Dr Siôn Parkinson
Honorary Research Associate
Dr Siôn Parkinson is an artist, composer, performer and researcher, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. His work combines sound, singing, costume, writing and live performance to explore the sensory and emotional lives of objects and their residues, the stuff that stuff leaves behind. In 2026, he was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
From 2024 to 2026, Siôn was part of the inaugural cohort of AHRC Early Career Fellows in Cultural and Heritage Institutions. Based at RBGE, his project, Fragrance in the Fungarium, explored the olfactory heritage of mushrooms. Through historical research, fieldwork and the study of preserved specimens, the project asked what fungal smells can tell us about how people experienced, described and understood the environments of the past. Its outcomes included exhibitions and events at RBGE, research into the dune stinkhorn (Phallus hadriani) and a series of sensory reference boxes created for botanical and natural history collections across Europe.
Siôn also works with Dr Marleen Boschen of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on plant humanities and the role of artistic research within botanical collections. Together, they established Routes to Roots, a UK-wide network connecting artists, researchers, scientists and collections professionals. Its first gathering, held at RBGE’s Botanic Cottage in July 2025, examined how institutions can better support artists undertaking sustained, collections-based research. Their continuing work explores practical and reciprocal approaches to access, collaboration, documentation and knowledge exchange between artists and botanical institutions.
Drawn to unusual material histories and marginal forms of knowledge, Siôn has created performances, films and books about fungal odours, phantom smells, hair, stains and other difficult-to-preserve traces. His projects frequently emerge from embedded research within museums, archives and natural history collections, using sound and performance to respond to evidence of touch, wear, handling and decay.
As the Vindolanda Trust’s Artist in the Archive, Siôn is researching five archival collections associated with Hadrian’s Wall and developing a new artwork for exhibition at Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham, in 2027. He also regularly presents talks and performance lectures for museums, festivals and universities, with recent invitations from Harvard University, the John Cage Trust and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Siôn is the author of Stinkhorn (Sternberg Press), a book about mushrooms, foul smells and listening. He is currently writing a new book about the colour brown, or rather, the processes through which materials, including plants, bodies, images and archival objects, inevitably become brown, colouring how we see and what we know.
Personal website: www.sionparkinson.com
Instagram: @sionparkinson