In June 2026, Fiona Brehony takes up a three-month artist residency with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Working across Oslo and Femundsmarka National Park, the residency places her within one of Scandinavia’s leading environmental research institutions – an organisation that bridges ecological science, social research, and public engagement.
The residency offers a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of art, ecology, and environmental justice. In Oslo, Brehony works alongside Dr Helene Figari and the Just Urban research team, whose work explores access, quality, and fairness in urban green and blue spaces. Oslo is one of the greenest cities in the world and a city in which that greenness is sharply unequally distributed: the poorest neighbourhoods in the east have the least access to blue and green space, the highest exposure to pollution, and the least say in how those spaces are planned and developed. Working within this inquiry, Brehony is developing Water Symphony, a poetic audio-visual work that follows water through Oslo’s divided geography, from the western fjord edge to the rivers flowing through the east, asking whose water this is, who gathers beside it, and who shapes what it becomes. Drawing on the city symphony tradition, the work gathers observed fragments of everyday life beside Oslo’s water into resonant meaning through rhythm, sound, and visual materials that explore what planning frameworks and policy documents leave unmeasured.
In Femundsmarka National Park, she will join Dr Rose Keller in soundscape fieldwork, mapping sounds, species, and people’s experiences of sound within the park. This strand focuses on the Røa, a ‘wild’ river once threatened by damming but ultimately protected, offering a direct counterpoint to her earlier work on Manchester’s Irk – a river reshaped by gentrification. Alongside Keller, Brehony will spend time with those who know the river closely, including local river-monitors, gathering personal river memories through conversation, sound recording, and film, and exploring how the Røa’s protected status has shaped both the landscape and the lives connected to it.
Across both strands, Brehony will develop a creative research archive – field recordings, photography, interviews, and written reflections – that will form the foundation for a future sound and moving image installation. The residency extends her ongoing inquiry into how creative practice can translate ecological research for wider publics, and how listening, in its fullest sense, might open new ways of understanding our relationship to the natural world.
