In her multidisciplinary art practice, Molly Macleod navigates the delicate intersection of ecological conservation and deeply personal material explorations. She utilizes unconventional mediums, such as plant tissue, salt, and soil, to create connections between humanity and the environment. She uses these materials in soundscapes, bio-banks, and chemical processes to engage her viewers in a creative dialogue that asks viewers to reconsider their place within fragile ecological structures. What she does ultimately bridges the gap between abstract scientific data and the felt human experience through narrative storytelling. Molly turns the "silent" crises of biodiversity loss and soil degradation into audible and visible events. This is why her work is relevant to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Life on Land.
Take, for example, her interactive sound installation Silent Seas. Commissioned for The Ocean Lab Aquarium in Pembrokeshire, Macleod’s piece brings the microscopic drama of the shoreline ecosystems to life. In the piece, she invites audiences to drop a pebble into a speaker-amplified rockpool at the aquarium. This allows them to hear both the miniscule life teeming in the pool along with the loud thud that the pebble creates. The act forces viewers to confront their own role in the visual and sonic disruption of similar habitats across the globe.
Just like the pool, marine life in intertidal zones today are constantly negotiating a landscape of shifting tides and harsh weather exacerbated by climate change. This means that they are increasingly losing landmass and are exposed to rapid daily temperature changes, ranging from 10 to 20 degrees every day, a phenomenon whose long-term effects scientists are still studying. On top of that, the University of Queensland has also found that this rapid change within intertidal landscapes is also affecting 625 million people who live within coastal communities. This is why Macleod’s literal amplification of coastal habitat sounds is important, as it helps to point out the underlying threats that seemingly careless human activity brings to coastal habitats and communities, especially for those whose lives are far removed from it.
Her project BIOME, on the other hand, sees her exploring the tension between the sterile aesthetic of bio-banked trees in laboratories and the crumbling, organic reality of the trees in their native habitat. In the project, Macleod investigates how these labs create seed banks and preserve plant tissues to create her own versions of them, choosing to document the Menai Whitebeam tree (Cerddin Menai) as only 30 of these trees now exist in the wild. She then presents her results artistically as an installation piece that also recreates and includes materials from their real habitats, allowing audiences to compare how the trees are being preserved in labs vs how they thrive in their natural habitat.
This work successfully shows how individual curiosity and citizen science can go a long way, encouraging her viewers to stay curious and think about their own little ways to contribute to species preservation and conservation. At the same time, it also critiques the idea of special revival in isolated labs. Through her piece, Macleod argues that storing seeds is insufficient without a deep, recorded understanding of the habitat in which they thrive. As proper species revival requires the ecological integrity of intertwined habitats, instead of just individual species longevity.
Therefore, it can be said that Molly Macleod’s work acts like a fun, easy-to-understand grade school science experiment. It serves as a vital bridge between the clinical detachment of scientific data and the visceral reality of environmental collapse. Her practice suggests that true conservation and today’s environmental preservation require not only just high-tech bio-banking or data collection, but also a collective witnessing and understanding of the intricate fabric of life that her inspiration, marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson, once championed.
For more information about Molly Macleod’s work, check out her website mollymacleod.allyou.net or Instagram @mollymacleodstudio.