I am a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, moving image, sound, collaboration and participatory practice. My work explores human/nonhuman entanglements, urban ecology and the overlaps between folklore, popular culture and everyday life. Often using humour, absurdity and collaboration, I create immersive works that encourage audiences to reconsider their relationship with the natural world and overlooked ecologies within cities.
Through projects such as WildPing, I investigate belonging, ecological attention and collective experience by combining walking, performance, song-making, field recording and installation. My practice is shaped by curiosity, observation and direct engagement with place, often responding to seasonal change, wildlife behaviour and local histories. I am interested in how creative action can reconnect people with their environments through participation, play and shared encounters.
This thinking is expanded in my essay A Return to Belonging: Reclaiming Our Place in Nature Through Creative Response, which explores how creative practice can reconnect people with the natural world during ecological and social disconnection. Through performance, installation, walking, sound, collaboration and absurdity, the work examines overlooked urban ecologies and proposes belonging not as ownership of nature, but as active participation within a wider living network of humans, animals, materials and place.
Alongside ecological themes, my work draws from personal experience, using performance and material experimentation to translate internal states into physical forms. I work fluidly across disciplines, allowing projects to evolve through research, collaboration and lived experience.
WildPing Installation
WildPing is an immersive installation exploring human/nonhuman entanglements, urban ecology and the ecological crisis as a crisis of attention. Set within a narrow alleyway reminiscent of old Soho, the work transforms an overlooked transitional space into a site of listening, participation and collective noticing. Drawing on the atmosphere of Wardour Street and Dean Street, once the centre of the British film industry, the installation reimagines the alley as a speculative “Film Row” for ecological encounters.
Using projections, sound, AI-generated oversell film posters, moving image fragments and participatory elements, WildPing blurs cinema, advertising, play and environmental awareness. Instead of blockbuster narratives, visitors encounter short “Ping films” documenting fleeting moments of connection between humans, animals, weather, sound and place. These fragments are intentionally rough, humorous and unresolved, valuing participation and lived experience over polished spectacle.
At the centre of the work is the fictional concept of WildPing: an impossible ecological notification system that redirects the attention economy of digital technology back toward the living world. Borrowing the language of phone alerts and invasive notifications, the installation issues speculative “pings” inviting visitors to stop, listen and notice the wildlife and layered ecologies already present within urban space.
The alley becomes symbolic of ecological pressure, a compressed habitat where both humans and wildlife exist within shrinking margins shaped by development, noise and consumption. Through absurdity, collaboration and sensory engagement, WildPing proposes attention as a form of ecological reconnection. The work does not offer fixed solutions, but creates temporary moments where strangers gather, participate and become conscious of their relationship to place, environment and each other.
Image credits:
1. Collaborations
Top: Witness to the Wind — a collaboration with Ryan Simpson using found materials, reused dust sheets and wind.
Middle: Imagine the Kelp — hanging dust sheets, projection and sound created an immersive drifting environment.
Bottom: Dazzle Camouflage — a Sea Coal intervention transforming the UCA corridor with Norman Wilkinson-inspired vinyl patterns.
2. Relational Aesthetics
Top: Sea Splash — sea bathers transformed playful splashing into a visceral shared engagement with nature and emotion.
Middle: Orchestra of Nature — visitors created collective compositions using buttons programmed with birdsong and nature sounds.
Bottom: Five Sites, One City, One Wild Song — participants walked between Canterbury wildlife sites composing verses and singing.
3. Absurdity
Top: The Chrysalis — wrapped in cling film, Bluetooth speakers repeating “Help me!” then “What do you want?”
Middle: Nature Fights Back — an AI film a bull attacking a robotic cleaning machine.
Bottom: Being a Cow — dragged on a toboggan, a painted sheet and cowbell, bellowing and grazing between human and animal.
4. Performance
Top: The Cloak of Passing Things — public-stamped recycled shirts became a wearable cloak performance.
Middle: Larvae Runner — a Sea Coal collaboration using polythene sheets, a powerful fan and a runner inside an inflatable tube.
Bottom: Wil O’ the Wisp: Beating the Bounds — a wandering figure mapping overlooked wildlife, plants and seasonal urban change.
5. Poster Designs
13 WildPing Film Posters
A series of A3 AI-generated “oversell” film posters exploring human and nonhuman entanglements within the WildPing project. Set against the backdrop of Soho’s historic “Film Row”, the works blur cinema, advertising and ecology to reflect on spectacle, commodification and urban wildlife.
BA (Hons) Fine Art - Canterbury 
Hollie Pearce | Fine Art
