A Weight to Entice Buoyancy

Paradise Works x Manchester International Festival 2025

Manchester International Festival 2025 x FESTIVAL SQUARE x Paradise Works
A Weight to Entice Buoyancy is a sonic and material installation by Amber Cronin (Adelaide, Australia) that invites audiences into a shared space of attention, reflection, and resonance. Rooted in ecological research and ancestral knowledge, the project draws on fieldwork with scientists, researchers, and activists, traditional Latvian dainas, and contemporary choral composition to explore how we remain connected—emotionally, ecologically, and socially—in times of complexity and transformation.

Presented as both an exhibition and a series of public performances across Manchester, the work brought together textile sculpture and layered choral sound. Each element was shaped by acts of care and embodied knowledge.

At the heart of the exhibition was Against the Rush of the Arrow, a new body of textile-based sculptural works. These wall-based forms evoked tools, fragments, and offerings for surviving endings. Through gestures of folding, knotting, and binding, Cronin drew on ancestral practices of care, persistence, and repair. The works spoke to the inevitability of collapse while quietly insisting on the power of ceremony, interdependence, and collective resilience.

Alongside the sculptural works was a new choral composition A Weight to Entice Buoyancy, developed with composer Emma Borgas (Adelaide Chamber Singers) and sound designer and folk musician Kaurna Cronin, and performed live during Manchester International Festival 2025 by members of Manchester’s Kantos Choir. Drawing on the lyric precision of ancient Latvian dainas and the intimate “prayers for the future” written by climate scientists throughout Amber’s extensive foundational field research, the performance held space for grief and hope—moving between breath, silence, and harmonic layering.

Paradise Works
Exhibition + Sound Installation July 4th - August 3rd

Public Performances

  • Friday 4 July, 2.00 – 3.00pm – Festival Square, MIF25

  • Saturday 12 July, 2.00 – 4.15pm – New Bailey Street, Salford (followed by a drinks reception and artist talk at Paradise Works, 5.00pm)

  • Sunday 13 July, 2.00 – 4.15pm – New Bailey Street, Salford

  • Thursday 17 July, 2.00 – 3.00pm – Festival Square, MIF25

    The sound work unfolded within the gallery at Paradise Works. Live-choir performances with Kantos Choir took place at Factory International and in unexpected public sites across Manchester, creating moments of surprise and depth that interrupted the everyday for audiences. By situating choral gestures in open, urban spaces, the work invited passersby into encounters they may not have otherwise sought out—drawing new audiences into the themes of ecological grief, resilience, and care. These interventions made space for reflection within the flow of the city, transforming ordinary streets into sites of collective attention. In doing so, the performances not only extended the reach of the exhibition but also created shared moments of resonance, where art became a vehicle for connection across Manchester.

    Within the exhibition, the sound installation created a continuous soundscape that held the sculptural works in a shared field of listening and reflection. The layering of choral voices with silence and resonance allowed the textile forms to deepen into their thematic groundings, amplifying their sense of offering, ceremony, and care. Together, sound and sculpture worked as interdependent elements: one evoking the presence of bodies and breath, the other holding the weight of materials and gestures. This interplay created an immersive environment in which audiences could move between personal contemplation and collective resonance, grounding the wider public performances within an intimate, embodied experience.

Essay by Andrew Purvis


Our tidal breath is an autonomic function; the steady inhalation and exhalation occurring without conscious thought. I ask that you concentrate on it now, observe the flood and ebb of oxygen entering and leaving your body. A lungful is a scant measure: only about six liters of air. For as long as it takes you to read this short piece of writing, I want you to be as attentive to your breathing as a singer, or a deep-sea diver; aware of the preciousness of each breath and of the fragility of the organism that relies on such insubstantial sustenance.  

As an artist, Amber Cronin has immersed herself in the world of ecological research; her practice is performed alongside and in response to the work of organisations such as the Nature Conservation SA, South Australian Seed Conservation Centre,  SA Forestry, and Trees for Life. In speaking with Amber about the processes of data collection that she has observed amongst these field researchers, it strikes me that their deep, diligent vigilance has an almost mystical quality: volunteers listen to birdsong in order to track declines in species diversity in much the same way as Ancient Greek ornithomancers read omens from the flight and cries of birds. In an era of unprecedented environmental precarity, this field of investigation is the scientific equivalent of theological eschatology: a study of last things.  

Through her work, Amber is keenly attuned to the sense of loss and fatigue that environmental researchers feel when confronted with their own findings. She is also aware that this grief is a compass; the title of her new work, A Weight to Entice Buoyancy, alludes to the ballast which provides stability to ocean-going vessels. The title, she says, acknowledges ‘the need to be with the heaviness and complexities of the current moment [...] in order to move forward into uncertain futures.’ 

This work recognises and seeks to ameliorate a lack: as a society, we are yet to formulate the ceremonial framework through which we may communally acknowledge and process environmental grief. Aptly multi-disciplinary, A Weight to Entice Buoyancy provides us with the various components of a rite, including ritual garments and textile talismans, embroidered with community sourced prayers of hope and resilience.  

At its center is a new choral piece, composed by the artist in collaboration with musicians Kaurna Cronin and Emma Borgas. The form and language of the lyrics are directly inspired by Latvian dainas, traditional folk songs that weave together themes of pre-Christian mythology, daily life, resilience, and nature. In drawing from her own Latvian heritage, Amber finds correspondence in the past’s anxious awareness of humanity’s vulnerability to the vagaries of the seasons. While ours might be an era of unrivalled climate instability, we are not unique in our apprehension of these forces. Emerging from the Western world’s long era of climate complacency, there is perhaps some comfort to be found in reconnecting with the concerns of our ancestors; in knowing that we have never been alone. 

This sense of continuity in the face of rupture and the assurance of community is what gives ceremonial traditions their placatory power. By singing together, harmonising, we find connection; through a joined exhalation, it is hoped that we might find respite from feelings of vulnerability and isolation. So, as you observe the movement of air into and out of your body, think on the fragility of all things, experience a sense of passing, and take comfort in knowing that you do not breathe alone. 



A Weight to Entice Buoyancy would not exist without the insight and generosity of:

  • Tom Borgas – who has been dedicated to the realisation of this project from its inception

  • Emma Borgas – composer, vocalist and collaborator

  • Kaurna Cronin – sound designer, composer and collaborator

  • Andrew Purvis – writer

  • Jutho / Julie Thornberg-Thorsøe - costume

  • Thomas McCammon – photographer / visual identity

  • Ramsay Taplin –  documentation photographer (Adelaide)

  • Breige Cobane - documentation photography (Manchester)

  • Jessica Bennett – UK curator, Paradise Works

  • Robin Broadly – technician and install, Paradise Works

  • Fallow - exhibition design

  • Paradise Works

  • British Council

  • Manchester International Festival

Kantos Chamber Choir:

Ellie Slorach (Artistic Director)

Eleonore Cockerham

Sarah Keirle

Dominique Saulnier

Lorna Day

Jess Conway

Toluwani Idowu

Robin Wallington

Robin Morton

Alistair Donaghue

Alexander Kyle

James Savage-Hanford

Sam Gilliat

James Connolly

Edmund Phillips

Henry Page

This project was made possible thanks to support from:

Creative Australia, The Australian Cultural Fund, James Allen, Anton Andreacchio, Hannah and Andrew Andreyev, Thomas Borgas, Lilian Choo, Lesley Forwood, Ben and Jamie Gardner, Jane Howard, Elizabeth Nowell, Libby Raupach, Leigh Robb & Andrew Purvis, Mary Lou Simpson, Lisa Tarca, Triton Tunis-Mitchell, Henry Wolff, Nunn Dimos Foundation, Human Kind Studios