Laura Harrington

Fieldworking 2020 

16mm film transferred to video with sound. 29’19  

In Fieldworking, six artists, an ecologist and two filmmakers spend five days together in an off-grid location surrounded by moorland and blanket bog. Camping on the former site of an important scientific field station in Moor House – Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve, they explore ways to exist and work within the context of this remote and ‘boggy’ location. The work meditatively interweaves footage and field recordings from this journey.  With Chris Bate, Ludwig Berger, Sarah Bouttell, Luce Choules, Simone Kenyon, Fiona MacDonald (Feral Practice), Lee Patterson and Meredith Root-Bernstein.  

Co-commissioned by Tyneside Cinema (Projections) and MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art). Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Additional support from Natural England, Northumbria University and The Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

Liveliest of Elements  2015 

HD video with sound. 20’57 

Liveliest of Elements is a film about insignificance, fragility, shifting energy and an embedded immersion with place. Set entirely on a bare eroding peatland, the film, through sound and image, curiously observes the landscapes contradictory qualities, from liveliness and decay, bleakness and beauty, fragility and force. 

The film was developed from an elongated period of research into upland blanket peatlands working alongside physical scientist/geomorphologist Jeff Warburton within the Department of Geography at Durham University. The starting point was to create a film that went beyond the view of such a landscape as a seemingly mundane and passive environment and reveals this supposed nothingness in its entirety. While the image maintains a human focal length the sound shifts between a wide expansive field and intensely focused micro-movements and vibrations – the frenetic beauty of the micro with the haunting expanse of the macro. 

The work is a particular experience and comes from collaborating with both the renowned field recordist Chris Watson and sound artist Lee Patterson, individuals who whilst equally fascinated by sound, in this instance occupy quite distinct spaces. The film, deploying these differences in tonality increase our awareness of the layered nature of our relationship to landscape, our expectations, and connections, and within that also the multi-faceted reality of a site, expansive and vast across all scales.  

Commissioned by Invisible Dust and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Additional support from The Leverhulme Trust, Durham University, The North Pennines AONB Partnership and Woodhorn Museum. 

Laura Harrington PhD is an artist and CNoS postdoctoral researcher at Northumbria University. She makes work that considers the complex relations between humans and landscapes, often through experimental fieldwork, cross-disciplinary research and collaborative working. Her practice operates between the interdisciplinary boundaries of art and environmental sciences and for the past decade she has been collaborating with sites, individuals, and institutions in the field of geomorphology and ecology. Using a variety of methods and media, including filmmaking, installation, drawing, fieldwork and listening, Laura’s practice centres on ‘upstream consciousness’, a framework that connects rivers, peatlands and other upland and mountain ecologies to global currents. Process and interaction are also central to her practice, with research both physically and conceptually embedded in, and significantly informed by, her direct experience with specific landscapes. Her practice-based PhD upstream consciousness: exploring artists’ fieldwork through geomorphing, spiralling and co-productive ecologies was in interested in the capacity of artistic methods to support new forms of ecological thinking.