Michelle Atherton presents ‘Errant Vibrations with the Underground’ research at Bath Spa University symposium

Michelle Atherton was invited to present her research ‘Errant Vibrations with the Underground’ at Fiction Machine IV Symposium at Bath Spa University considering methods of fiction and personification within art practice to engage with, and give voice to, more than human lifeforms and materials.

Michelle’s exploratory paper was based on her new practice-based art project Ecstatic Rot and the Soil Séance Sessions. She takes an autobiographical or autoethnographic approach, in an essay exploring listening to soil and what that might offer our relationship to the ground, death and transience. Going on to advocate for methods of sonic intimacy, intermittent attention spans and sensory processes. Not to reify or fetishize sound but to consider how vibrations from the underground might initiate more errant, wayward ways, of engaging with transience.

Michelle Atherton is an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and been awarded an ECRI fellowship at SHU. Her work holds a fascination with the relations, material dynamics and contradictions at play in day-to-day phenomena and experiences. The aim is look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics, and new imaginaries.