Our 2025 Nature Writer in Residence was the awe-inspiring Ashley Holmes. Ashley is a Sheffield-based artist whose practice blends elements of visual art, sound and music to hold discursive spaces around relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories.

Ashley will be creating a collection of ‘Regulation Rhythms’ - meditations that will guide us to subvert the ownership of land and music through embodied connection with our natural world. We’re so excited to welcome the awe-inspiring Ashley Holmes as our 2025 Nature Writer in Residence. Ashley is a Sheffield-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice holds discursive spaces around relationships to sound, memory and oral histories.

During his residency, he will be working on ‘Constellations, Interludes’,  a series of audio compositions made up of various field recordings that document the sonic textures of local built and natural environments. Recorded by Ashley and the Peaks of Colour community, the compositions will sample the sounds of various locations across Sheffield and the Peak District to think about collective listening and embodied ecological knowledges and perspectives.

Ashley’s sound-based works foreground sonic processes and biological systems such as delay, reverb and echolocation as a way of navigating the world and understanding space through sound. In returning to the same places to record and re-record, Constellations, Interludes will emphasise the capacity of sound as alternative cartographic and archival practices that document the places we inhabit. 

The residency will relate to Ashley’s ongoing research around the production and dissemination of Black musical practices that disrupt notions of ownership and copyright law. The compositions will challenge ideas of our relationship with land as being singular or dominant (for example ‘conquered this mountain’ or ‘completed this walk’), or that our relationship to place should be stifled by lack of ownership (90% of the Peak District is privately owned).

Much like the audio itself, the residency will be layered and made up of 4 different moments. Layer 1: Field recordings made by Ashley and a handful of community members / Layer 2: Ashley creates a first version / Layer 3: Walkshop where community are invited to make and contribute their own recordings / Layer 4: Ashley creates second version alongside the nature prompts.

Constellations, Interludes will be available digitally and as a limited edition tape cassette, and will offer space for listeners to be with the resonances, details and intimacy of the sounds produced by the Peaks of Colour community. How can we think of listening as a practice that is collective, that is embodied and that is connected to the human nervous system. How can sound enable us to be more mindful of the spaces we occupy and question what our impact might be?

Designs by Kohenoor Kamal