Sarah Smout: Waterbaby | RGS

About

Waterbaby invites us on a personal and global journey exploring our fragile and intrinsic relationships with water. Combining her soulful poetry, mesmerising vocals and live-looped cello soundscapes, Sarah captivates and tugs at the heart. With stories from her voyages by boat to Iceland, Shetland, the Faroes and the Uists, and over land to waters around her northern UK home, Sarah shares personal experiences of how water has shaped her life. Waterbaby is a plea for the future of the planet by returning to the ocean that cradled us all as we were waiting to breathe; humming with atmosphere, carrying the voices of people, places and beings who need to be heard, encapsulating the urgency for connection, healing, and experience with nature.

Sarah Smout is an environmental artist whose work transcends traditional boundaries, weaving together nature, creativity, and activism to provoke thought and inspire change. Combining her unique use of live-looped cello soundscapes, ethereal vocals and soulful poetry, she creates a transportive and mesmerising world leaving audiences captivated and spell-bound, ready to take action for the planet. Her music has been played on the BBC's Radio 2, Introducing and Look North programmes, and she has worked with Greenpeace, COP26 and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, with many ongoing cross-arts, science and community projects.

Her live film, Rooted, was selected to be screened at the famous Kendal Mountain Festival and Hinterlands Rural Film Festival. '23 saw her return to KMF to perform alongside Simon Armitage, Robert MacFarlane, Sam Lee, and Elizabeth Jane-Burnett at the festival's sold-out event "Music on Nature", as well as receiving an Honorary Research Fellowship at the University of Cumbria. She also sold out her recent show at Hay Festival, and toured her solo show 'Eyjar', inspired by her island-hopping sailing voyage to Iceland, at arts centres and venues across England.

Prior to her solo career launching in 2019, she toured and recorded internationally with artists for over a decade. Now, Sarah makes every effort to tour via land and sea, in order to keep her negative impact on the planet to a minimum. Sarah has embarked on epic sea voyages to places such as the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes and Iceland to record natural sounds, travel slowly, and collect stories from the people, flora and fauna she encounters. 2025 sees her biggest adventure to date, set to take place around Svalbard, a frontier of climate change.
Sarah's deep care for the planet resonates through her compositions, encapsulating the urgent need for connection, healing, and experience with nature.

"Deeply lovely" - Mark Radcliffe, BBC Radio 2
"Simply beautiful" – Greenpeace
"Imaginative, creative, innovative and deeply sensitive, but above all, brave"
- Sir John Lister Kaye, author and naturalist

1h 50m (inc 20m interval)