View In View Out: Breaking Down Walls in Weston-super-Mare and the Mendip Hills
23 June 2025
By Rachel Hare.
‘View In View Out’ (VIVO) is a unique, immersive soundscape and augmented reality trail which will open in Weston-super-Mare and the Mendip Hills this July. As Weston-based composer and lyricist Gwyneth Herbert explains, the title ‘references the desire to represent both the Mendip land and the people who look out upon it, and also the emotional internal landscapes’ which shape our world view and how the world views us. VIVO will explore both ‘the commonality that unites us’ and ‘the walls that keep us disconnected – from ourselves, from each other and from the land on our doorstep’. Mendip is one of six Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (or National Landscapes) which has been selected for Nature Calling, a national programme of new art commissions. The project asks: who owns these special places, how are they experienced, and why does it matter?
Described in The Sunday Times as ‘one of the country’s most exciting talents’, Gwyn calls herself a ‘musical adventurer’ who thrives on working in partnership with artists from different disciplines and people who may never have considered themselves artists. Gwyn, sound artist Jason Singh and ‘nature interpreter’ Chris Howard wanted ‘to explore the land alongside the people rather than imposing a way for them to appreciate it’ and this ethos has infused the project from start to finish. For example, the team invited teenagers from South Ward to take them on a tour of their estate, discovering together that ‘nature was there, waiting’ as they tasted sloe berries, touched cobwebs and found an eye in a birch tree. According to a national survey in 2024, young people aged 12 to 15 consider themselves less connected to nature than younger children. Initially resistant to the ‘boring’ outdoors, the teenagers from South Ward began to talk about what ‘nature’ meant to them: Is nature a wolf, but not a dog? Are we nature?
Gwyn observes that there have been many more ‘unexpected and extraordinary’ creative encounters across the town and in the Mendip Hills. A theatre group from central Weston conducted a ‘wish ritual’ where they offered ‘wishes’ from the community to the ash tree, which is sacred for healing in pagan folklore. People seeking sanctuary from all over the world held a drum circle at Batch Farm, playing a Kurdish song to howra (or the clouds). The team have spoken to people who work on the land – including dry stone wallers, farmers, rangers and the old Mendip warden – and Jason has collected the music of nature, such as the sound of streams and footsteps and the biodata of trees. Local primary-school children have written poems about Mendip’s ‘champion species’ like the adder and the greater horseshoe bat, and young people from the YMCA have written an anthem to mental health called ‘Heady Ouchy’. All these ideas inspired the narrative thread running throughout the work and two additional voices emerged, leading to poems from the perspective of a dying ash tree and Eliza, a nineteenth-century woman who lost her life at the hands of her miner husband who is thought to have been suffering from lead-induced psychosis. Gwyn notes that ‘nature turned out to be the ultimate composer of the piece’, describing how a storm broke out when recording a poem so that she felt she was ‘making in collaboration’ with the landscape.
The elements have been woven together into a 40-minute immersive soundscape that will run from the 14th to the 20th July in The Sovereign in Weston-super-Mare, and in two trails of augmented reality (or AR) boards in South Ward and the Mendips. Gwyn explains that the soundscape journey begins with the legacy of ownership, symbolised by the Mendip drystone walls, but ‘by the end, our walls have crumbled and we are all singing together in one voice, in the land that, ultimately, owns us all’. She says ‘I hope that what we’ve made in some way honours the rich multiplicity of voices, both of the land itself and the people around it: I hope people take that away that “there are so many layers of history, of stone, of sound, of story here – and my story is valid within this too”’.
VIVO was created by Gwyneth Herbert, Jason Singh, and Chris Howard in collaboration with local communities and supported by the Mendip Hills National Landscape Team, Sound UK and Super Culture. It is part of Nature Calling, the first national programme of new art commissions by the National Landscapes Association with Activate Performing Arts, funded by Arts Council England and Defra.
For more information about visiting the VIVO installations, see our website: https://superculture.org.uk/listings/view-in-view-out