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The Age of Irony

Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our fifth annual selection of Museum of the Anthropocene student essays: objects that shift shape through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care.

1,340 words: estimated reading time = approximately 5.5 minutes

It’s midsummer, and England has just experienced its hottest June since records began.¹ Temperatures have been topping 40^oC across Europe, while in the eastern Pacific Ocean a ‘monster’ El Nino is developing,² with its effects already being felt in places like Papua New Guinea.³ London recently paid host to ‘London Climate Week’, at which the UN Secretary-General highlighted that London was not just ‘Calling’, but ‘Cooking’, perhaps starting to bear out at least some of the apocalyptic vision of The Clash’s post-/punk classic.⁴ But several Climate Week events couldn’t go ahead; most notably perhaps, a panel discussion at the London School of Economics on improving the management of extreme heat was called off due to — you guessed it — the extreme heat.⁵

Anthropocene ironies

‘The Anthropocene’ seems to be an age of irony. The term describes a period in Earth’s history when (some) humans have seemingly become a dominant, controlling, world-making force, and yet our knowledge of the future implications of that agency are shrouded in uncertainty. This is an age of melting polar ice giving access to more fossil fuels; of urgent defences against rising seas being wrapped around fossil fuel infrastructure;⁶ of the clear need for more global cooperation just at the moment that geopolitical worlds seem to be pulling apart.⁷ And meanwhile, experts on dealing with the heat can’t talk to each other because it’s too hot.

As the philosopher-poet Eugene Thacker put it in a 2021 interview:⁸

There is a tragic irony in the Anthropocene idea. We do matter after all. The evidence? We have created the conditions for our own extinction. I suppose that is an achievement, of sorts. So convinced are we as human beings that we matter that we are willing to sacrifice the planet for our own species-specific self-importance.

This year’s submissions to our evolving online Museum of the Anthropocene capture this sense of Anthropocene ironies. Like last year, some deal with collapsing boundaries,⁹ with things which are neither one thing nor the other, or which seem to be something but which are in reality something else.¹⁰ As we move through them, we move in many respects from identifying the problems and violences of the Anthropocene towards the moves we might make to undo them. But that spectrum of knowledge and action is implied in all of them, in different ways.

Katya Boinvoisin points us towards the ironies and contradictions of the clean energy transition, showing how the rare earth mining frontier — producing materials which are vital for ‘clean’ energy tech — is pushing into northern Scandinavia and repeating many of the political and environmental violences we tend to associate with fossil colonialism¹¹ and fossil capitalism.¹²

This year’s collection features a range of shape-shifters; objects whose meanings and attachments seem to shift radically when viewed through the lens of the Anthropocene. Izzy Laws’ account of the rubber duck shows how a cute children’s toy can also contribute to marine plastic pollution; but in a further twist, how an accidental spillage of thousands of the things helped scientists piece together new knowledge of ocean circulation — crucial to helping us better understand future changes in the ocean-atmosphere system.

Maisie Royal offers us a cup of matcha, and places the latest coffee shop trend in a deeper historical and geographical context. Once used to aid meditative contemplation of the beauty of human-nature coexistence, now it is a fully-fledged global commodity and challenging coffee as the chemical enhancer of choice for exhausted minds labouring under late capitalism. Nonetheless, Maisie suggests that matcha still embodies a deep desire for (re)connection with nature, even as its cultivation in Japan is increasingly challenged by changing weather patterns.

Bethany Waite similarly explores the juxtapositions of beauty and industry through the lens of crochet. She traces the mechanisation of this craft skill and its increasing entanglement with ‘fast fashion’ and synthetic fibres, but points too to emerging craftivism movements by which crochet, as a form of “slow, handmade work” is interjected “into fast, industrialised spaces, disrupting the speed and disposability that define modern fashion systems”. In so doing, crochet promotes a new ethos of care, community and sustainability.

Lastly, Joanna Edwards also examines the tension between materiality and meaning. Their object is a handmade Pride flag, stitched together from fragments of industrially-produced cloth to produce something fundamentally different: a defence and a celebration of queerness. Drawing on notions of ‘queer ecology’, Joanna diagnoses the Anthropocene as an age defined by the rejection of the inherent queerness of both natural and human worlds, and by the enforcing of boundaries and hierarchies. By gathering around Joanna’s flag, we can see how fighting against the Anthropocene requires solidarities that cut across the categories industrial modernity has bequeathed to many of us.

Queer ecology — looking beyond categories

Oversimplifications abound in corporate and state environmentalism, from deeply performative nature-culture dualisms to the rendering of wild spaces in one corner of the world fungible and exchangeable with wildness elsewhere, through mechanisms of offsetting and substitution. Queer ecology reminds us of the inherent strangeness, intimacy and interdependencies of the world, which cut across the Western philosophical ‘operating systems’ that, since the 16^th century or so, have dominated how the nonhuman world is comprehended and apprehended.

In this age of irony, it is plain to see how these categories contain their own contradictions within them; spotting and talking about those ironies, then, might be the key to undoing their violences.

Find more

England’s warmest June on record – the second warmest for the UK and Wales (Met Office, 1/7/26)
Everything We Know About the Monster El Niño That Could Make the Whole World Even Hotter in 2026, Luis Prada (Vice, 11/5/26)
Papua New Guinea at risk of food shortages as El Niño brings frost and drought, Rebecca Bush (The Guardian, 25/6/26)
London’s Calling, by The Clash: “…the sun’s zoomin’ in // meltdown expected // the wheat is growing thin” (Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, 1979). Some travellers on the Central Line this week might nonetheless welcome the idea that the “the ice age is coming”.
Climate event on coping with extreme heat cancelled by extreme heat, by Eliana Nunes (Mirror, 23/6/26)
Aerial photography of the Gudong Seawall of Shengli Oilfield, protecting the great sea wall of the oilfield, and beautiful scenery (iNews, 8/7/26)
Geopolitical Outlook: 2025–2029 in the Trump Era (The GeoPolity, 7/1/26)
Histories of Violence: On Suffering, by Brad Evans with Eugene Thacker (LA Review of Books, 1/2/21)
Anthropocene Naturecultures: Where are the Boundaries? by Martin Mahony (ClimateCultures, 30/5/25)
Irony (Wikipedia)
Mapping fossil colonialism, by Shreya Khaund (Royal Geograhical Society, 2024)
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm (Verso, 2016)

You can find all five new entries in Inside the Museum, along with Martin’s selections for 2022 to 2024 – a growing collection of objects and entities that shine new lights on the Anthropocene and ask important questions of us. And we bring together all of Martin’s introductory essays in the main Museum of the Anthropocene page. Do also check out our earlier project, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, where CimateCultures members discuss the objects — real or imagined — that illustrate the emerging planetary age for them.

To mark the first four years of our online Museum of then Anthropocene, we recently hosted a conversation between the Museum’s co-ordinator, UEA’s Dr Martin Mahony, and fellow ClimateCultures member, GroundWork Gallery’s director and curator, Valerie Sekules. Do read Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years for an exploration of how collections such as this enhance- our understanding of our planetary age.

This short piece by Ingrid Bååth for studio ClimateCulture (not related to ClimateCultures) discusses how Queer Ecology offers “a framework for seeing — and living — differently. It reminds us that the binaries we inherit are not inevitable. That nature is not static.”

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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

For his recent post with Veronica Sekules, Martin said: “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”

Martin Mahony

A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.

Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years

As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s Martin Mahony and GroundWork Gallery’s Veronica Sekules discuss the collection through a professional curator’s perspective and how it enhances our understanding of our planetary age.

3,380 words: estimated reading time = 13 minutes

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets the context for this conversational post from Martin and Veronica.

We launched our online Museum of the Anthropocene in 2022, drawing directly on Dr Martin Mahony‘s work since 2018 with 3rd-year undergraduate students on his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia. Each year, the current cohort has submitted short essays on objects or entities that speak to some aspect of the nature of this new planetary age and our own species’ role in shaping it. Alongside each year’s selection for the ClimateCultures Museum of the Anthropocene, Martin has written an introductory post for us, reflecting on the ideas that emerge from the students’ pieces.

As we approach publication of our fifth set of contributions — coming soon to ClimateCultures — Martin and I discussed how we might draw out some of the themes and topics that have emerged so far from the series. We quickly settled on the notion of bringing in a professional curator’s voice and were delighted that Veronica Sekules generously took up the challenge. Not only is Veronica the founder and director of the GroundWork Gallery, where she has been responsible for showcasing the work of a great many artists and researchers who bring unique perspectives to the critical issues of the Anthropocene, but her background in education — and with the Sainsbury Centre in particular — brings significant experience to the notion of a collection such as this. And, of course, Veronica has contributed her own object-based insights into our planetary age for ClimateCultures, through her writing on three objects for our series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. So it’s a great pleasure to host this conversation between Veronica as our ‘guest curator’ and Martin as instigator of the Museum of the Anthropocene.

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Seeing beyond the strata

Veronica: I have been thinking about the Museum of the Anthropocene for a few days now. I must at first say thank you — yes — it is wonderful and so rich in its approach and the range of its content. Congratulations on putting together such a very thought-provoking and original collection of ideas and discussions. Before I read it, I must say that I had been thinking about the Anthropocene — tutored, as it were, by Colin Waters who gave a talk about it at one of our GroundWork events — as a geological phenomenon. What stuck in my mind rather persistently after his talk was that we were creating a geological layer, including increasing quantities of giant chicken bones and tungsten from ball-point pen points, and of course, plastics. So it is utterly refreshing that you have opened up the subject so much, to be very much more cultural and, indeed, historical.

Showing: 'Cloud of Thorns' by Chris Drury, shown in Nature's Mysterious Networks exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2021. Photo: GroundWork Gallery — ‘Cloud of Thorns’ by Chris Drury, shown in Nature’s Mysterious Networks exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2021. Photo: GroundWork Gallery © 2021

Martin: Thanks so much Veronica! It’s really lovely to hear such a positive response from a bona fide curator, arts practitioner and museum educator. And yes, that ‘geological’ version of the Anthropocene has become a dominant story which is told, and it is a striking and compelling one. Geologists like Colin have done amazing work in quantifying the sheer amount of stuff that we’re leaving behind and which will be our record in the rocks for millennia to come. But geologists as a whole have a tricky relationship to the notion of the Anthropocene, embodied most clearly perhaps in the recent decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy not to confirm the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch. The reasons for that are many and interesting, but does it represent the death of the Anthropocene as a useful concept? I don’t think so. The term originated not in geology but in Earth System Science — not the people concerned with our record in the rocks, but the people concerned with how humanity is perturbing things like the climate and the biosphere. In recent years it’s become more common to think of the Anthropocene not as a geological age or epoch, but as an event, and a process. As process, it is something which is unfolding unevenly across space and time. As event, it is something which could, on geological timescales, be relatively fleeting. Which is quite a hopeful way to think about things! Either way, this new way of thinking scientifically about the Anthropocene sits much more comfortably with how social scientists, historians, artists and others like to think about it — as a set of processes with some coherence, perhaps with an identifiable beginning and hopefully an end, but which is highly geographically uneven. It’s not all ‘we’ and ‘us’, but some people, some systems, some ways of doing things which are powerful, but not unmovable.

Veronica: Indeed. As your defining terms in your very useful glossary, and several of the museum exhibit entries suggest, it is not just the Great Acceleration we need to concentrate on as the main culpable era, but that the beginning of the Anthropocene can arguably be traced back — as in the so-called Columbian Exchange — to the first expansionist, colonialist ventures, prospecting for more plants, land and resources. I think in fact it goes potentially much further, and your texts lead the way to thinking very much more broadly than previously, not only about the origins and conditioning factors for the Anthropocene, but about how it is defined. The medieval map and the Santa Maria replica ship both highlight those issues.

Martin: Absolutely, and that’s something we spend time talking quite a lot about. While the stratigraphers wanted an easily identifiable, globally synchronous ‘big bang’ moment they could point to as the start of the Anthropocene, historians, geographers and the like are more interested in tracing root causes of change, which might mean thinking about how the transformations of the Great Acceleration had their roots in early European colonial expansion or, as you suggest, perhaps even further back, in moments like the rise of settled agricultural communities, or in the emergence of particular attitudes to the natural world.

Showing: UEA Museum of the Anthropocene exhibition 2024. Photo by Daniel Lightening (Lightening Photography) — UEA Museum of the Anthropocene exhibition 2024. Photo: Daniel Lightening (Lightening Photography) © 2024

Veronica: Exactly — as the authors and you frequently suggest, there is also the whole persistent question about nature and humans’ attitude to it, and what role that is playing in, not so much the current concerns with mass extinctions, but exploitation and the wielding of power. There are moral nature-culture questions about the canary, the pigeon, the rat and the beaver, but also in different ways for plant species — the suburban lawn, the Christmas tree and Sweetgrass. There seems to be a persistent tension between the human desire for control as exploitation and the exertion of power, and for its more apparently benign purpose to create order. Time and again, while reading the museum entries, I was thrown back on thinking not only that everything is connected in complex ways, but that the earth is riddled with, as you put it Martin, ‘unequal geographies’.

Showing: A film work by Jane Ivimey about eroding cliffs at Happisburgh (Norfolk, England), shown in 'On the Edge' at GroundWork Gallery, 2019. Jane Ivimey © 2019 — A film work by Jane Ivimey about eroding cliffs at Happisburgh (Norfolk, England), shown in ‘On the Edge’ at GroundWork Gallery, 2019. Jane Ivimey © 2019

Martin: I think that’s really key. And we can trace the origins of those unequal geographies both in material processes of transformation (e.g. in the economic contributions of the transatlantic slave trade to the rise of industrialism in Great Britain), and in moments of ‘geo-cultural’ change, as Jason W. Moore puts it. That’s what I think is so fascinating about the whole debate around the Anthropocene. Suddenly we’ve got historians and ethicists talking to earth system scientists and geologists about human-nonhuman relationships in a profoundly generative way, in a manner which didn’t really happen when we were ‘just’ talking about climate change, air pollution, or other environmental crises that have now been bracketed together under the term ‘the Anthropocene’. That bracketing can be problematic as it leads to abstractions and blindspots. But it also draws attention to some big, consequential questions about our relationship to nature, the legacies of empire-building, about cultural change, and so on.

Our planetary age through objects and processes

Veronica: In fact, I think, the kinds of exhibits and concerns brought to light in the museum are leading me to think that we need a whole new definition of the idea of the Anthropocene, beyond geology and what we are physically laying down and altering on the globe. For much of what is being discussed is not so much about what the world is becoming physically, but by what moral, ethical and economic forces it is being, and has been influenced and shaped.

Take for example the Mirror — one of the artefacts of earliest origin — which highlights the problems of self-regard, vanity, narcissism and the confusion of nature-culture that we see or don’t see in our reflections. That author suggests that the Mirror-cene could be a relevant concept. That entry, and quite a few others touch on aspects of the original sins — pride, vanity, greed. Also, the Lawn, Fast Fashion, the Diamond Ring, Banana, the Pocahontas costume — but in each case, go much further to illuminate the subtleties of exploitation, appropriation of identity, commerce, corruption and consumerism, and the special poisons of corporate greed that have increased the scale of the problems these artefacts represent. But for all the evils of their proliferation, it also struck me forcibly when reading these, that the fact remains that humans are vulnerable to being exploited on a mass scale and to that end, culpable as consumers, not quite equally, but not without power as such, to change things — in either direction.

Showing: 'The Art of Waste' exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2023, with works by Jeremy Butler, Jan Eric Visser, Liz Elton.jpg — ‘The Art of Waste’ exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2023 – showing works by Jeremy Butler, Jan Eric Visser, Liz Elton. Photo: GroundWork Gallery © 2023

Martin: You’ve touched on a really tricky and fascinating point which is shot through all of this — how to talk about things like cultural values, norms, behaviours etc. in a way which prompts new forms of reflection, but which also doesn’t lay the blame for what’s going on at the feet of individuals? There have been a few occasions where students have chosen an object which connects to something they love — like a hobby or a sport they’re keen participants of — and then when they start to unpick all the ‘Anthropocene’ aspects of it, they’re left feeling their object is a Bad Thing. I warn them about the risks of that at the outset, but also try to emphasise that the world, our systems of production, our shared values and so on are determined to a large extent by forces outside of our control. We can change them, but not just by being better consumers, or by no longer taking joy from the plastic Christmas tree or enjoying a picnic on a manicured lawn. Again, history is powerful here, because it shows how contingent things are. Our rapacious version of consumer capitalism wasn’t inevitable — it was very deliberately engineered as a way of dealing with a crisis of overproduction following World War II. That’s what the archives show, and industries like marketing and PR developed precisely to get that new consumer economy going. Once one knows that, it’s possible to see how things could be otherwise. And that’s about collective action, political work, and imagination work. And on the latter is where the arts and museums can be so important.

Learning from the Anthropocene museum

Veronica: That leads me to think more about the state and status of the museum currently — it is a wonderful collection of stories as well as artefacts, and stories which manage at the same time to be quite depressing as a collection of observations about the harm we have done to the Earth, and enlightening in unpicking the forces and circumstances that led us there. There are plenty of positive statements too, about the desire for care for nature and nature as a refuge, and how this sometimes develops in surprising ways, as in the story of Pikachu, or more straightforwardly, Sweetgrass and the tribute to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s famous book. I also very much liked the positive reframing of the Witch as a bringer of ecological wisdom, as a counter to her conventional portrayal as a frightening practitioner in black magic and as a force to be reckoned with against the patriarchal and colonial creators of the Anthropocene’s problems. I also liked the ones that took us above and beyond Earth into space — as indeed that exploitation is going to be the next goal for the greedy prospectors — you just need to look at who the main ones are…

The museum educator in me began thinking about how the museum could be further activated educationally. Of course, it was created with an educational purpose, which in itself is extremely interesting. Conventionally the museum curator is the one who selects and essentialises the stories, whittling down to the uber-story that the display elucidates. When I worked as a museum educator, I always maintained that it was then our job to re-assemble the rich detail that lay at the heart of those distilled curated stories and then from there to explore the wider field that had provided the context — which embedded the story potentially much more deeply again and led to wider areas to discover. That in a sense is what your exhibitors have already done. However, I think there could be an interesting metacognitive exercise to re-dissect their themes, pick up on their keywords, to examine each aspect of their detail, and then to see where the further connections and alliances are between the different exhibits. Where, for example does ‘ecological wisdom’ occur — perhaps between the Witch, Sweetgrass and Pikachu? I am not entirely sure where this would lead, but it might be fun to do. And it might be a way to think about the cumulative effects of the phenomena you are faced with, and maybe come closer to thinking about how to address some of those thorny issues of inequality, resource exploitation, geographical power imbalance. For I do feel that you and the students are onto something in terms of reframing the debates around the Anthropocene and potentially coming up with some positive proposals to counter them.

I know you have frequently started your conversations with the Sainsbury Collection, and I used to have a whole repertoire of workshops whereby we would have a deck of words or phrases on card — which might have come from either a random source or a specific one and we would place them near an object with which we thought there might be some kind of connection. It wasn’t always enlightening in terms of being true to the cultures of origin of some of the artefacts, but always led somewhere interesting because of peoples’ desire to make new sense of things, and was a way to open up new questions… I always found the Sainsbury Collection tremendously valuable in encouraging questioning and I am sure that, plus its global range and variety of kinds of artefact, made it an ideal starting point for you and the students.

Martin: It’s really interesting that you say that. In Week 1 of the module we do an exercise with some ‘keywords’, to prompt some discussions of what the Anthropocene ‘means’ and what it ‘demands’. This always yields really interesting insights into how the students feel about environmental change and, essentially, what appetite for revolution they have! Revolution of various kinds — economic, cultural, technological… Bringing some of our previous museum entries into that conversation could be really generative too. I’ve learned so much from the education team at the Sainsbury Centre about how to do good object-based learning, and getting students thinking in those terms right from the get-go could have some interesting implications for the kinds of objects and entities they ultimately chose to focus on.

Veronica: I was wondering what difference it might have made had you begun with a more conventional museum, the kind that claims to provide answers and ‘factual’ information and a more taxonomic approach to its collecting. Perhaps you might have got a more conventional range of essays…

Martin: Quite possibly! Via the wonders of YouTube we engage with how other museums around the world have engaged with the Anthropocene, like the Deutsches Museum in Munich or the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In both cases I think the notion of the Anthropocene has challenged their curatorial practices, whether that’s poking the notion of natural history or challenging the boundaries of a museum focused on human technology — the type of museum that tended (until recently!) to tell a rather celebratory story of technological change. I think there’s something interesting about curating as a geographer rather than a historian too — I try to get them to think about difference, inequality, about what Anna Tsing calls the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. I think that leads to some differences of emphasis, as well as an always-fascinating range from the mundane and the everyday to the spectacular and the unique. But a perennial challenge is to find the grounds for hope in all of this — via these objects to identify historical contingency, to spot those spaces where different worlds are being built and ultimately, I hope, to help students discover their own agency in all this — not as self-flagellating, guilt-ridden consumers who must make better choices, but as agents of collective change equipped, I hope, with some useful knowledge and, more importantly, with persuasive stories to tell.

Anthropocene Museum: Showing Museum of the Anthropocene entries - the first four years, 2022-25. — Museum of the Anthropocene entries – the first four years, 2022-25

Find more

You can explore all 24 student entries over our first four years of our Museum of the Anthropocene, Inside the Museum. And Martin’s essays accompanying each new cohort are:

The Museum also has a small Anthropocene Glossary, briefly exploring some of the terms introduced in the students’ essay, with links to further reading: Coloniality, The Columbian Exchange, Epistemic communities, The Great Acceleration, The Malthusian Hypothesis, Technofossil, The Technosphere, The Tragedy of the Commons.

GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, is all about art and environment. As well as a full programme of exhibitions, events and residencies, their site has an extensive collection of resources: “writing linked to, or inspired by our campaigns. All of them have been connected with exhibitions and/or with artists’ work. Everything that GroundWork Gallery displays or exhibits aims to connect with a particular environmental message and these resources are grouped into themes, which have emerged through our discussions.”

You can read Veronica’s previous ClimateCultures posts, including her three chosen objects for our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects: A Personal Anthropocene History #6: ‘Cosmic Man’, TE20 Tractor, Loch Hourn Stone, and her essay for our Longer feature: The Art and Heritage of Waste.

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Veronica — “I use AI sometimes almost inadvertently (in that Google offers it automatically) to gather information and make lists of issues to follow up for further investigation. I only use it purposefully to adapt and/or shorten the long texts I write for exhibitions, mostly to produce press releases — which AI does admirably and I hate to do, so for that function I am grateful. It produces very odd press contact lists, though! And it is completely hopeless at producing blurbs for events etc — it makes anything sound utterly cheesy and gushing.”

Martin — “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”

Veronica Sekules

An art curator, educator and writer with a background in the environmental movement, who has created GroundWork Gallery to showcase art and campaign for the environment.

Martin Mahony

Dark in Nature – Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

Eco-artist and designer Ife Abhulimen‘s sculpture, Dark in Nature, explores persistence by holding an object in place long enough to be noticed. Emerging from the space between appearance and disappearance, it questions our notions of ‘waste’ and ‘away’.

960 words: estimated reading time = approximately 4 minutes

Often times, the moment something becomes ‘waste,’ it also becomes easy to forget.

And then, once it leaves our hands, we move on. We carry on with our day as usual and rarely stop to wonder where it ends up.

Every year, we discard hundreds of millions of tons of plastic. Most of it slips quietly out of view into landfills, oceans, into places we don’t have to look at. And once it’s gone from sight, it becomes easier to believe it’s gone altogether.

Out of sight, out of mind.

But some things don’t often follow that saying.

What we choose not to see

Most of what we throw away is designed to leave us quickly. A bottle is used for minutes. Packaging is torn open and discarded without a second thought. These objects pass through our hands so briefly; it almost feels like they were never really there to begin with.

And yet, they remain, just not where we can see them. That absence creates a kind of comfort. If it’s no longer in front of us, it no longer belongs to us. It becomes someone else’s problem. Somewhere else’s reality.

But that distance is thin. Almost imaginary.

It didn’t start as art

Dark in Nature, one of the pieces from my recent solo exhibition, Delicate Resilience, began in that space between presence and disappearance. It is made from reclaimed plastic bottles, wire, textile scraps. Materials that were once held, used, and then set aside. Things that had already reached what we might call their end but in my mind still had potential to become a conversation piece. At the centre, a darkened organic-looking structure holds fragments within it, bits of colour and texture held in another bottle that feel like remnants of something that hasn’t fully let go. Around it, the forms extend outward. Bottles bend and stretch, no longer functioning as they once did, but not erased either.

They linger, outliving us by generations.

Dark Nature: Showing: 'Dark in Nature', by Ife Abhulimen, 2026: Plastic bottles, garden wire, textile scraps. — ‘Dark in Nature’ (Ife Abhulimen, 2026). Plastic bottles, garden wire, textile scraps. Photograph: Ife Abhulimen

Something is still happening

There’s a sense of movement in this piece of work. The wire reaches outward, almost searching, almost restless. The forms resist stillness. They push past the boundaries that try to contain them.

And then, unexpectedly, there are the yellow elements. They resemble flowers; small, delicate, almost hopeful. For a moment, they suggest something familiar. Something natural. Something alive.

But they are not what they seem.

They are constructed, like everything else in this piece. Placed there, not grown there. These ‘flowers’ hint at nature’s persistence, its quiet way of pushing against human interference, always trying to find a way to thrive.

The illusion of growth

That’s where the tension sits. Dark in Nature holds that contradiction quietly. It looks like growth, but it isn’t the kind we understand. These materials do not return to the earth. They do not follow the cycles we associate with life.

They stay, they break, they shift, they scatter but they remain part of the world, whether we see them or not.

So what we are looking at isn’t growth in the traditional sense. It’s persistence taking on the shape of something we recognise.

Showing 'Dark in Nature' (Ife Abhulimen, 2026). Plastic bottles, garden wire, textile scraps. Photograph: Ife Abhulimen — ‘Dark in Nature’ (Ife Abhulimen, 2026). Plastic bottles, garden wire, textile scraps. Photograph: Ife Abhulimen

What happens after we look away?

When we throw something away, we rarely imagine its future. We don’t picture where it settles. How long it stays. What it becomes over time. But that doesn’t mean it disappears. It simply moves beyond the edges of our attention. This piece brings it back from that distance. It gathers what was scattered. It places it in front of us again, not as it was, but as something we can’t ignore quite as easily.

Not gone, just repositioned

Nothing here is new.

Every part of it has existed before, used differently, for an original purpose. All that has changed is the context. The way it is seen after some artistic manipulation. The fact that it is being looked at again. And maybe that’s enough to unsettle something. Because if these materials were never truly gone, just relocated, reshaped, reassembled, then the idea of ‘away’ starts to feel uncertain.

Dark in Nature – a small shift

This work doesn’t offer answers.

It doesn’t tell you what to do or how to respond.

It simply holds something in place long enough for it to be noticed.

And sometimes, that’s where change begins, not in immediate action, but first in awareness.

Because once you begin to notice what doesn’t disappear, it becomes harder to believe in the idea of ‘away’. And maybe ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was never the full story.

Maybe it’s just the part we chose to accept.

Find more

You can find more on the recent exhibition of Ife’s work, which included Dark in Nature, in our Creative Showcase piece, Delicate Resilience: Where Nature Refuses to Give Up.

Elsewhere on our blog, in Starting to See Waste as Art and Heritage, curator Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using an exhibition at GroundWork Gallery to explore artists’ roles in helping change how we value what we discard.

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Ife – “I use AI to create mockups and nice backgrounds for my art pieces, which has been very helpful especially when I want to showcase work in a different setting. In addition, I use AI to do research as it helps me filter all the fluff, in contrast to Google search, and it gives relevant information. I also use it to search for opportunities in the sustainable art space. I try not to use it a lot because I think it’s robbing us of our capacity to think as intelligent humans. For this post, I have used AI to help with grammar corrections.”

Ifeoluwa Abhulimen

A self-taught eco-artist and designer who explores themes of consumption, sustainability, and environmental responsibility, inviting audiences to discover beauty and value in what is often overlooked.

Conversational Drift and Artistic Inquiry: Thinking With The Harrisons

Transdisciplinary artist Sarah Strachan offers a practice-based researcher’s perspective on Thinking with the Harrisons. The book explores how this renowned eco-artist duo’s responsive, ‘conversational drift’ approach suggests how artistic inquiry can remain open to ecological complexity and uncertainty.

1,820 words: estimated reading time = approximately 7.5 minutes

Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis Art offers an exploration into the pioneering and prophetic work of eco-artist duo Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) in conversation with the writings of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead’s concepts of process philosophy. The authors, Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, position the Harrisons not as historical figures to be interpreted from a distance but as collaborators whose approaches continue to shape contemporary ecological art. This shift — from thinking about to thinking with — is central to the book’s structure and argument. It reframes the Harrisons’ practice as an ongoing, relational inquiry rather than a closed body of work, and it invites readers to inhabit the methodological openness that characterised their ecological engagements.

“Rethinking the arts in the environmental crisis involves questioning the conventions of art and their appropriateness for a rapidly changing world just as Whitehead’s search for a different philosophy of nature involved him questioning the foundations of science and Stengers, the questioning of the cultural values of technoscience.”

— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p. 105)

Showing the cover of the book 'Thinking with the Harrisons' by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, 2024

The book is described by educator, artist and researcher, Iain Biggs as “an unusual and highly important text” that focuses on “how the Harrisons’ unfolding process addresses a series of fundamental and pressing ecological questions”.¹ However, for me, its most significant contribution lies in its articulation of thinking with and conversational drift as methodological frameworks. For practice-based researchers like me, these concepts are not merely descriptive of the Harrisons’ approach; they constitute an epistemic orientation and methodological process for engaging with ecological complexity, multispecies entanglement, and climate-related transformation.

Thinking with: a relational epistemology

The concept of thinking with emerges throughout the book as an epistemic orientation grounded in relationality, responsiveness, and co-production. To think with the Harrisons is to enter the same mode of inquiry that animated their practice: a willingness to be transformed by the ecological, social, cultural, and political contexts one encounters.

For practice-based researchers, thinking with is significant because it challenges the assumption that research begins with a stable problem or a fixed set of methods. Instead, it suggests that ecological research must be co-constituted with the systems it engages. Thinking with becomes a form of methodological humility — an acknowledgement that ecological knowledge is distributed across species, landscapes, and processes, and that the researcher’s role is to participate in these distributed networks of sense making. Douglas and Fremantle emphasise that thinking with is not a metaphorical gesture but a practical orientation. It shapes how the Harrisons approached sites, collaborators, and ecological crises. It also shapes how the book itself is organised: as a polyphonic assemblage of voices, perspectives, and disciplinary positions that collectively enact the relational ethos of the Harrisons’ work.

Conversational drift: methodology as movement

If thinking with provides the epistemic orientation, conversational drift provides the methodological process. Conversational drift describes the Harrisons’ characteristic way of working: beginning with a question, entering dialogue with collaborators (human and more-than-human), and allowing the conversation to move in unexpected directions. Crucially, drift is not a lack of focus; it is a method of ecological attunement. It can mean both “the motion and the result of that motion”.² It mirrors the dynamics of ecological systems, which are non-linear, iterative, adaptive, and relational. Drift allows the work to follow ecological cues rather than impose a predetermined structure. It is a methodology that privileges openness and emergence. For practice-based researchers, conversational drift offers a model for how artistic inquiry can remain open to ecological complexity without becoming overwhelmed. It becomes a way of navigating uncertainty — of allowing the research to unfold in relation to the shifting conditions of the ecological systems it engages.

The book highlights that the Harrisons’ conversations were never limited to human interlocutors. Their work is filled with dialogues with watersheds, species, coastlines, and climatic forces. These conversations are not symbolic; they are methodological. They reflect the Harrisons’ commitment to treating ecological entities as collaborators with agency.

“Conversation in this work is not limited to people but to the interaction between elements in the landscape shaped by human self-interest in the form of farming, paper mills, channels, levees and inevitably toxic pollution. The idea of joining the ‘odd kind of dialogue’ in which ‘the business of the universe/is conducted’ (Seventh Lagoon/91) here becomes the discourse of that place.”

— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p.102)

Conversational drift, in this context, becomes a way of listening to ecological processes. It requires the researcher to attend to signals that may not be verbal or human-centred: the movement of water, the behaviour of species, the shifting of coastlines. It becomes a method for recognising that ecological knowledge is co-produced across species and systems. This more-than-human conversational method anticipates contemporary multispecies and post-humanist scholarship, yet the Harrisons’ approach remains grounded in material processes. Their conversations with landscapes are informed by ecological data, fieldwork, and site-specific observation. Here, conversational drift is both conceptual and operational.

Showing 'Book of the Lagoons' by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, from the book 'Thinking with the Harrison', 2024

Mapping, scale, and systems thinking

Both thinking with and conversational drift are deeply entangled with the Harrisons’ commitment to systems thinking. The authors emphasise the Harrisons’ ability to drift across different scales — from lagoon to watershed to planet. This movement is not arbitrary; it reflects the ecological reality that local phenomena are embedded within larger systemic dynamics. For practice-based researchers, this raises important methodological questions. How can artistic practice operate at scales that exceed the human sensorium? How can research remain grounded in local specificity while attending to planetary processes?

The book suggests that thinking with and conversational drift offer a way through this tension. They allow the work to move fluidly between scales, guided by the ecological relations that emerge through conversation. Scale becomes a drifting relation rather than a fixed parameter.

The Harrisons’ conversational texts — hybrid forms of poetry, dialogue, and ecological proposition — are central to their practice, and the book treats them as methodological artefacts. These texts embody conversational drift in their structure: they move between voices, temporalities, and epistemic registers, refusing closure in favour of ongoing inquiry. For practice-based researchers, these texts demonstrate how writing can function as a site of ecological experimentation. The drift of language becomes a method for exploring ecological futures that are not yet materially realised. Thinking with becomes a textual practice as much as an ecological one.

Critical reflections: the limits of drift and relationality

The book presents thinking with and conversational drift not as perfected research methodologies but as ongoing, situated practices that must continually negotiate their own limitations. Drift can be difficult to reconcile with institutional structures that demand clarity, deliverables, and measurable outcomes. Thinking with requires time, trust, and relational labour that institutions often undervalue. Whilst these attributes of the method offer potential for art practice-based research, as artists and researchers we need to work within the constraints of these institutional structures.

There is also a risk that drift, if unexamined, can obscure issues of power and representation. Who participates in the conversation? Who is authorised to drift? As Grant Kester acknowledges, “voices that run contrary to official wisdom often take longer to locate and are more difficult to hear”.³ Whilst the authors foreground these tensions by recognising that “systems continue to reveal and confirm biases and structural inequalities”⁴ and “the arts and the environment and conservation movements are still characterised by a lack of cultural diversity”,⁵ there is a reliance on artists from within the Eurocentric hegemony in the chapter titled thinking with one another. This references artists immanent in the Harrisons’ work, who have furthered it through experimentation or of the same generation with similar concerns but using different approaches; although, as outlined in an earlier article on the Harrisons, their enquiry has focused primarily on artistic practices that openly acknowledge the Harrisons’ influence.⁶

Showing 'Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece' by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, from the book 'Thinking with the Harrisons', 2024.

A methodological invitation

The authors position thinking with and conversational drift as evolving and generative methodologies for ecological art in the era of climate crisis. They offer a way of engaging with ecological complexity that is adaptive, relational, and open to transformation. They challenge artists and practice-based researchers to cultivate methods that are responsive to ecological systems that embrace uncertainty and that recognise conversation — human and more-than-human — as a form of ecological agency.

“Could the Harrison’s key contribution lie in how they share their learning in such a way that those who follow grasp their experience with clarity? Unlike the world of art and its proprietorial character, the Harrisons are not afraid of other people making use of their work”

— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p. 214)

In this sense, the book is not simply a retrospective on the Harrisons’ work but a methodological invitation. It claims that the Harrisons’ legacy is not a set of works but a way of working that remains urgently relevant. It asks us to continue thinking with the Harrisons by allowing our own practices to drift — toward new collaborators, new scales, and new ecological futures.

Sarah’s references

[1] Biggs, I., 2024. Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environmental Crisis: A review

[2] Strachan, S., 2023. A drift in conversation: Across hierarchies and beyond boundaries. Journal of Arts Writing by Students. (Bristol, UK; Intellect Publishing. p. 92.)

[3] Kester, G., 2004. Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art (University of California Press, Berkeley. p.172.)

[4] Brain, T., 2018. The environment is not a system. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 7(1), pp.152-165.

[5] Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C., 2024. Thinking with the Harrisons. Reimagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

[6] Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C., 2023. Thinking with the Harrisons: what does now demand? Field: a journal of socially-engaged art criticism, 23.

Find more

Thinking with the Harrisons: Reimagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis, by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, is published by Leuven University Press (2024).

Anne Douglas (Professor Emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland) has written about the book at the Leuven University Press blog (September 2024).

You can explore the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at The Harrison Studio.

Craig Adcock was the first to use the term ‘Conversational drift’ as the process undertaken by the Harrisons. It was the title of an article which documented a conversation between the three of them. He writes: “The title ‘conversational drift’, which they suggested, is meant to reflect both the process of interchange that occurred between us and also to suggest how their ecologically orientated art function in general: their work sets up situations both in art galleries and in the halls of government that encourage the conversation to open up, to change, and to drift toward innovative and creative solutions to real world problems.” (Conversational Drift: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Adcock, Craig: Art Journal, Volume 51, Issue 2 (1992) p. 45)

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Sarah – “In my practice, I enter into deep conversations with people, place, the land and its materials. More recently this has also specifically involved conversations with generative AI, which is helping me to explore the concept of more-than-human conversation further. Therefore, the development of this review has been informed by conversations with all these entities.”

Sarah Strachan

A transdisciplinary artist exploring through printmaking, painting and ceramics how perceptions of being in, knowing and belonging to the world affect our ecological awareness and thinking.

Hey! Earthlings! A Field Guide to Connecting

Artist Andrew Howe shares a collaborative project with fellow artists and migrants to bring together creativity, community and heritage, building trust, reframing narratives in an era of climate crisis and showing we are all earthlings, connected with nature.

2,230 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

At a time when the ground beneath us is shifting — politically, ecologically, socially — what does it mean to belong?

Environmental crises are intensifying and so is human movement — quietly, unevenly, and often without recognition. Creative practice has a vital role to play in response: not simply to draw attention to change, but to hold space for connection, dignity, and shared experience.

Hey! Earthlings! emerged from this context as both a project and a provocation — an invitation to rethink how we connect across difference, and how art might help cultivate belonging in an age of displacement.

Beginnings — from idea to collective action

This project began as an idea some years ago to invite people who have moved across borders, or with connections to other places through family and heritage, to join with us and share stories, sounds, and creative responses through walks and making. A simple idea, but multi-layered and rich with potential to help participants build stronger connections to local nature and heritage and, perhaps, find a new sense of place and belonging in Shropshire.

As conversations developed, a core team formed: myself, as an artist working in sound, painting, printmaking, and other media; Jill Impey – an artist working in video, sound and printmaking; and Jean Atkin – a poet and writer. Together, under Participate Contemporary Artspace CIC (now Participate Co-labs), we shaped the project and secured funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund in Summer 2024. After a period of careful planning, our activities got underway during Spring/Summer 2025.

Hey! Earthlings! unfolded amid increasing social division in the UK and growing hostility toward migrants and refugees. Against this background, the project took on a deeper significance: to offer a counter-narrative grounded in generosity, creativity, and welcome.

“The project challenged the idea that we live in a world of ‘not enough’. In reality, the Earth is abundant, and people naturally want to contribute meaningfully to the places they live and without the negative narrative and fear-based leadership in the world, humans would naturally share without fear.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Climate Change and the movement of people

Practitioners engaging with climate themes cannot ignore migration.

The relationship between climate change and migration is complex, but the global effects of both phenomena are undeniable. Extreme weather events — floods, storms, droughts — are already forcing millions to move. Slower environmental changes, such as desertification or rising sea levels, impact on livelihoods too. The frequency and severity of these events are increasing.

UNHCR estimates indicate that tens of millions of people are displaced each year by sudden environmental events, while projections produced by the World Bank indicate that by 2050, hundreds of millions could be internally displaced due to long-term climate impacts.

These figures reduce human lives to statistics and do not capture the lived experience of losing home, identity, culture, agency, assets and dignity and the search for belonging.

This is where art has a humanising role to hold spaces where people can speak, create, and connect.

Walking as method: reconnecting through landscape

We held three Hey! Earthlings! creative events at each of two pairs of locations in Shropshire, offering important natural and historic heritage to explore by walking together:

Old Oswestry Iron Age Hill Fort and Oswestry Memorial Hall
Doctor’s Field countryside site and Darwin House, The Mount, Shrewsbury (Charles Darwin’s birthplace and childhood home).

These are all located within or very close to the towns of Oswestry and Shrewsbury, and so were relatively easily accessible, with the potential for participants to return again in future.

Each of the events comprised an artist-led walk followed by a creative workshop.

We were inspired by artist Henna Asikainen and her use of walks in projects with refugees and migrants. Walking offers a shared rhythm. It dissolves hierarchies. It allows for informal conversation, chance encounters, quiet reflection and freedom to explore the surrounding landscape.

The group bonded through creativity and shared experience, taking opportunities to translate for each other and share food and song whilst gathered around a fire.

Showing Hey! Earthlings! participants listening to the river. Photo: by Anna Martin 2025. Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! listening to the river. Photo: Anna Martin © 2025

Each walk started with a grounding meditation. We then listened to the river and trees, we foraged, shared stories and words about nature, and played parachute games. The group(s) learned about local history and nature, sharing oral histories, making films and co-creating art.

After scrambling over steep ramparts to the top of the Old Oswestry Hillfort, we used a compass at this 360-degree viewpoint to orient ourselves to local landmarks and distant homelands.

These multi-sensory walks enabled people to compare common or shared experiences from other places, and find meaning, empathy and compassion.

“Being in nature evokes a sense of home and belonging (the trees are not lost): the wind is the wind, the rain is the rain, the sun rises for all the stars and moon are the same ones their families see across the world. This reinforced the idea that humans are children of the Earth and of the stars. The Earth has no borders; birds and fish do not need passports.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Hey! Earthlings! Expressing belonging through creativity

Following the walks we returned to workshop venues to respond creatively.

The approach was intentionally open, flexible and welcoming. We offered printmaking, drawing, writing, small book-making, and other collaborative activities, allowing participants of all ages and abilities to engage in ways that felt comfortable, safe and meaningful.

The workshops were not set up as places of instruction, but as opportunities for exchange. Participants brought their own knowledge, skills, and creative traditions. It was a delight when two young Ukrainian participants asked if they could lead some creative sessions during the workshops — an offer we embraced and celebrated.

The shift from facilitator to co-creator crucially challenges the notion of participants as recipients and instead recognises them as contributors and artists with knowledge to share.

Showing Hey! Earthlings! participants preparing cyanotype prints. Photo: Andrew Howe Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! participants preparing cyanotype prints. Photo: Andrew Howe © 2025

The resulting artworks were vibrant, layered, and deeply personal. They spoke of journeys, memories, loss, resilience, and joy. They reflected not only the challenges of displacement, but also the richness that diverse communities bring to local contexts.

Building trust: the role of an ethical framework

Underpinning the whole of our project was an ethical framework devised by Jill Impey. This guided our delivery to ensure everyone involved felt safe and welcome, providing a reference or set of prompts to guide actions and relationships throughout from beginning to end.

The ethical framework aims to embed respect, honesty and understanding in working with participants, with our supporting organisations and with each other. When working with people who may have experienced trauma, displacement, or marginalisation, the stakes are high.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! Ethical Framework. — Hey! Earthlings! Ethical Framework.

The framework emphasises:

Empathy and compassion as foundational values, cultivating a culture of care
Inclusion and accessibility to remove barriers to participation
Respect and honesty in all interactions
Agency and consent, ensuring participants retained control over their stories and contributions
Reciprocity, recognising that exchange must be mutual, not extractive.

This framework was not simply theoretical. It informed practical decisions — from how we structured workshops, to how we developed relationships with partner organisations, to how we shared outcomes.

It also provided a crucial anchor for the team, offering a shared language and set of principles to navigate complex situations.

Partnership and participation

The project was made possible through a network of partnerships, including community organisations, cultural institutions, and local authorities.

Participants came from a wide range of backgrounds: young people from Bulgarian schools, asylum seekers from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Sierra Leone and Vietnam, newly settled Ukrainians, and individuals connected through refugee support networks and community groups. Each event was tailored towards the particular group attending.

We were very fortunate to be able to appoint two experienced community co-ordinators, Anna Martin and Marina Churm. During project planning, we consulted with various community groups to gauge interest and shape the activities for the events.

Both Anna and Marian proved invaluable to the project as they engaged so positively with groups they had existing connections with and with other community leaders who could help link to a wider network and invite people to work with us. Building trust takes time, sensitivity, and existing relationships. Their work ensured that participants felt welcomed, informed, and supported throughout the process.

The team were supported by local artists, Jamila Walker Thomas and Niki Holmes, and project evaluator and mentor, Cerin Mills.

Meaningful engagement cannot be rushed or assumed. It requires investment in relationships, and often collaboration with those who already hold trust within communities.

Sharing responses: rethinking the ‘Cabinet’

We showed the work made at the events in a travelling cabinet at exhibitions in local libraries and museums. These took place at Oswestry Library; Gateway Arts and Education Centre, Shrewsbury Library and Shropshire Archives. The mobile cabinet is made with reclaimed furniture and is able to host and display a range of materials, sounds and video. Its many drawers, compartments and fold-out doors invite visitors to interact with the cabinet and explore for themselves.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! cabinet in Shrewsbury library. Photo: Andrew Howe 2025. Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! cabinet in Shrewsbury library. Photo: Andrew Howe © 2025

Cabinets like this one have long been used to collect and display objects deemed unfamiliar, unusual or exotic — often telling stories about people rather than with them. We aimed to do things differently by inviting the participants to have a stake in curating the exhibition and deciding how to present their work on their own terms.

Rather than turning lives into curiosities, this Cabinet asks us to be curious with empathy — and to reflect on how we might tell richer, more respectful stories in the future.

Shared responses also included a series of collaborative poems edited by Jean Atkin, a short film edited by Jill Impey and a series of soundscapes of stories, reflections and field recordings edited by me. The soundscapes were installed as audio trails at Old Oswestry Hillfort and at Doctor’s Field in Shrewsbury, and can also be streamed from the Participate website.

A Field Guide to Connecting

Towards the end of the project, we prepared a Field Guide to Connecting: a resource for sharing our experience to help other practitioners deliver multi-cultural community arts and heritage projects effectively.

The Guide is aimed towards:

Artist peers/creative practitioners
Community workers and organisations
Fundraisers seeking funding for similar projects

The Guide provides some key reference sheets, such as the Ethical Framework and Ingredients for Success, which include prompts and practical advice. This is supplemented by information from our Hey! Earthlings! project describing our approach, supported by sample documents.

The document is designed not as a fixed methodology, but as a flexible, adaptable resource — something that can be used, questioned, and reshaped. It moves beyond theory into practice, offering grounded insights into what works, what challenges arise, and how they might be navigated.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! Field Guide to Connecting — Hey! Earthlings! Field Guide to Connecting

Reframing migration: from crisis to contribution

One of the most powerful shifts within Hey! Earthlings! is its reframing of migration.

“Many displaced people are treated as passive objects, moved like pieces on a chessboard. Used for political games and leverage and discarded when no more use. This results in adding to their deep grief, a sense of betrayal, and a loss of agency. It can feel as traumatising for them as the reason why they are here — just in a different way. Reframing migrants as contributors, creators, and community members is vital for their healing and for the communities that receive them.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Too often, migrants and displaced people are positioned as problems to be solved, burdens to be managed, or victims to be pitied. This narrative not only dehumanises individuals but also obscures their agency, creativity, and potential contributions.

By contrast, Hey! Earthlings! foregrounds participants as creators, collaborators, and community members, and aims to foster more inclusive communities. Our project offered alternative narratives to dominant, often divisive discourses and engaged with global issues through local, embodied experience.

Hey! Earthlings! offers an invitation to recognise ourselves as Earthlings – a condition we share with every living organism inhabiting and depending on a single, fragile planet.

Find more

The projections Andrew gives on displaced people due to long-term climate impacts are from Climate change-induced migration: UK collaboration with international partners by Thomas Weston (September 2023).

You can explore Hey! Earthlings! at the project pages on the Participate Co-labs website — including a download of A Field Guide to Connecting, an 8-minute video, a guided grounding meditation and two audio trails of Old Oswestry Hillfort and Doctor’s Field, consisting of collaborative poems performed by Jean Atkin, shared stories and reflections on the events at the Hillfort, and a soundscape of an imagined Iron Age village. This series of soundscapes was edited by Andrew Howe using field recordings made at the Hillfort, and poems created using words by participants at events and edited by Jean Atkin.

Participate Co-labs (formerly Participate Contemporary Artspace) is an artist-run community interest company, set up in 2015 by Jill Impey, Elizabeth Turner and Keith Ashford to create space for artists to work and exhibit in Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

Shropshire Supports Refugees was established in 2016 to bring relief and support to vulnerable families displaced by unrest in their home countries relocating to Shropshire.

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Andrew – “I occasionally use AI for some functional, time-saving tasks like transcribing spoken word recordings or helping to reduce word count in written drafts before I re-edit into my own style. It can be useful to provide simple, clear summaries or comparisons between options when I have gathered and checked material myself, as I don’t fully trust AI with factual research. In my artist practice, I often move between analogue and digital processes, which I control, but I don’t like the aesthetics of AI-generated imagery and I don’t find it very effective in developing creative ideas.”

Andrew Howe

An interdisciplinary artist and project manager using walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, drawing attention to human entanglements within a multi-species environment.