KELPING — site 2.0 ash perier

About

Ash Périer is currently developing a in)disciplinary Situated practice working on projects merging environmental conservation efforts, experimental art approach and local knowledges from the fields she investigates. For the past five years, her work has been focused on water ecosystems with a situated approach.

Situated practices, a concept articulated by the philosopher Donna Haraway in 1988, refer to ways of producing knowledge through actions that are grounded in specific positions and contexts, rejecting the fiction of only one neutral, universal form of knowledge. They form a political project that challenges dominant and opressive regimes and supports collective, localized, and emancipatory modes of action attentive to humans and the entangled forces of the worlds they are part of.

Collaborating with artists, researchers, encounters and coïncidences, they create objects, texts, pluri-sensorial installations and methods that take care of water ecosystems by working on the alteration of percepts and affects with a concrete positive environmental impact.
Each sensory installation aims to reach beyond the limits of the art world by investigating contexts of environmental conservation and non-academic knowledges.

The aim of each project is not to en-
courage people to become more sensitive
(a convenient catch-all phrase) 
but to make them capable 
of greater attention.

CV

Contact

Ash Périer
ashleyperier1@gmail.com
Instagram : @ash.perier

KELPING

BACK

MURMURATION

MURMURATION is a situated and multidisciplinary research project initiated by Ash Périer that studies the destruction of underwater kelp forests on a global scale and more specifically in the Sydney region.

This project began in Sydney in 2025 during a collaborative field research involving artists (Maxence Obein and Ash Périer, local Indigenous knowledge (through members of Sea the Weed – Indigenous kelp ceremonies), and scientific marine conservation knowledge (through Aaron Eger and the marine conservation NGO “Kelp Forest Alliance”). With the common objective of taking care of the underwater kelp forest of Malabar in Sydney, this fieldwork was the beginning of a long-term collaboration uniting these three singular relashionships to the world through first and formost a listening position toward this kelp forest and it’s eco-political concerns.

What is kelp?

Kelp, also called « kombu » in Japanese, « varech » or « laminaire » in French, is a family of algaes that forms underwater canopies. These forests cover one third of the world’s marine coastlines. Very close to Belgium in Brittany or as far away as Australia, they are true ecological niches that support the lives of millions of beings and people. They play an essential role in water purification, carbon absorption, and the protection of ecosystems. Unfortunately, 40 to 60% of these forests have now disappeared worldwide, and one person out of two does not know what kelp is, even though 750 million humans live less than 50 km from an underwater forest. This shows how much this ecosystem remains unthought-of, both in terms of environmental conservation and in terms of geo-poetic explorations. Although they are often overlooked, a renewed interest in their preservation is beginning to emerge through various international organizations, including those involved in this project.

Method

As artist-researchers, we work based on encounters, from objects and materials created or found on site and from relational methods that facilitate exchanges between the different types of knowledge mobilized in this project.
Murmuration is a journey that keeps on transforming itself and that is part of in situ production circuits, defining itself as a space of hybrid collaborations bringing together multiple percepts, affects, and situated forms of knowledges.

Field recording of the soundscape and construction of hydrophones

For this underwater field research, Maxence Obein built two prototypes of hydrophones, perfectly adapted to this environment, making it possible to record the soundscape of this forest and to make audible the murmurs of the forest that are typically inaccessible to our human hearing.
The recorded sounds have been used to create a spatialized sound piece that allows the languages of the inhabitants of this forest to be heard by humans. Our recordings also produce data useful to the scientists of K.F.A (Kelp Forest Alliance) in a bioacoustic monitoring approach.The next step of this project is to test a hypothesis based on a study of the marine biologist Tim Gordon. In 2012, Tim Gordon worked on coral restoration and considered a coral reef as a symphony, who’s main musicians were missing (due to environmental loss) and that needed to be brought back to the coral reef in order to redinamise it’s biodiversity. In this study, he recorded the sound of those “missing musicians” that had deserted the reef and played those healthy reef sounds through underwater speakers in continu. Within just 40 days, positive results from this acoustic enrichment were noted, showing a faster attraction of young fish and consistent higher abundance throughout the experiment, demonstrating quick and strong impacts on reef biodiversity and fish population. After one year of using sounds to attract fish : damaged reefs with added sounds saw a 50% increase in fish numbers and attracted many more juvenile fish compared to quiet control sites, showing the power of "healthy reef soundscapes" to bring life back quickly.

Based on that study, our research asks : what if we do the same but in a kelp forest environment, with it’s specific species and singular conditions? And further, how can we co-enrich the different human communities involved in kelp forests by uniting our strenghts and uplifting each other’s weaknesses? These two questions are at the present center of this Murmuration research.

Meeting and collaborating with local Indigenous people

Ash had the opportunity to meet Arthur Little, Brendon, and Jack during their Indigenous kelp ceremonies – “Sea The Weed”. These traditions from the Pacific Northwest blend cultural knowledge with marine science to restore seaweed ecosystems, foster deep connections to nature through rituals (sunrise gatherings, touching seaweed), and teach about environmental resilience, using kelp not only as food but also as a symbol and a tool for cultural healing, environmental stewardship, and community cohesion. These events involve Indigenous elders guiding participants to interact directly with the sea and kelp, creating powerful bonds that support restoration efforts and honor ancestral practices.
During the fieldwork, the location of these ceremonies was situated exactly where the bioacoustic recordings had been taken, so an obvious connection was to be made. Coïnciding coïncidence...
Based on their initiative, the members of Sea the Weed invited Ash to participate in the rituals and to spend time together to envision ways to collaborate. They exchanged about their origins, what they want to do, their affective relationships with kelp forests, their historical heritages, their shared desires, etc. At the end of the time spent in Sydney, we were mutually enthusiastic about the idea of collaborating further on this project and of learning from their Indigenous knowledge into the awareness-raising, experimentation, and protection of kelp forests.

What emerges from this first research fieldwork:

Above all, it is links and stories that lead us to modes of affectation that are all the more relational between different human communities, but also toward algal and submarine sensitivities.
An opening toward becomings and desires that compose, assemble, and imagine a perceptual relational fabric mirroring the ecological density of kelp forests.
The creation of an immersive art installation involving smell, visuals, bioacoustics sounds, light and documentation of this research and it’s geo-political concerns.
The exploration of a vocabulary and a space of sensations.
The development of encounter methodologies inspired by the relational movements taught by algae and this field experience.
The beginning of a dialogue with the sensitivities inhabiting kelp forests (algae, epifauna, and fauna) through bioacoustics.
The creation of an edition for Kelp Forest Alliance, “How to Help Our Underwater Forests”.
The redaction and production of a book “Encounter with an underwqater forest : vertical blue, iridescence and relashionships in the making” as Ash’s Master thesis.