How can we map human life in harmony with birds? 

An exhibition at Frampton Marsh RSPB Reserve, Roads Farmhouse, Frampton Roads, Boston, PE20 1AY

Open Monday – Sunday 10.00 – 4.00

Featuring work by Karen Eng & Liz Kelleher

At their Frampton Marsh reserve, the RSPB have created a paradise for birds. Everywhere you look they gather, bathe, feed, fly in huge numbers. Two artists are showing work here in the viewing gallery at the reserve as a result of engaging in the Wash Residency, and their work responds to the sounds and atmospheres of the extraordinary environment outside.

Liz Kelleher 

Strata (Graphic Score)

This oil painting, is a visual record of the diverse sounds created by the birdlife inhabiting the Wash and surrounds. Inspired by the spectrograms of the Merlin Bird App, the chorus and cacophony are articulated through gestural markmaking, texture and colour and rooted in a grid of scratched map lines. Some of the paints have been made by Kelleher from collected local mud and plants.  

Liz Kellehers’ artistic practice is rooted in the narrative potential of the South Lincolnshire Fens, with a central concern being historical and current threats to the area’s natural ecologies, exploring and reinterpreting both historical and contemporary narratives and objects. 

She experiments directly with the ‘material’ of her research such as agricultural paraphernalia, organic objects and matter and mock archaeological remnants which coalesce into large scale, process driven sculptures. Her ongoing body of work ‘A Fenland Archive’ interweaves large scale metal/mixed media sculptures, casts, prints and an archive of found, salvaged and collected objects from the area, working with communities to question the value and significance of found objects and the current and increasing threats we face. 

Karen Eng

Migration Symphony

This is a generative audiovisual installation that renders the rhythms of bird migration at Frampton Marsh as a living composition. Drawing on real-time data from the reserve, the work treats each species’ arrival, presence and departure as a distinct voice – some sustained for months, others passing through in days – overlapping into an ever-shifting chorus across the migratory year.

Each species appears as a hand-drawn mark abstracted from its own anatomy: the curve of a Curlew Sandpiper’s bill, the webbed arc of a Brent Goose’s toes. As departure nears, marks grow restless and agitated before scattering outward, an echo of zugunruhe, the pre-migratory restlessness observed in birds preparing to fly.

Sound kinetics are likewise generated from migration data, and every species is tuned so that overlapping voices remain in harmony.

Conceived for continuous display at the reserve itself, the work invites visitors to experience the marsh as a persistent, many-voiced event with its own internal rhythms of departure and arrival.

Karen Frances Eng is a multidisciplinary artist exploring how meaning accretes through interactions among place, culture, nature, imagination and technology. Her associative, process-led practice begins with close observation and chance encounters, charting unexpected connections as they emerge. Through the Department of Ontological Cartography – an imaginary institution and evolving framework for her practice – she creates protocols for noticing, naming and mapping extraordinary realities layered within the apparently ordinary, using embodied observation, speculative systems, and traditional and emerging media. She resides within the ever-shifting overlay of air, land, water and light at the edge of the Wash.