Author Brit Griffin reflects on her recent fiction's shift from speculative to Gothic framings, as the unfolding climate emergency calls us to recognise the monstrous forces unleashed -- and find language that allows us to process the unfathomable. ...
Explore more great content — recent and archive — from our members, below.
Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments
ClimateCultures is an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. Launched in 2017, we are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces. Novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, climate researchers — and more.
Scroll down to see a rich taster of our evolving content — all exclusively from our members: our regular blog, a showcase with short examples of creative work, a growing collection of longer essays, and several special series featuring themed content.
The ClimateCultures blog
You can see our current post above. One of our members publishes original content on our blog every few weeks.
We now have over 250 posts from more than 95 authors. You can find these under our Blog menu arranged by year or by our categories: * A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects * Art & Eco Activism * Challenges of Creative Engagement * Conversations * Creative Works * Cultural Change * Endangered Worlds * Environmental Change * Environmental Keywords * Gifts of Sound and Vision * In the Elements * Learning in the Anthropocene * Longer * Preview * Review * Signals from the Edge * Spaces * Speculative Worlds * Spiritual Ecology.
You can explore individual writers by searching for ‘ClimateCultures Authors’ in the ClimateCultures Members Directory. And in our sidebar you can see some of the popular posts and pages that people are reading right now.
Composer and performer Camilla Cancantata considers the nonhuman voice in Cockroach Cabaret. Scrutinising human actions, her alter ego questions the role of humanity on planet Earth, asking if we can pull ourselves back from the brink of apocalypse. ...
Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, "We are all related." ...
Artist, writer and practical activist Nicky Saunter remembers weekly act of creative solidarity during the Covid-19 lockdowns: plague poems for plague times, reminding us that writing may be a solitary pleasure but sharing is an act of magic. ...
Artist Julien Masson shares a recent community collaboration with artists, residents and businesses, which uses recycled garden furniture, instruments and miscellaneous timber found locally to create public art that reflects a mix of cultures and transform public spaces. ...
Sustainability researcher and writer Denise Baden discusses the challenges of thrutopian fiction -- writing stories to entertain, raise awareness of effective climate action and inspire sustainable behaviours -- and her latest thrutopian novel, The Philosopher and the Assassin. ...
Kim V. Goldsmith presents a collaborative essay with fellow artists whose new exhibition, Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence, explores Regional Australia through intersectional feminism, adding personal reflections on her creative approach to sparking conversations about being good ancestors. ...
Artist Michael Gresalfi introduces the personal value to him of adopting the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and its principles in his quest to "live a life worth living", and to do so in a more environmentally sensitive manner. ...
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White visited the Planet Local Summit, finding in its examples of urgent work around the world to foster being and acting locally a cultural turning towards nature as antidote to climate and ecological breakdown. ...
Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan shares her realisation that, no longer content to simply document climate change, a more fluid, non-linear visual language can evoke the nonhuman voice and reflect our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world. ...
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Change, Mike Hulme's book exploring how the idea of climate change is shaped and used in different ways and how its meanings help us navigate climate change as predicament rather than problem. ...
Experimental artist Veronica Worrall offers a story of shared hope in students' reactions to her photographic series 'Unseen', and how young people's actions and art in the USA, China and around the world provide examples ahead of COP26. ...
Photographic artist and researcher Aindreas Scholz discusses his photographic installation, where cyanotype is both image and material event. And So I Watch You From Afar is part of ongoing research into photography's material footprint, reconsidering it not only as technique, but as a process that registers the environmental conditions in which an image is made. ...
Ecopoet Dr Helen Moore's latest collection, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas, is celebrated as confirming her "as the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time." She reflects on the book and the genesis of one poem, which conveys hope in how we can resist the forces of destruction and seek Thrutopian paths forward. ...
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White celebrates the Rivers of Film Festival he curated in Cambridge, working with local partnerships. James commissioned 10 short films as a catalyst for conversation and deeper thinking on rivers and water bodies and as a response to growing activism on water health and water care, meeting water knowledge with heart. ...
In this original piece, novelist and essayist David Guenette suggests that, too often, 'climate fiction' fails to bridge the planetary-scale climate crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges: more stories we can identify with may relieve suppressive social silence on climate change. ...
In this original essay, artist and researcher Iain Biggs builds on his earlier essay for ClimateCultures to explore 'wild deep mapping'. This approach offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information. ...
In this original essay for ClimateCultures, poet and writer Joanna Guthrie recalls her time with fellow students on a course exploring connection with trees, their biology, lore, patience and weathering. And deep connection with people, place, love and grief for personal loss and planetary: our links with each other providing the buoyancy we all need. ...
As well as these regular features, we run special series on particular themes, gathering creative content and thoughts across a topic, such as our Quarantine Connection series during the first Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020, and our exploration during 2022 of three Environmental Keywords — ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’ — as part of a project by the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities.
And we’re pleased to host an online Museum of the Anthropocene, bringing a selection of the objects nominated by students on the University of East Anglia’s 3rd-year undergraduate course, Human Geography in the Anthropocene.
Some of the contributions to the Museum of the Anthropocene
ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what the climate and ecological predicaments of our times mean, and what they offer us as ways forward. It’s a beginning.
Do explore our archive, use the comment features to join the conversation, and let others know about us.
How ClimateCultures began, What we’re about & Who we are
You can find more about the initiative’s genesis and context in our About pages: About our platform, About the global predicaments we focus on, About our Members. The ClimateCultures Members Directory gives links to each of our artists, researchers and curators and the work they are doing and the posts and other content they share here on our site.
