Artist Michael Gresalfi shares an artwork that uses repurposed materials dating from before our mass communications 'information age' to witness the extensive decline of bird species and populations in his local area and the loss of natural spectacle. ...
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. We publish original content from one of our members on our blog every couple of weeks.
We now have getting on for 200 posts so far, from 80 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. And you can explore individual members by searching for ‘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.
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. ...
Curator and writer Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using GroundWork Gallery's recent exhibition to explore artists' roles in helping change how we value what we discard, viewing our waste as art and heritage. ...
Artist Michael Gresalfi shares an artwork that uses repurposed materials dating from before our mass communications 'information age' to witness the extensive decline of bird species and populations in his local area and the loss of natural spectacle. ...
Composer Stanley Grill shares his Music for the Earth project and how his feelings about climate change have a way of turning into music evoking connections with the natural world and our obligation to be caretakers, not destroyers. ...
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Gifts of Gravity and Light, an anthology of diverse writings on our seasons, and explores how, as we disrupt the living world, our relationship with it shifts, and with it ideas of 'nature'. ...
Video artist Mirjamsvideos shares reflective artworks which subtly demonstrate our relationship with the world, using ugliness in trash and beauty in small things to overcome our lack of insight into systems we've made toxic to ourselves and others ...
Photographer Veronica Worrall explores how art can offer an important emotional response to global pandemic and climate crises, sharing her 'lockdown' project to generate images where photography partners with natural processes to produce a visual essay of optimism. ...
Artist Jo Dacombe explores the othering of woodlands through maps and language as bordering us off from the natural world -- a dichotomy enabled by the Enlightenment ideas in 18th-century Europe -- and looks to ways to reconnect. ...
Filmmaker James Murray-White describes taking part in the Small Earth conference within the stunning beauty of Snape. At this special event, psychotherapists, ecologists, economists, philosophical and spiritual thinkers gathered to address hope for future living within the ecosphere. ...
Poet Nick Drake offers poems of three dark objects that illuminate our world-shifting ways: an emblem of inefficiency, a single-use convenience that will outlast us, and a nightmare taking shape beneath our feet, our streets, our notice, until... ...
Through his songs, writer Peter Reason explores many rich themes: grief, rage and despair at our ecological catastrophe; beauty and wonder at the world; deep participation in life on Earth, and taking seriously the panpsychic and animist perspective that the world is alive, sentient and speaks to us, if only we will attend and listen. ...
Artist and writer Ursula Troche showcases a video using washed-up discarded fishing rope, recovered and stitched together, to explore the growing threat of 'ghost gear' and the haunting of our seas by plastic waste. Picked Up the First Pieces has become the start of a series of video works using imagination to tell plastic stories. ...
Ecological artist Laura Donkers shares Stormy Weather, a short film that conveys collective collusion in climate change through a combination of verbal message, moving film image, and soundscapes of storm, bird song and dance music that pulls the viewer into the personal and collective experience of Cyclone Gabrielle in Aotearoa New Zealand in February 2023. ...
In this original essay for ClimateCultures, art curator and writer Veronica Sekules draws on work at her GroundWork Gallery to counter prevailing cultures of extractivism and look at how mobilising creativity can help us rehabilitate waste as a transformative resource in ways that could ultimately mean 'waste' no longer makes sense as a category at all. ...
In this original essay for ClimateCultures, artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces the concept of open deep mapping as partial, creative explorations sharing a conversational orientation to place that has value in times of social and environmental upheaval: "an open-ended process, something both much more inclusive than attempted by cartography and much harder to describe." ...
In her essay on the Flint Water Crisis, arts researcher Jemma Jacobs explores visual culture and its value in exposing environmental racism. Her case study of the Flint Water Crisis looks at the work of photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, capturing the strength and endurance of a struggling community to draw our focus toward marginalised experiences ...
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
You can find more about the initiative’s genesis and context in our About pages — where you will also find the splendour that is the ClimateCultures Members Directory, with links to each of our artists, researchers and curators and the work they are doing.
