeing, a paring down from that first impression. What initially held my eye were the enormous heaps of spoil in the Coniston Copper Mines valley, and the stones called out for the introduction of a person into my frame. The collaborative process with Debbie developed from this place, informed by the music and our fellow artists. Human condition and land interconnect within the photographs under Ruskin's 'supervision' and by re-using elements from previous shoots in combination with the ingrained aesthetics of our dance training. I TURNED AND LOOKED speaks for all places even though it has emerged from one.
BOBBY WILLIAMS
Bobby Williams is a filmmaker and sound engineer specialising in recording and filming classical, acoustic, folk and jazz musicians, with a focus on achieving the highest sound and image quality. Jess, Bobby and Dylan have worked together for the past decade. Beginning with early experiments on reel-to-reel and 4-track cassette machines, his practice developed alongside his work as a multi-instrumentalist. He studied Fine Art, graduating with first-class honours, and went on to work in television and documentary before establishing his own production work. As a musician, he has toured and recorded internationally. His work brings together sonic and visual disciplines to sensitively capture performance, with close attention to detail and atmosphere.