Spout is a sculptural sound installation by Alice Mahoney, developed through a series of guided walks exploring Bodmin’s watery past, present, and future. The project considers water as a shifting, cyclical force that shapes place, memory, and movement, asking how water continues to move through landscapes that have been controlled, altered, or hidden.
The walks traced an imagined water cycle through leats, springs, rivers, pools, lakes, cesspits, and subterranean sites in and around Bodmin, creating shared spaces for conversation and embodied experience. These journeys informed the development of the installation, bringing together sculpture, sound, light, and film, drawing on environmental rhythms, local mythologies, and material experimentation.
Responding to Bodmin’s visible and hidden water systems, Mahoney created ceramic sculptures designed to hold, channel, and move water. Working closely with historian and sonic experimenter Jonny Davey, she explored how water moving through sculptural forms could generate rhythm and sound. Using recordings from these experiments and from the walks, Mahoney composed an original audio work, transforming samples into layered rhythms and melodies.
The installation includes a new film by Naomi Frears, developed in response to the walks and sculptural process. Together, these elements form an immersive work that invites audiences to reconnect with landscape, water, and one another in new and playful ways.
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About the Artists
Alice Mahoney is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the entangled relationships between materiality, place, and human and non-human systems. Her work is grounded in an exploration of ecological and socio-historical interconnectedness, with particular attention to the layered geographies of post-industrial landscapes and their associated watercourses.
Working with clay, sound, and found or waste materials, Mahoney engages with environments understood as cyclical, impermanent, and continually shifting. Her sculptural, research-led processes examine the residues of extractive industry alongside organic, cultural, and ecological regeneration, situating her practice within wider conversations around land use, memory, and repair. Through embodied experience, speculative enquiry, and collective memory, she seeks to reimagine how we might reconnect with these places, foregrounding the potential of art to act as a conduit for relational, restorative, and re-enchanted engagements with landscape.
Mahoney enjoys disrupting ideas of correct methodologies and material processes, embracing experimental approaches that allow the behaviour of materials to guide outcomes, questioning notions of permanence, value, and authorship. Humour, chance, and unpredictability are integral to this way of working.
Recent exhibitions include Soft Ruins at Stick Figure & Sons (2025), Solid Sound Liquid Light at Two Queens (2024), CLUSTER at Flamm Festival (2023), Under / Over at Krowji (2023), The Redruth Albany Club at Kingsgate Projects (2023), and The Only Thing More Slippery Than the Elbow at Auction House, Redruth (2022).
She also plays keyboards in the band Disco Rococo.
Based in the Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Naomi Frears works across film and video, as well as printmaking, painting, and curatorial projects. Her work is shown widely in contemporary galleries, museums and institutions across the region and beyond.
She was nominated for the Film London Jarman Award in 2023, teaches Fine Art at Falmouth University, and regularly makes covers for the London Review of Books.
Recent works include a silent disco in a library made with artists Georgia Gendall and Liam Jolly as part of Tender Acts, a film with sculpture, sound, and giant curtains at Two Queens, Leicester with artists Stuart Blackmore, Leila Galloway, and Alice Mahoney, The Work, a film about artist Ben Sanderson for Harbour House Gallery, T-shirts for a show in Lincolnshire, and Problems Problems Problems, a show of 6 artists work in her studio – each artist asked to bring a work with a problem and describe the problem.
Current projects include Goodbye and Good Luck, a film commission for Art Centre Penryn; a film for Falmouth University about four island communities; a show of woodcuts and unreasonable thoughts at Auction House in Redruth; and All Going Nowhere Together – a choreography for 40 cars with sound by DJ Luke Vibert – which is being loaned by the Government Art Collection to Drive, an exhibition in a new space in Scotland.
