Interviews with Artists
David John Scarborough
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Interview by Sarah White
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Published in June 2026
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Presented online with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Earth-Stepper follows a mythic family and a host of animal voices on a pilgrim’s journey through ecology, kinship, and burial. At intervals throughout the assembly of the virtual world, David met with Sarah to develop the writing and world-building of the artwork. This interview follows a year's worth of critical conversations.
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Language in the world is utilised in different registers. The proclamation or declaration, speech, dialogue, narrative. The text you have written is somewhere between a psalm, a spell, a chant, a lament, a eulogy, a riddle, an exaltation, a conversation, a song, and a command. You move between these forms and give them shape through the voices of various characters. You have collected, borrowed and repurposed words, sentences and stories from a range of time periods and localities: words taken from those close to you, and those you have never met. What do you find when you inhabit the words of others? What do they offer you, and how do they change you and change the world you are making, a world littered with many voices?
I’m typing these words with my two thumbs onto and into the Notes app on my iPhone, trying to think of what to say. Much of the text in the world of Earth-Stepper was arranged in the same way. Crouched, hunched over, in a corridor, in the dark. Waiting for my children to fall asleep. Writing my own words, pasting the words of others, ideas and voices began to become interpolated. Looking back, I was trying to find my own experiences in the words of others to find a language for grief, for fathering. For some sort of kinship with the natural world, for which I don’t believe we have a word in the English language. Part of my practice involves thinking about how, in British culture, story and place might be embedded in one another. In the words of others, I found routes to follow, places which I could not always visit myself. I was carried by the words of others, on a sort of pilgrimage, through an imagined landscape, an idea of a place. Finding the right words, for me, offered direction.
David John Scarborough, Earth-Stepper, 2026
This is something I relate to strongly. I regularly find myself existing in the words of others, inhabiting them as words which articulate that which I did not realise I was feeling, or did not know how to say. I have experienced this most recently, in the book Transgressive Devotion where the writer repeats, throughout the book, the phrase, ‘On the morning when I woke up no longer believing in God…’. The repetition of the phrase turns this into an event which keeps happening again and again. Is there a connection in this work with your own navigation of faith and doubt, and its entanglement with loss?
I find this very hard to talk about. The work itself is made in the working out of these things, in repetition. I think there could be the perception that if you’re repeating yourself, or a moment, that you’re stuck, that you’re not progressing. A morning repeating and returning and recurring. I don’t find stasis in that idea. I don’t think it means that you’re stuck, if you keep finding yourself mumbling the same sought words. Sometimes that’s all you can do to keep yourself going.
David John Scarborough, Earth-Stepper, 2026
You also speak of the relationship between culture, story and place, and I think locations are significant in your work. In Earth-Stepper, there are markers and cairns in the landscape, which are sites of memorial and symbolism. How do you think about site in relation to the digital realm of the game, which is both a specific place, but can also exist everywhere at once?
One of the places in Earth-Stepper is an open-air structure called Volvelle Bothy. The rooms contain electric blue roots and looping sunrise animations made by Ama Dogbe. A volvelle is a paper construction of rotating illustrated discs. Sewn one atop the other, they can be moved to align planetary positions and eclipses on calendars. In the 16th century, cartographers could use these tools to forecast astronomical events such as the position of Jupiter in the night sky for a given latitude, time and date.
As I assembled Earth-Stepper, I thought about how cartographic tools such as volvelles and Ordnance Survey maps can bring us both closer and further away from a landscape. Mapmaking can guide us through a terrain by providing a vantage point that we could never normally see with our human eyes. It also presents us with an abstracted view of a place and time, creating distance between our selves and our immediate surroundings. Indigenous traditions such as Songlines store cartographic and cultural data in a very different way, encoding it in the landscape of a community through shared generational storytelling.
Building Earth-Stepper meant building my own map, my own cosmology, a biblical imaginary, a way of working through a form of spirituality that is digital and embodied, negotiated. Somewhere to spend time. It’s not a specific location so much as a specific emotional terrain. I spent far too long trying to figure out a phrase for an inverse psychogeography, how a feeling could create a landscape. Bachelard writes about how the memories of childhood homes, of attics and cellars, form a specific emotional tenor in the adult mind. The remembered house becomes an interior landscape which exists long after we’re grown; a cosmic domestic. I started to consider digital space as a cosmological space, or a spiritual site. A distributed story-space, a technological word-hoard. A networked site that could produce experiences that felt spiritually significant within embodied life.
David John Scarborough, Earth-Stepper, 2026
At the time of reading your text, I was also reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, and found resonances with the story of a married couple going in search of their lost son, not truly knowing where they were going, but with only fragments of memory visible, other aspects hidden under a mist of forgetfulness which covered the whole land. Which other writings and stories have fed into these worlds, and what do they each bring to them?
I had hours watching a walkthrough and reading write-ups of Sable on my phone. The lexicon Landmarks formed much of the ethos of the world. I cribbed most of the place-names from here. I also spent time combing through the forums of a site of Old English poetry, which houses mouthy discussions about the Pagan-Christian origins of the texts. There are many other reference points, gathered over many years. Thinking through the ethics of repurposing other texts became part of the development of the world, a way of thinking through folk histories, generational storytelling, and the responsibilities that come with that. The spine of the telling is an apocryphal fable about the burial of the biblical patriarch Adam. After years of gathering and sifting words, I recognised that my own autobiography had fallen in the cadence of this fable.
One versioning of the story was performed as a Cornish play known as The Creacion of the World, at the time of the English Reformation in the 16th Century. The play preserved Cornish language and vernacular Catholic theology at a time in which the English Protestant state looked to standardise religious expression and national identity. In my sharing, the story follows a mother and son as they carry a father’s body back to his homeland. Unable to enter, they bury him outside the gates with three seeds in his mouth, from which a forest grows. In Earth-Stepper, you wade through the terrain as you wander through the folktale.
The folktale, which is formed over generations, localities and through different voices. There are also voices of the characters within the story. How do these voices intersect? The fictional and the personal, the real? How does the story of Adam, Eve and Seth weave through the world?
In the online world of Earth-Stepper, you traverse thickets, wetlands, chambers, under suspended root systems, stars, moons and canopies. Audio follows the user—analogue synths, beat-based electronics, original folk melodies, and sampled voices. Sounds are spatialised, shifting with location and movement. There is no voice-over; dialogue appears as written segments within the world.
The story of the mother, the son and the father is told by a multitude of voices: a rabbit, a chorus of butterflies, clattering deathwatch beetles, by the standing stones and the earth themselves. I found that the story needed to be worked and reworked. I wanted it to be possible for the references to become inconsequential, where an explanation may not be necessary. Despite that, and the mythic mode of the story, I wanted the specifics of my telling to remain, to avoid universalism.
David John Scarborough, Earth-Stepper, 2026
When the writing was in development, we spoke a lot about filling in the gaps of the text. I would ask you questions such as, ‘Why has the father died?’ ‘Why does the body not stay buried?’ I am curious about your individual role in constructing this folktale, and the collective role of the audience in adding to, taking away from, or repeating the stories you have offered them. How does this interplay affect the sense of authority of the myth?
At this point in my practice, I’m primarily concerned with the meaning that is created for my friends and family, and those in my immediate community. I want to make things that are useful for these people, useful for myself, that have some kind of utility to them, in that they might be helpful for gathering people, offering comfort, or a chance to imagine something new, or repurpose something old. I’m not thinking in terms of an authoritative narrative voice.
David John Scarborough, Earth-Stepper, 2026
This is helpful to understand, and interesting to note that there is a particular community, and specific people the work has been made for, or in mind. It makes me wonder about what this work might develop into, and how that will be shaped by the communities you are a part of and what their hopes or desires are for the work.
When the virtual world was in development, I remember discussions about how much you wanted to direct the audience and how much freedom they were given to roam around. The markers which appear on the floor give both instruction and choice to the players. On reflection, how do you see the role of choice, freedom and predictability within the world? How do the choices of speed, pace, and direction made by the players interact with the process of lament and the construction of mythology?
Earth-Stepper was iterated through research and presentations with New Media Art Club and Six Minutes Past Nine, which meant I was able to demo and test it with audiences, online and in-person, in real time. I found that the more I made things plain and visible, the more engaging they became. Offering paths, scripted dialogue, and subtitles made for a more invitational artwork. I worked to encourage an experience of close reading or close listening through constructing a world that prioritised slow movements.
New Art City, the site on which Earth-Stepper is housed and built, does not include a top-down map view for the artist or audience. Placement of 3D assets, MP4s, text and GIFs is done through arranging and rearranging from a first-person perspective. This gives an embodied online experience to the construction of the world. In many ways, I could not separate myself from the imagined cosmology and virtual ecology I was looking to make. I was always in it. Making in-world was a process of amassing and accumulating, of careful assemblage, of bricolage, of installation, of nouns, of virtual objects, of recorded sound, of synthetic sound, of thoughts on contemporary ecology specific to people and places close to me.
I’m uncertain of speaking on the processes of lament for those experiencing Earth-Stepper. I do think the work puts forward a proposition that the poet can-may speak for the community. This could be understood as a new form of folk history, or the ongoing work of reworking tradition or handing down. There is an expectation that the work should be generous enough for the audience to be able to see themselves within it.
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Explore Earth-Stepper online with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art.
Photos by Joshua Jones.
David John Scarborough is a British-Australian artist based in Charnwood, East Midlands, UK. Projects include: Earth-Stepper, Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth (2026), Paint By Style Sheet, Phoenix Cinema, Leicester (2025), Computala, LCB Depot, Leicester (2025), Underlands, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Online (2023), Screwed Black Gospel Notes, Kiln House, Online (2022), A Mountain Is A Mountain, Brooke Benington, Slough (2019). He has participated in residencies with AA2A, Nottingham Trent University (2026), New Media Art Club, LCB Depot (2025), and Hybrid Realities Lab, Six Minutes Past Nine (2025). He is a Co-Director at Modern Painters, New Decorators, Loughborough.
Sarah White is a London-based interdisciplinary artist working across somatic movement practice, performance, writing and installation, with an MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional from Trinity Laban (2025). Recent public performances have been programmed by The Swiss Church (2023 and 2026), Future Ritual (2025), Mystic Voices (2024), the Goethe Institut (2024), Royal College of Art (2024), Society for the Study of Theology (2024), Nomas* Projects for Art Night Dundee (2023), Religion and Art Live (2021) and Koppel Project (2020). Sarah is the Programme Curator and Residency Curator for Morphe Arts, and Editor of the online Agnoscis Journal.
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︎ @davidjohnscarborough
davidjohnscarborough.cargo.site
︎ @sarah_white16
sarahwhite.org.uk
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If you like this why not read our interview with Melle Nieling.
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