PRACTICE
The advisory work and the artistic work are the same investigation approached from different directions.
Both ask the same question: what intelligence is already present that we have not yet learned to read? Both work with pattern, lineage, and the understanding that what looks like absence is often compressed information waiting for the right conditions to become visible.
The artistic practice is where that inquiry has no client brief, no outcome requirement, and no institutional frame. It is where the methodology is made, not applied.
Honorary Fellow — Arts University Plymouth, 2025
Honorary Fellow — Arts University Plymouth, 2025. Awarded for sustained contribution at the intersection of artistic practice, technology, and social transformation.
SELECTED WORKS
L3b1a: "These people were my relatives, my ancestors. And this place could be my refuge." Mixed media — Hawarden Castle collection · 2023
Earth Echoes Immersive sound art · Friends of the Earth · Greenwich · 2023 earthechoes.earth →
The Future is Sound: Symbiotic Symphonies Co-production with The Future is Sound · Alexandra Palace Theatre · 2024
THE RITUAL OF INHERITED CODE
An ongoing artistic research project exploring how biological, ecological, and algorithmic systems share relational intelligence, and what happens when that intelligence is removed.
The source codes of nature and the source codes of the self are the same document. DNA. Soil. Algorithm. Western technology copied the architecture while removing the relational intelligence. To remember the source is an act of repair.
Each work in the series is made directly onto an original page from a 1899 Times Atlas, the atlas of imperial cartography at the height of its confidence. Each map corresponds to a territory on the Ada’s maternal haplogroup L3b1a migration route. Each holds a systemic inflexion point from 1899. All of them are still unresolved.
The question threading every map: What type of ancestor do you want to be?
MAP 1
L3b1a: "These people were my relatives, my ancestors. And this place could be my refuge." — Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
Mixed media on original 1899 Times Atlas page A0 · 841 × 1189mm · Replica vintage gilded frame · Ivory matting Hawarden Castle collection · 2023 · Acquired
L3b1a is Ada’s maternal DNA haplogroup, a West African lineage estimated to be approximately 12,000 years old. This map traces the L3b1a migration route from Egypt to Guyana, where Gladstone's father once owned sugar plantations. The 1899 Paris Arbitration, the same year as the atlas, drew the border that the Essequibo dispute still lives inside, currently before the ICJ, with judgment expected in 2026.
Submitted to an open call by Gladstone's family for the Temple of Peace at Hawarden Castle. Selected and acquired for the permanent collection.
MAP 2
L3b1a + D4b1a2: Original Instructions Nature Wrote the Code First — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Mixed media, gold thread on original 1899 Times Atlas page A0 · 841 × 1189mm · Unframed 2025–2026 · Unique work · Available
The North Polar Region map from the 1899 Times Atlas depicts the pole as a blank centre. That blank was not empty. It held four thousand years of Inuit navigation, the genetic source code from which every person on every expedition descended, and the relational intelligence the cartographers had no method for including.
Ada’s haplogroup L3b1a and haplogroup D4b1a2, carried by the four Inuit men who stood at 90 degrees North with Matthew Henson on 6 April 1909, both descend from the same East African maternal ancestor. Africa is the Arctic's genetic origin.
A single continuous gold thread connects every leyline on the map, passing through the blank centre on its way to and from each location. Always returning. Accumulating. As DNA does. As mycelium does. As the relational intelligence of the 1899 cartographers continues to connect, despite everything.
Each leyline carries the material reality of that location now: Iran (sanctions), Gaza (Lavender extraction), Sudan (12 million displaced), Congo (cobalt 70%), Bangladesh (18 million / 70%), Guyana/Essequibo (11 billion barrels · 1899/2026), Haiti (1947), Western Sahara (1975).
"Every boundary is a wound." — Wilson Harris
IN DEVELOPMENT 2
The second strand of The Ritual of Inherited Code is in active research: DNA Sonification and Field Listening, recording soil at ancestral lineage sites and developing a methodology for translating biological inheritance into immersive sound. Arts Council England application in progress.
The maps are the proof of concept. The sound art is what the funding unlocks.
“Collaborating with Ada on Earth Echoes has been a wonderful shared journey of exploration. I look forward to our calls as a highlight of my week. Through our work together, I have seen her unique ability to support people to feel safe enough to open up to their own ancient wisdom and to connect with nature. She is endlessly creative, and it is a joy to work with her to bring her ideas into being.”