KIERAN JENKINS
Composer | Field Recordist | Sound Researcher
The Market Place
The Market Place is a sound research project that documents the artistic process, craft, production, and local industry of Sneinton Market, Nottingham.
Reflecting on the consumerist production industry, where speed and excess in creation and consumption are drivers, this research explores the sound of slowness, of community, of locally created and sourced artisan production, and the connection between artist and product.
Following my 2025 research into the sound of decommissioned coal power stations, I began a new body of work documenting the local, small-scale, and community-led industries of Sneinton Market. Having recently moved to Nottingham, sound became a tool for learning and situating myself within my new environment — an auto-ethnographic process of discovery through listening.
For The Market Place, I wanted to capture the dialogue between maker and material. My previous work focused on large industrial machinery, powerful generators, and the monumental infrastructures of steam and coal. Here, I turned toward a contrasting soundscape: one of intimacy, texture, and proximity. By recording the subtle rhythms and gestures of small-scale production, I began to explore themes of slowness, community, and togetherness embedded within the sonic environment.
In The Watered Garden, I spent the morning recording sounds imperceptible to the human ear, using hydrophones and geophones to capture the movement of water passing through the soil and small pebbles that form the foundation of their plants and terrariums.
In By Our Hands We Make Work, I used contact microphones placed on the tree trunks and hand-powered tools used for Martin's wood sculpting classes, and in Luisa's Chocolates, carefully placed microphones that would record the process for making the UK's only 100% vegan handmade chocolatier.
It is with hope that sharing this collection of community-gathered sounds and images can be used to document the beauty of reducing our connections to the culture, waste, and excess of global capitalism, and to think in terms of closeness, proximity, and community threads.
The Market Place soundscape will be installed in Sneinton Market across July & August 2026
Location will be confirmed soon.
