KIERAN JENKINS
Composer | Sound Artist
The Market Place
The Market Place is a sound research project that documents the sound of the artistic process, craft production, and local industry of Sneinton Market, Nottingham.
This soundscape composition explores the presence of slowness, community and proximity found within industrial spaces and environments.
Following my 2025 research into the sound of decommissioned coal stations, I began a new body of work that aimed to document industries with a contrasting sound ecology, focusing the local, small-scale, and community-led industries.
Having recently moved to Nottingham, sound continued to serve as a tool for immersing and situating myself within my new environment — an auto-ethnographic process of discovery through listening.
For The Market Place (2026), I wanted to capture as much of the process between maker and material. With previous work focusing on large industrial machinery, powerful generators, the monumental infrastructures of steam and coal and the absence and alienation of its workers, here, I turned toward a contrasting industrial soundscape: one of intimacy, texture, and proximity. By recording the subtle rhythms and gestures of small-scale production, themes of slowness, community, and presence embedded within the sonic environment of this local industry began to emerge.
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 - in Luisa's Chocolates, carefully placed microphones that would record the process for making the UK's only 100% vegan handmade chocolatier. In Rose's Press, the sound of 100-year-old antique printing presses were captured through close-proximity recording with a range of geophone and contact microphone placements.
It is with hope that sharing this collection of community-gathered sounds and images can be used to document the beauty and simplicity found in reducing our connections to the cultures of speed, waste and excess prioritised through global capitalism, and to instead think of production in terms of closeness, proximity, and community threads.
Exhibited at By Our Hands We Make Our Way, 24th June 2026
