May 2018 - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

A History of Eco-fiction, Part 1

Author Mary Woodbury opens a two-part series on the development of eco-fiction: a form with many roots, which is “not so much a genre as a way to intersect natural landscape, environmental issues, and wilderness into other genres.”

1,900 words: estimated reading time 7.5 minutes

You can read the second part of A History of Eco-fiction here.

***

When we approached the cottage in Ireland, a pair of white horses in the meadow raised their heads to look our way. Strong winds lifted their manes and tails wildly yet gracefully. We had driven from Dublin to the west coast, near Doolin, and were staying above the cliffs in a cottage. I was tired from an overnight flight and the drive to Doolin.

Showing 'Horses near our cottage, western Ireland' a photograph by Mary Woodbury — Horses near our cottage, western Ireland. Photograph: Mary Woodbury

You look at Ireland on a map and think it wouldn’t take very long to get from coast to coast, but it takes a while to get used to driving on the other side of the road and the other side of the car. It takes special patience to understand the roundabouts, to safely navigate the narrow country lanes with no shoulders — only rock walls, with more seasoned Irish drivers whipping by at 100 km/h or faster — and to stop and smile while farmers older than dirt slowly herd their cattle across the road. My husband was the driver, as my mother and I took in the magical countryside around us. When we arrived at our destination and stepped onto terra firma, my spirits rose. I went straight over to the horses. They were the cottage owner’s animals, and it took some wading through wet, tall grasses to get there, but the horses came right up to me and allowed me to pet them and feed them hay from the meadow. Each evening, when we returned to the cottage, they were there to greet us.

And each morning, when we left the cottage, we explored the wilds of Ireland: caves, the Burren, the sea, the cliffs of Moher, and the many places we ran — which William Butler Yeats had written about. We sailed to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, a real island in Lough Gill, which Yeats was inspired to write as he walked the bustling Fleet Street of London in the 19th century and dreamed of getting away into a simpler life more strongly connected with nature. We did trail runs in Slish Wood, which was what Yeats referred to as Sleuth Wood in The Stolen Child and in the trails around the lake isle. Nearly every single waking moment of this journey was filled with sweat, wonder, being away from cities and people, and interacting with natural things and places, though at night we did hit the pubs. I sensed within the wild a great seclusion, sacredness, awe, and even discomfort at times. It was a world alive with remnants of the past. I felt free.

Showing 'Lake Isle of Innisfree', a photographby Mary Woodbury — Lake Isle of Innisfree. Photograph: Mary Woodbury

If my story were fiction, it might be called eco-fiction, because the story depends on natural places and the human connection therein. Many precursors to eco-fiction exist, and Yeats’ early work — such as The Lake Isle of Innisfree and The Stolen Child, which dream of escape to the wild from the Victorian world he was locked into — might be considered one inspiration for the modern literary field. Later, he sought this escape via mysticism, but the early roots were steeped in Irish mythology:

For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

from The Stolen Child, WB Yeats

What is Eco-fiction?

One of the largest works describing Eco-fiction is Jim Dwyer’s Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Eco-Fiction (2010). He researched hundreds of books and stated that his criteria in choosing whether or not a book was eco-fiction were:

The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
The human history is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

Another definition is by Mike Vasey (referenced in Dwyer’s book):

“Stories set in fictional landscapes that capture the essence of natural ecosystems…[They] can build around human relationships to these ecosystems or leave out humans altogether. The story itself, however, takes the reader into the natural world and brings it alive…Ideally, the landscapes and ecosystems–whether fantasy or real–should be as ‘realistic’ as possible and plot constraints should accord with ecological principles.”

Some descriptions are simpler. Ashland Creek Press calls it “fiction with a conscience,” and one of the press’ co-founders, John Yunker, via personal correspondence, called it a super-genre. I think of eco-fiction not so much as a genre than as a way to intersect natural landscape, environmental issues, and wilderness — and human connection to these things — into any genre and make it come alive. I am not big on labels or boxy terms, but eco-fiction is broad and has a rich history. Eco-fiction has no boundaries in time or space. It can be set in the past, present, or future. It can be set in other worlds.

A short note on climate change in fiction

These days, many terms have sprung up to address the 'hyperobject' that is anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or what one might call the biggest eco-crisis of our times, perhaps what all other prior concerns in eco-writings have led to, built upon, and culminated in. Such genres include Anthropocene fiction, new nature writing, enviro-horror fiction, afrofuturism, green fiction, ecofuturism, ecopunk, biopunk, solarpunk, environmental science fiction, environmental fiction, climate fiction, and ecological/new weird fictions, to name a few–and these do not always relate just to just climate change but to a related eco/socio/political/cultural system. A hyperobject, according to Timothy Morton, explains objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change. Again, I think of eco-fiction as a way to bring alive the wild in any genre, whether romance, adventure, mystery, you name it.

A History

Jim Dwyer stated in his field guide that the first time he heard the term eco-fiction was from the Eco-fiction anthology published in 1971 by Washington Square Press. Within this collection are even older short stories dating back to 1933. You might be surprised at the big authors in this little anthology: Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, A.E. Coppard, James Agee, Robert M. Coates, Daphne du Maurier, Robley Wilson Jr., E.B. White, J.F. Powers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Herbert, H.H. Munro, J.G. Ballard, Steven Scharder, Isaac Asimov, and William Saroyan. The preface to the anthology states:

“The earth is an eco-system. It possesses a collective memory. Everything that happens, no matter how insignificant it may seem, affects in some way at some time the existence of everything else within that system.
Eco-fiction raises important questions about man’s place in the system:
Will man continue to ignore the warnings of the environment and destroy his source of life? Will he follow the herd into the slaughterhouse?”

So the first time the term eco-fiction came about, it contained stories going back to 1933. But, like with many living things, this type of literature has roots and branches and an ever-extending canopy. According to Dywer, precursors include magical realism, pastoral, mythology, animal metamorphoses, and classical fiction. Like with the anthology edited by Stadler, science fiction roots are evident as well. Environmental science fiction and ecologically oriented weird fiction go back far, because, as with Yeats’ and others, writers in every field have always worried about the trappings of walls and cities and refinement and wondered about the kind of life where one can “come away” to the “waters and the wild”. We can find such concerns in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy works, too, which often pit machine and greedy power vs. an imaginary (but not unrealistic) natural world. Patrick Curry wrote an article titled Tolkien and Nature at the Tolkien Estate, stating:

“Tolkien…returns readers to the animate, sensuous, infinitely complex nature that humans have lived in for nearly all their 100,000 years or so, until the modern Western view of nature as a set of quantifiable, inert and passive “resources” started to bite only 400 years ago. Middle-earth is real because despite our modernist education we recognize it.”

There’s a long lineage of works in this canon, from early myths of weather gods and goddesses such as Thor, the thunder god, or Susanowo, the Japanese Shinto god of storms and sea. There’s Noah in the Bible and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In 1759 was Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, which dealt with regulation of the weather. Various storms, such as floods and winds and ice storms and fire, figure commonly in eco-fiction plots — but stories do not have to be apocalyptic; they also can be subtle and thoughtful.

Showing 'Nanabozho in Ojibwe flood story from an illustration by R.C. Armour, in his book North American Indian Fairy Tales, Folklore and Legends (1905)'. Courtesy, Wiki Commons. — Nanabozho in Ojibwe flood story from an illustration by R.C. Armour, in his book North American Indian Fairy Tales, Folklore and Legends (1905). Courtesy, Wiki Commons.

We cannot ignore notable nonfiction that has inspired fiction movements, including nature writers and poets such as Rachel Carson, Margaret Fuller, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nearly every era of human-time has had its nature lovers who take to the pen to exalt nature or politicize our impacts on the wild, from St. Francis of Assisi to Gary Snyder to Upton Sinclair to Michael McClure to Naomi Klein.

One might say eco-fiction first began as cave drawings of animals and birds, which documented an era of humans connecting with their environment, and did so with storytelling via art; but the term became popular in the 1970s when natural history evolved among biologists and ecologists, and nature writing with a sense of advocacy grew in literary study (ecocriticism), nonfiction, and fiction. Along with other environmental movements, the study of ecologically oriented fiction began to bloom and there became a sense of morality in storytelling. We have to be very careful in storytelling to be true to art forms, however, and not be preachy. Eco-fiction novels and prose zoom out to beyond the personal narrative and connect us to the commons around us –- our natural habitat. Previous literary scholarship often ignored this crucial connection.

***

In Part 2 of A History of Eco-fiction, Mary looks at how this “way to intersect natural landscape, environmental issues, and wilderness — and human connection to these things — into any genre” has been evolving from these earlier expressions and will return to the personal journey to her Irish roots.

Find out more

For the articles and books mentioned in Mary’s piece:

Jim Dwyer’s Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Eco-Fiction was published by University of Nevada Press in 2010.
This Wikipedia article introduces the work of Timothy Morton, including his concept of a hyperobject. And You can hear a February 2028 Guardian interview with Timothy Morton: Why we need to rethink climate change, with Timothy Morton).
The Eco-fiction anthology was published in 1971 by Washington Square Press, edited by John Stadler.
Patrick Curry’s article, Tolkien and Nature can be found at the Tolkien Estate. Patrick also edits The Ecological Citizen.

Mary Woodbury

A fiction writer, researcher and curator of websites exploring ecology in fiction and providing ecoliterature resources for writers.

The Call of the Forest

Artist Julien Masson describes a residency in the New Forest, an environment that juxtaposes natural and human worlds, and his choice of a physical paint medium to represent the digital realm that often distances us from the natural.

1,630 words: estimated reading time 6.5 minutes

I was delighted to be invited by an art agency based in Hampshire for their residency project in 2018. Every year they invite an artist and provide them with a space for two weeks and the opportunity to produce art in the beautiful surroundings of the New Forest. It was going to be a challenge to adjust to new working spaces and produce artwork in such a short time but I thought it would offer a good opportunity to explore the area and really concentrate on an art project without distractions.

Last year I worked on a project with the New Forest heritage department and produced a series of digital artworks inspired by the geology, the streams and the flora of the area to create rich multilayered images based on LIDAR captures (images used to survey the geology and analyse what lies underneath vegetation). I was able to exhibit examples of that work at the New Forest Centre in Lyndhurst, such as Shades of the Land:

New Forest - Shades of the Land. Digital art by Julien Masson — Shades of the Land
digital work: Julien Masson © 2017
jfmmasson.com

For my residency this year, based in a New Forest forge, I was given free rein to work on a self-initiated project. The manager of the forge until very recently was the director of a local art gallery and so there was an interest to help support artists through this residency, but they didn’t expect us to produce work linked to their activities — although it is a fascinating space.

I was happy to rise to the challenge and try to produce a series of works during the two weeks of the residency.

Mapping new meaning

Our digital culture brings us into a sometimes uncomfortable relationship with the technology we rely on to drive it. I am interested in the ways we rely more and more on technology to record and survey our environment, and how this over-reliance is possibly misplaced. Through the numeric lens of digital devices that have a direct impact on how we perceive the world, spaces, objects and people are all analysed in the same manner — reduced to datasets that can be disassembled and reassembled at will. My works often consist of a dynamic mass of marks echoing digital networks and our complex interconnected world; they criss-cross the surface of the paintings like a giant mind map generating new meaning.

I explore the possibilities that digital tools offer us to create alternative realities and virtual simulations that ultimately allow us to further our knowledge. How does the virtual world affect our real, physical experience? What consequences will the digitalisation of our experiences bring? In these new pieces the layers of data points recreate the geological contours of the region. Each geological layer is superimposed onto another, and in the same way I superimposed strips of paint to recreate the layered stratas of the land…

New Forest tondi. Art by Julien Masson — New Forest tondi
Julien Masson © 2018
jfmmasson.com

One of the reasons why I have been working in a physical paint medium rather than producing purely digital artwork is that working in paint and pastels allows me that freedom and distance from my subject. By using paint I am a step removed from technology, I can have more a more critical look at it. I admire the digital virtual but also I like to imbue it with all that is chaotic and unpredictable with the physicality of painting.

A pixelised reality

My technique is unapologetically experimental. I paint, slice and collage painted surfaces, echoing the remixing of images in photoshop or the superimposed layers of photos in computer graphics software. There is a certain destructive activity in the way I work, as fractured formations of paint emerge from this process. I believe this illustrates the dislocated sense of reality we are subject to in this day and age.

The studio space was comfortable and bright, on the top floor of the forge, and I also had the privilege of working alongside Peter Corr there, a very talented artist. It was fascinating seeing the work progress during the two weeks. We were made to feel very welcome by the forge manager on the ground floor; it was a real hive of activity and we felt really inspired by the work they produce there.

The journey in and out of the studio offered an interesting progression through the industrial landscape of Southampton Docks to the forest at Ashurst… Spring sunshine appeared and we witnessed a real explosion of colours, as the foliage really started to fill the tree canopy… The impact on my work was immediate and I shifted my palette from a rather restrained selection into a veritable kaleidoscope array of glitches. These glitches — unexpected results or malfunctions, especially occurring with digital devices — often manifest themselves through a faulty interaction with digital technology, and offer a sort of distorted pixelized reality. I spent several days gathering images of the surroundings with my digital camera. I often manipulate the images to generate interesting and unexpected arrays of colour, which I use as inspiration for my works.

The New Forest - Full Cycle. Art by Julien Masson — Full Cycle
Julien Masson © 2018
jfmmasson.com

I wanted to illustrate this fractured vision of Nature that we sometimes have. The tessellated technique I used on these works echoes the kaleidoscopic view we often have of the world through the use of digital technology. Our perception becomes compressed and pixelated, often in constant motion; it seems incomplete yet it has a certain beauty too. I also arc back to painterly techniques used by the Vorticists and the Futurists. Similar use of dynamic strokes of colour can be found in my work.

The intense use of the colour green was definitely in response to the new leaves that appeared in the last couple of weeks there. The tessera of paint also echo the foliage of the trees and the movement of their leaves in the wind. Geology is also present, as the stacks of colours reminds me of the strata of different soils.

Eco responsibility

No matter how aesthetically oriented my work is it is undeniable that I also want to treat the subject of eco-responsibility in my work. Technology allows us to analyse and study our environment so we can understand it better but it has the effect of distancing us from it. From this abstracted digital space we can experience the world in the safety of our own virtual shells, choosing to be blissfully unaware of the impact our activities are having on our environment.

I often mix traditional materials such as paint and pigment with found manmade materials: metallic foil, electric wires and plastics. My use of recycled materials is also a comment on our relationship with the natural environment and how we are truly living in a geological age dominated by our own activity. I included some flexes of copper and metallic material throughout the works as a reminder of human activity in the landscape and also a nod to the activity at the forge where the studio is based. To me, the layering of marks, materials and imagery during my creative process is in many ways akin to the stratification of meaning, of human activities and histories.

The New Forest - Call of the Forest. Art by Julien Masson — Call of the Forest
Julien Masson © 2018
jfmmasson.com

In this series I was particularly interested in using the circular frame because of its scientific connotation. I am thinking of petri dishes or microscopic images; this series of works represent almost a series of individual experiments in shape and colour, each forming its own world, its own microcosm. Finally I am planning to display these works as a series: carefully arranging them almost as a comparative study.

The residency took place in a studio on the top floor of a forge, and this industrial space was at odds with the idyllic view of the area. However I felt this was very appropriate considering my interests in the sometimes uncomfortable juxtaposition of a manmade landscape and a wild landscape. The New Forest itself is a human creation, managed for centuries to exploit its various resources.

Find out more

The LGV Residency “accommodating an artist in the New Forest National Park for the development of their creative practice” is a scheme provided by Little Van Gogh, an agency that delivers programmes and projects that help organisations to support and promote emerging artists, “be it through our workplace art exhibitions or the commissioning and purchase of original fine art.”

A tondo (plural: tondi or tondos) — Wikipedia tells me — “is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art, either a painting or a sculpture. The word derives from the Italian rotondo, ’round.'”

The New Forest was created by King William I in 1079 as his royal hunting park following the Norman Conquest; the ‘new’ forest became one of England’s National Parks in 2005. The New Forest National Park Authority is the planning authority, while the Verderers of the New Forest – the commoners whose rights are protected by statutes – manage many of the traditional agricultural practices in the area.

LIDAR — Wikipedia again — is a surveying technique for 3D laser scanning for ‘Light Detection and Ranging’, which “measures distance to a target by illuminating the target with pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor. Differences in laser return times and wavelengths can then be used to make digital 3-D representations of the target.” At the website of the Verderers of the New Forest High Level Stewardship Scheme, you can see two interesting films of the technique being used in the New Forest to understand more about the human and natural characteristics of the area.

Julien Masson

An artist whose works are all, in some way, related to technology and our relation with it and wishes to expand notions of what is art.

Adorning Our New Biosphere

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explores the call for a creative symposium on ‘how to love the postcarbon world’, our new biosphere. Can art, creativity, imagination actually help us to break free of our seemingly unbreakable pattern of thought?

1,530 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes

In a social and economic landscape where the ‘state of the art’ — technologically and politically — for supposedly environment-friendly energy solutions may be literally “a scar on a loved landscape, as much as the causes and impacts of climate change are a scar on our psyches and consciences”, what is the role of the artist in bringing a more ecologically attuned sense to moving us away from the industrial model that has got us into this predicament? Can art, creativity, imagination actually help us to break free of our seemingly unbreakable pattern of thought? Something somehow in the spirit of the provocation Albert Einstein is supposed to have offered: “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”

Learning to love

This is my reading of the central question behind art.earth’s call for proposals for its November symposium, Adorning our new biosphere: how to love the postcarbon world. That title reads as a startling proposition; we’ve become so used to a world where the very word ‘biosphere’ seems to suggest something at peril from humanity that the notion that we — our species, our own lives — might somehow adorn it could be a form of heresy. In the conventional spectrum of environmental consciousness, at either extreme you either fall into the camp where technology and the better angels of Homo economicus will ‘save the world’, and the inevitable compromises that have to be made are simply the cost of progress; or the camp where human intervention is so poisonous that the imperative must be to find ways to withdraw more or less gracefully from ‘nature’ and let it advance once more. In the middle lie many flavours of environmentalism, and then of course there are all the positions which pay little or no attention to the crises, or attack the very idea of crisis at all. So, what is this ‘adorning’, a word that seems almost medieval? How can it apply to the ‘modern’ world of science, politics, technology?

And it is mediaeval — a Middle English word anyway, from Old French and Latin. ‘To dress’, to adorn is to add beauty to, enhance, or make more pleasing: a dangerous word perhaps for humans to deploy within the natural world, in this day and age? But the clue, of course, is in the subtitle that art.earth and its partners — Plymouth University’s Sustainable Earth Institute and Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology’s Science Walden — have chosen for the event. Learning to love. But to love what?

“In learning to love the postcarbon world, we must first learn to love and care for the carbon-dominated world we are attempting to heal,” the call suggests. It’s a moral proposition, but also a pragmatic one; it’s our relationship with(in) the environment that we need to change if we’re to change the outcome.

Love in the post carbon world — love for the post carbon world, now — is to love the world in a way that will help shape it to be the best we can imagine (or in its direction at least) and to recognise that, as the quote from writer William Gibson has it, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The post carbon world too is already here, but if it’s to be better realised, better distributed, in a better relationship with itself then we must care also for the carbon world — the here and now — and thereby change it. That is part of the frame for this event.

At the 2014 Weatherfronts climate change conference for writers, author Jay Griffiths quoted a 1944 poem by Alun Lewis, In Hospital: Poona. Near the end of the Second World War, the poet lay in a hospital bed in India where he was stationed, a third of a world away from his lover back in Wales:

Last night I did not fight for sleep
But lay awake from midnight while the world
Turned its slow features to the moving deep
Of darkness, till I knew that you were furled,
Beloved, in the same dark watch as I.
And sixty degrees of longitude beside
Vanished as though a swan in ecstasy
Had spanned the distance from your sleeping side.
And like to swan or moon the whole of Wales
Glided within the parish of my care …

In Hospital: Poona, Alun Lewis

The ‘parish of my care’ — and your own parish will be personal to you, each one different but overlapping, intermingled — Jay suggested is the ambit of what we can each best achieve, but can encompass the wider world we have ambitions to work for.

“What we have done to our climate, to our planet, lies at the heart of the political and social problems we face,” the art.earth call continues. “We seem incapable of addressing this wicked problem partly because we tend to look inward rather than outward, because we are careless rather than caring.”

What good is art, anyway?

You will have your own answers to that question. In a 2017 piece for the Tate website, Climate Change: can artists have any influence, novelist J M Ledgard asserted that one reason why the answer to this question must be ‘Yes’ is “there are not many alternatives to seeing intensely. The scope of the ruination is so grave and fast it is difficult for the polity to conceive of. Economists, philosophers and neuroscientists have all demonstrated that humans have a limited capacity to project themselves into the future. But art can move effortlessly outside of time and space, highlighting the absurdity of naming the year 2017 on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old. Our classical ancestors were locked to land and sky by miasmas, storms, portents, stars, solstices, harvests. Art … various and ambitious … can bring us back to that place. That is how art will inform the debate.”

And, as the art.earth call suggests, “Surely the artist’s ability to stir up and question societal thinking, challenge preconceptions, and assert new forms of beauty and aesthetic reasoning must play a role … So this is a call to action for artists, designers, engineers. ecologists, policy-makers and other thinkers to turn their attention to a world in need of a change of argument, one that can adorn our new biosphere not only with aesthetic pleasure but with a beauty of equality and social equity.”

“We need a new conversation: welcome to our new biosphere.”

I’ve experienced two art.earth events — 2016’s Feeding the Insatiable and last year’s In Other Tongues — and am looking forward to my third, Liquidscapes, just a couple of weeks from now. Each time, a wonderfully eclectic but cohesive programme of speakers and workshop leaders has been matched with many thoughtful and stimulating personal encounters with a range of artists, scholars and activists of many kinds. Having helped organise several TippingPoint events in the previous few years, discovering art.earth at just the time that that involvement was drawing to a close was very fortunate timing for me; and all my TippingPoint and art.earth experiences have been highly formative in my own thinking and work, not least in deciding to set up ClimateCultures last year.

It’s a privilege to spend three days in the company of so many creative and curious minds, and to soak in the ideas and possibilities in the environs of the Dartington estate just outside Totnes. So, for me, it’s a double privilege to have been invited to be part of the organising committee for Adorning our new Biosphere. I can’t wait to see the programme that emerges from all the ideas that this latest call stimulates. I hope that all ClimateCultures Members and readers of this site will head straight to the full text of the call and submit a proposal of your own or encourage others to do so.

The invitation is for “any ideas that inspire you and which you think may have a place during this event … We would particularly welcome proposals from artists, writers and other makers as well as panels or interviews or other discursive formats. Please bear in mind that the event takes place in a particular environment: Dartington is a 900-acre mixed estate that includes modern and ancient woodland, riverside with swimming, open pasture, formal gardens, and other outdoor sites where people can meet and work in groups. We particular encourage proposals that take advantage of this context.”

Find out more

You can read Alun Lewis’ In Hospital: Poona in full at Seren Books blog, among many other sites.

The Tate website article Climate Change: Can artists have any influence? with J M Ledgard also featured critic and arts correspondent Alastair Smart (whose answer was ‘No’).

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.

Art, Rise Up!

Artist Ottavia Virzi describes a recent intervention by Art Rise Up, the creative collective bringing art and activism together for environmental protection, in support of the campaign to halt opencast coal mining, using art to engage cultural meaning.

1,010 words: estimated reading time 4 minutes

How to realign our creative practice in support of effective actions, aiming to help achieve some steps in the process leading to a fairer society? As creatives, feeling this need can lead to different paths: paths that can be centred on raising cultural awareness, or be part of a sustainable design process, or can look at the bridges between art and activism. We are interested in testing this last option inside the collective Art Rise Up. Approaching activism can be an uplifting experience for those looking to direct ways to have an impact, overcoming the sense of frustration and disempowerment that is felt by so many citizens today. Our creative intervention in support of the direct occupation of Pont Valley started from this common need we perceived, to use our creative skills to directly support a significant environmental campaign.

A direct occupation of the valley has been taking place from early March until eviction last week, but the campaign is however motivated to stay strong. A campaign lasting decades for some members of the community, trying to stop an invasive open-cast coal mine from opening right in front of the villages of Dipton and Leadgate, County Durham. A campaign felt ever more strongly today, right when England is committed to coal phase-out by 2025, in an areas which has been historically exploited for coal.

Creative intervention

Coal is the symbol of many countries’ slow response in tackling the climate crisis. Moreover, the impact of coal on local community is extremely high, due to coal dust produced through the distressing excavations. A petition signed by 88,000 people regarding the Pont Valley mine was brought to the Home Office in February and ignored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Sajid Javid, the same Tory HCLG Minister — just appointed Home Secretary — who recently denied permission for another mine — at Druridge Bay in Northumberland, on the grounds of climate change and implications on health and wildlife — did not react regarding Pont Valley. The same private energy company, Banks Group, is involved in both mines. This scenario underlines the conflicts between private corporate interest and governments, who are not able to pronounce a complete and definitive “no”. National usage of coal power has diminished in England, amounting to 8% of the energy mix in 2017. But the continued dependency on cheap polluting energy is a direct consequence of our economic system — based on boundless consumerism — and the lack of extensive policies reforming energy usage through real investments in renewables and energy efficiency, and of a brave discourse regarding the need to re-adjust energy demand. This does not mean de-growth seen as a step backwards, but rather as a different growth and a step forward.

"Sajid Javid turns a blind eye to Pont Valley". Image: Art Rise Up — “Sajid Javid turns a blind eye to Pont Valley”
Image: Art Rise Up © 2018

All of these thoughts informed our decision to organise ourselves into a collective which could keep supporting the campaign in London, where our life as creative freelancers often means compromises in a constant search for balance in our actions.

Cultural meaning

The task we gave ourself was to create something simple and efficient, to give a shape to this large amount of information on the issues in the form of an artistic intervention which could also try to help to influence directly. The exercise of art is after all an attempt to condense communication, and give it tangible cultural meaning.

Pont Valley masks. Image: Art Rise Up — Pont Valley masks
Image: Art Rise Up © 2018

With the use of a critical neo-classical bust, we decided to underline the responsibility of governments and power figures in handling the climate crisis. This is a call for politicians to re-think the meaning of providing community welfare beyond exploitative models.

Our installation consisted of a clay bust picturing Sajid Javid — empty black eye cavities, and coal around him — and a plaque referring to his controversial silence regarding the Pont Valley mine. In the plinth, built-in speakers were emitting sounds of birds chirping with overlapping industrial sounds of excavators.

More-than-human community

The statue has been officially unveiled in front of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Direct action and artistic intervention can share with theatre a performative key, which is increasingly used in protests. We decided to unveil the statue in a ceremony with four officiants wearing masks inspired by Pont Valley wildlife – Skylark, Crested Newt, Pont Burn River, and Gorse Bush. These masks to represent a wider community of people and living beings behind our actions. Mining and burning coal harms the smaller creatures in our ecosystems as much as human communities worldwide.

Our intervention didn’t manage to change Sajid Javid’s mind. The Pont Valley Protection Camp was evicted last week. Banks Group are even planning to appeal against the Druridge Bay decision. What this little journey helped us discover though, is how committed and motivated is the movement behind environmental campaigns. How a small example such as a coal mine in County Durham and a larger perspective necessarily live together. How the journey will still be long, with countless the campaigns to fight. How important it is for all to embark on this journey to adjust the system, from politicians to countryside dwellers, to city workers and artists together, committing to spread awareness and give shape to a real plea for change.

Find out more

Art Rise Up has a Facebook page and intends to promote and share contents about Art and Activism.

You can learn more about the open cast coal mine at Pont Valley and the campaigns to prevent it at Coal Action UK and in these articles from The Ecologist, BBC News and Chronicle Live: Protecting Pont Valley: meet the protesters fighting a new coal mine (28/3/18); Dipton opencast mine protesters in underground tunnels (20/4/18); All the opencast campaigners kicked out of protest camp after 33 hour stand off with bailiffs (20/4/18).

Ottavia Virzi

A set and costume designer focusing on sustainability, heritage crafts and social history, and associate artist with Art Rise Up, a group merging art and activism.