Photography Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

A Strange Country

Psychotherapist Susan Holliday discovers an intricate world of imaginal possibility (a strange country) in an overlooked detail of a familiar landscape. Turning away from global events for a moment reminds us that change often starts with something small.

2,060 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country.¹

– Bill Brandt, photographer (Camera in London)

I wake before dawn to the sound of a robin’s song piercing the morning chill. It takes me less than an hour to dress and make my way to the wrought iron gates which mark the entrance to Richmond Park. A heavy dew rests on the still shadowed grass, seeming almost to hover above it like an overnight spell. All around, the bracken is rusting into its autumn glory. I make my way up a gentle slope through a stand of birch, beech and oak trees to reach the crest of the park. Here the sun has just tipped over the horizon and cast every leaf, blade and branch into fine gold. A huddle of deer nuzzle the grass, making the most of the quiet before the weekend cyclists arrive. I must have walked in this park a thousand times and still it takes my breath away.

The park is always a ‘strange country’ to me, a correlation of ever-changing elements, light, season and subjectivity. At first I just see what I have seen before, but with every step my preconceptions fall to the floor. Unclad, my eyes begin to see beyond recognition. What I’ve come to realise, over many encounters with the park, is that as my perception deepens, it moves from the general and the big, to the particular and the small. On this occasion it shifts from the broadbrush palette of grass, tree and sky, to the particular curve of a branch; the tritone beech leaves rustling their blessings over the waking park; and the oceanic wave structure of ageing bark.

Walking for days at a time, nature writer Nan Shepherd notices how her perception deepens gradually, so:

The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen.
So the ear, the other senses.²

This strikes me as a beautiful description of how we come to see more keenly. The word ‘gradual’ refers to something coming into fullness over time (from Latin gradus, meaning ‘step’). Gradually, we see what we ‘didn’t see before’. We begin to see ‘in a new way’.

So it is only on my way back down the slope, as I re-enter the shadows, that I notice the dazzling spiders’ webs which jewel the bracken. They were there all along. I passed them on my way up. I just didn’t have eyes keen enough to see them. Crouching down now, to take a closer look, I see a lattice of tiny pearls, strung together with impossible intricacy. To me, their beauty stems in part from their near perfection (the essential word here being ‘near’). Each little rectangle of negative space is uneven, each one an incomparable structure, building through repetition into something greater than the sum of its parts. These lines have not been measured or calculated. They have been drawn through countless micro movements of the spider’s body.

A strange country. Showing: Jewelled spider's web. Photograph by Susan Holliday 2025 — Jewelled spider’s web. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

A strange country: the gift of intricate hinterlands

Each web is a ‘strange country’ all by itself. The longer I look, the more I feel drawn into this other world. I imagine any one of these webs would be fine enough to grace a noblewoman’s robes in a Tudor court. I find myself wondering what it might be like to shrink down in size, to place my feet on its little ladders, or to hold one of the pearls in my hand. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable detail becomes an opening onto an intricate hinterland. Through their imagination and the suspension of preconception, these details become enormous. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, or the wardrobe in C.S Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the power of this portal vision.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter. For as adults we tend to regard the ‘small’ as lesser, as marginal and of little consequence. This has never been more so than at a time when everything is valued according to quantity and scale. The small can so easily be dismissed as a mere trifle, rather than valued as a coherent whole with its own integrity and particularity.

Indigenous peoples, artists, philosophers and mystics have long held a different view, in which every speck of the whole reveals universal patterns and principles. Fourteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, encapsulated the essential paradox of the ‘great little thing’ in one of her revelations:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’

And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.³

Four hundred years later, William Blake encouraged us to “see a world in a grain of sand”.⁴ Romantic fancy, some might say. In defence of the small, I could stray into the ways in which quantum mechanics and fractal geometry are opening up our contemporary understanding of the complexity and correspondence of micro and macro dimensions of our world; the profound influence of the minute. But I want to stay with my own experience, to say something about why I believe we need to turn our attention away from the titanic battles, the larger-than-life characters, the numbers, trends and averages, and lean towards the small, the slight and the fleeting.

They say ‘the devil is in the detail’, but maybe the sacred is there too. I don’t mean this in any religious sense, but in the context of everyday experience. We live in an age of distraction and consumption fuelled by fear of boredom and emptiness. As a psychotherapist, this word ‘boredom’ has intrigued me for years. It comes up a lot, either in the sense that life has become ‘boring’, or that a person fears they will be perceived as ‘boring’. It seems to me that ‘boring’ is the state we arrive at when we believe there is ‘nothing much to see here’, or perhaps ‘nothing new’. Boring is the ‘same-old-same-old’. It feasts on abstractions and averages, on preconceptions and generalisations.

‘Boring’ signals I have lost faith that within me, or in front of me, there could be more than meets the eye. More to be discovered. More strangeness. Perhaps I believe that I’ve seen all there is to be seen, or I’ve seen it all before. So I stop looking, or I start looking elsewhere. This is a bit like looking down from an airplane window on an outstretched continent, and believing it to be boring, simply because at this height (and at this speed) I can’t see the incomparable particularity, the infinitely varied and ever-changing detail of its topography. At close quarters, what I thought was entirely self-evident reveals itself to be a ‘strange country’, full of surprises and unplumbed depths.

Showing: Bark detail. Photograph by Susan Holliday, 2025 — Bark detail. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

Each of us contains an inner landscape. A place, like the park, we may have visited many times. Perhaps we think we have seen it all. Until one day, if we are really paying attention, we notice a slight shift, a little anomaly, an overlooked detail ‘for the first time’. Virginia Woolf suggests these glimpses are “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”.⁵ How often we overlook or dismiss these curious intimations. Un-midwifed by our beholding, the inkling moment is stillborn. Yet the moment we start to notice the details of our experience, life no longer seems so boring, so barren.

Just imagine how this simple practice of attending to little daily miracles could change our relationship to each other and to the whole. When every detail (like the jewelled spider’s web) opens a door onto a world of imagination and possibility, life feels rich and vital. Perhaps then we would no longer need to consume our way out of emptiness.

Finding my niche

We differentiate ourselves through our particularity. It is through paying attention to the subtle qualities and slight nuances of character that we start to appreciate we are not just a number, a statistic or a type. Each of us is one of a kind. There is only one of us in all time.

In his 2021 book, The Journey of Soul Initiation, Bill Plotkin articulates the principle that each of us occupies a distinct ‘ecological niche’:

Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community.⁶

Hauled into the trawler nets of socio-economic grouping, diagnostic typologies, or target markets, it can feel increasingly challenging to distinguish our authentic singularity, the significance of our particular ecological niche.

Could it be that the current polarisation of society into crude groupings of ideology and identity originates in a deep wound, which is the experience of not mattering in our smallness. If everything around me reinforces the narrative that what I imagine, feel, think and long for is of little importance ‘in the grand scheme of things’; if what I choose to do with my life doesn’t really matter ‘in the end’, then I will find my sense of mattering through identifying with something larger. Through this amalgamation, I lose sight of the details which define my singular significance.

The tragedy is that this obscuring of the little things which make me uniquely ‘me’ robs the wider whole of my particular contribution. Collectively, this self-effacement quickens the degeneration of the planet.

If I am to find my unique ecological niche in the Earth community, I will need to give some time to wandering about the inner ‘park’ of my life, until my eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen. Sensing my responsibility to my own particularity, I no longer look to ‘kill time’ (with distraction and consumption), but to realise my life ‘through time’ in all its richness and distinction.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us

Absorbed in the intricacy of the little spider’s web, my eye flickers between the lines and the spaces between them, the negative shapes. I start thinking how the whole structure of the web depends on these little spaces. I begin to breathe more deeply, as though taking in this airy structure as a blueprint for my own existence. Like most of us, my life is pretty crammed, packed with activity, crowded with ideas, obligations and intentions. Loaded with stuff. Drawn into the ‘strange country’ of the little web, I begin to sense what it might be like to live a more spacious life.

It occurs to me then, perhaps the Earth can teach us. Perhaps the small, the slight and the fleeting, in all their intimate beauty and particular significance, can show us other ways of living. To heed this minute and infinite intelligence, we may need to create little gaps in our lives, tiny spaces. Change starts with something very small. A deep breath, perhaps.

Walking on down the slope, I feel a little lighter.

Susan’s references

Bill Brandt, Camera in London (Focal, 1948)
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Canongate Books, 2011)
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, A Choice of Blake’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1970)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (The Hogarth Press, 1927)
Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021)

Find more

Susan Holliday is a psychotherapist and photographer and you can find more of her writing at her website.

Susan’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart was published by Matador in 2021. You can read James Murray-White‘s review for ClimateCultures, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart.

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...

Between ‘The Valley’ and Dublin: ‘Narrative’ Deep Mappings?

Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature, ‘Wild’ Deep Mappings.

1,330 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

You can also read Iain’s new essay for Longer, ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder). Longer is our feature sharing members’ works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is usually possible with our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces or complements it here with an original, related post.

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Where we live in the world
is never one place…

– Naomi Shihab Nye, My Grandmother in the Stars

Until quite recently I always referred to Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as the best fictional narrative flowing from the same mentalité as the deep mappings that most interest me. That changed when I came across Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, an unusual combination of poetry, photographs and a conversation. I see the two books as trans-Atlantic cousins, surprisingly alike in some respects and quite unlike in others. Both celebrate a particular place in depth, and both were largely created by women whose work presupposes a poetic imagination. ‘Largely’, because both books are the product of active collaborations.

The title page of my beautiful 1986 copy of Always Coming Home — withdrawn from Shetland Library and bought second-hand — names Le Guin as author (she also drew the maps), but adds artist Margaret Chodos, composer Todd Barton and geomancer George Hersh as contributors. I get the impression that the poems in A Poet’s Dublin were selected by the editors, possibly with Boland’s assistance. It was certainly the editors who sent Boland out with a camera to gather images to accompany the chosen poems. The connections between the poems and the resulting photographs are not always obvious. They may even appear “like disjunctions”, as Randolph puts it in her Introduction, adding that this serves to remind us of something important: “that an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined”.

Much the same could be said of the disparate, even disjunctive, elements in Le Guin’s book about “the Valley”. An imagined future region certainly, but one in no small part grounded in the various adult realities that surrounded Le Guin as a child. The reality of her mother’s work as author, anthropologist, and friend to and biographer of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people of North California. Also, of her father’s work as a highly respected cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, who later in life also served as a lay psychologist. Her father’s belief that genius arises out of culture at particular times, rather than being the isolated quality of a ‘great man’, would seem to have informed Le Guin’s detailed and diverse accounts of different aspects of ‘Valley’ culture and ritual, and to have informed the contrast between that culture, aligned to nature along the lines of the First Nations peoples in California, and that of the military and technologically-preoccupied Condor people.

Narrative deep mappings: Showing 'Stammersong', a poem by Ursula le Guin from 'Always Coming Home' (1985); with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine. — ‘Stammersong’, a poem by Ursula Le Guin from ‘Always Coming Home’ (1985), with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine.

Narrative deep mappings: always more than one place at a time

Any literalist familiar with both books could instantly come up with reasons why my linking them is at best idiosyncratic. But then literalists believe that we live in the world one place at a time and are almost certainly immune to the pleasures and challenges of deep mappings. They’re also likely to be suspicious of an orientation described as “towards an archaeology of the future”, as Le Guin names the act of imagination that initiates Always Coming Home. While literalists might acknowledge some similarities between the polyvocal approach of Always Coming Home and certain deep mappings, I doubt they’d see an equivalent polyvocality in A Poet’s Dublin. A view that, to me, would suggest that they had either skipped or missed the point of Two Poets and a City: a Conversation, its final section.

Showing 'The Pale Ditch' a photograph by Eavan Boland © 2014. Printed alongside Boland's poem, 'The Mother Tongue' in 'A Poet's Dublin' — ‘The Pale Ditch’. Photograph: Eavan Boland © 2014. printed alongside Boland’s poem, ‘The Mother Tongue’ in ‘A Poet’s Dublin’.

Narrative deep mappings: Showing 'The Mother Tongue', a poem by Eavan Boland, in 'A Poet's Dublin' (2014). — ‘The Mother Tongue’, a poem by Eavan Boland, in ‘A Poet’s Dublin’ (2014).

Reading that conversation between Meehan and Boland turned me back to all that had gone before, alerting me both to the many generational and class tensions that haunt Dublin, and to the implications of their mutual sympathies as Irishwomen and poets. The relevance of all this to deep mappings is suggested by Paula Meehan’s observation that: “To all intents and purposes, our maps [of Dublin] shouldn’t overlap. What I love about poetry is that it makes sectarian or sectional stances redundant”. She adds that what she had initially mistaken as Boland’s use of the city as “a scenic backdrop for the working out of the drama of the self” was in fact an exploration of Boland’s relationship: “with the polis, with the power structures of the state as manifest in architecture, in statuary, in the suffering histories of the excluded as much as in the commemorated and sanctified official histories”. So, not polyvocal in the sense of the multiple intersecting narratives, images and scores of Always Coming Home, but a listening, conversational concern for the numerous worlds that make up Dublin at the intersection of the physical city with various popular and official imaginaries. A Dublin in which it is necessary to acknowledge that:

Small things
Make the past.
Make the present seem out of place.

– Eavan Boland, Once in Dublin.

Alongside the need to

… look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.

– Eavan Boland, Unheroic.

To miss the underlying tenor of that concern would be to miss all that makes Anna Liffey, here quite properly located between photographs of two Dublin bridges and perhaps the most moving and compelling of all Boland’s poems.

When I earned a living working as an artist/educator/researcher in a university, reading art criticism and theory was a necessity that stretched my thinking. Since retiring I’ve had less and less appetite for writing predicated on the presuppositions of the analytical mind. Like an animal sick from a diet lacking certain vital minerals, I’ve hunted out material to enable me to address that long-standing lack. Material that nurtures a more inclusive, holistic and relational understanding of the world. Poetry, Le Guin’s speculative fiction and her essays in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Space Crone, along with various poets’ reflective work — Boland’s A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Meehan’s wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them have provided rich and varied nourishment that reaches parts that criticism and theory cannot.

Why share this?

Because, like deep mapping, these two works (and others that flow from the same mentalité) help us to resist the toxic culture of possessive individualism and the culture industry that serves it.

Find more

Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin (1985) is published by Gollancz (2016 edition).

Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin (2014, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph) is published by Carcanet.

Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature explores ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder) as an approach that offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.

You can read Iain’s previous posts, Open Deep Mapping: Conversations-in-process, Places-in-time and Disciplinary Agnosticism and Engaging with Ecologies of Place, and his essay Open Deep Mappings Today – a Personal Introduction.

Artist James Aldridge reviewed Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book Iain co-authored with Mary Modeen, in Queer River and Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place.

Iain Biggs

An independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place seen through the lens of Felix Guattari's ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications.

When Mr Jones … On the Artist, Responsibility & Linear Thinking

Citizen artist Yky challenges fellow artists to consider their roles and responsibilities, alongside those of scientific experts, in how their art engages audiences and other citizens to overcome linear thinking in questions of urban resilience and social complexity.

1,110 words: estimated reading time = approximately 4.5 minutes

When Mr. Jones realised what time it was, he knew he would be late for the opening of his exhibition. He spent the journey thinking up excuses he could give. But none of them seemed very credible, and he arrived at the gallery feeling somewhat apprehensive.

Upon arrival, he found the atmosphere rather festive and wasn’t sure whether to feel offended or comforted by the fact that no one seemed to care about his tardiness. In one room of the gallery, a guest was looking at one of his works with a puzzled expression. The owner of the premises seemed to be ignoring him, so Mr. Jones felt obliged to introduce himself and was then asked the question we have heard so often: «But what did you mean by this work?» Mr. Jones replied with something we have also heard so often: “My goodness, it’s certainly not up to me to tell you what to think. Everyone is entitled to feel what they want.”

The art & the message

Dear readers of ClimateCultures, rest assured, Mr. Jones — who could just as easily have been called Monsieur Dupont or Herr Schmidt — serves only to make us reflect on the paradox of certain artists who consider that their work must be sociologically significant while refusing to consider the objective dimension necessary for understanding their message. For if there is one point on which everyone should agree, it is on the growing complexity of the social model we all wish for.

Let us be clear. Feelings, emotions, and everything that words cannot express obviously contribute to the very essence of the artistic process. And nothing should prevent or challenge this. But if an artist wishes to use his or her talent to work on complex subjects such as sustainability or urban resilience, then they acquire, whether they like it or not, a responsibility towards the community. From that point on, understanding the message that accompanies the artistic process becomes all the more important. And to paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas in his wonderful concept of alterity, “When the Other looks at my work, whether I like it or not, whether I want it or not, the simple fact that He looks at my work makes me accountable to Him.”

During the ‘Art of Resilience’ exhibition at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. ^[1], I reiterated in one of the opening speeches the importance of our responsibility in addressing the challenges we face, and considered how we can facilitate dialogue between artists, scientists and ‘non-expert citizens’. In this regard, a fictional narrative can be a powerful tool for sharing ideas and connecting with urban citizens while contextualising the pedagogical process.

Shakes, a diptych: D0 and D+ Artist: Yky © 2018

Those who are interested can find more information in a previous post I published on ClimateCultures — see the note below.

Resilience & the problem of linear thinking

Beyond the concept of resilience thinking ^[2], what is striking is the gap between the interest that many artists have in topics such as sustainability or urban resilience and their understanding of what defines these topics. It is almost as if this interest were sufficient in itself. But understanding why and how linear thinking impacts our ability to invent a more resilient way of life is essential.

Rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment, linear thinking has enabled a scientific revolution that we benefit from today. But at the same time, this rationality, this thinking based on the idea that the world is governed by universal laws and that nature is only meant to be domesticated, hinders our ability to develop unconventional societal models. So how can we move from ‘bouncing back’ to ‘bouncing forward,’ a key condition for urban resilience?

In the recent history of scientific research, one of the most important advances in breaking free from linear thinking was proposed by C.S. Holling ^[3], one of the founders of ecological resilience. With his theory of panarchy, he introduced the idea that not only are social and ecological systems interconnected, but they also restructure and renew themselves in response to their environment.

That said, I can already hear the arguments of some artists who believe that scientists are responsible for getting the message across. But many scientists do recognise that they are unable to communicate effectively to ‘non-expert citizens’ and that art is a powerful vehicle for communication. It is up to artists and scientists to leave their comfort zones in view of their collective responsibility.

Interestingly, challenging linear thinking is not solely a scientific endeavour. Isn’t that what Kandinsky did with his early compositions, introducing lines and colours with intrinsic value rather than mere representations of external forms? ^[4]

As Mr. Jones made his way back home, he reflected on the recent conversation he had had. He had no reason to feel uncomfortable, and yet a sense of helplessness overwhelmed him. The idea that a neo-liberal environment could affect our sociability suddenly frightened him. He wished he could help to promote new behaviours built on the sense of care. He wondered whether his artistic skill could, in some way, contribute to improving our well-being. Without really understanding why, Mr. Jones was overcome by a feeling of vulnerability. He would have liked to discuss it with other artists.

Linear thinking: Showing an image by Yky of Le Havre's seaside, France, (Argentic paper, print size 60 x 40 cm), where the reflections in pieces of broken mirror refer to our vulnerability, and the silver paper frame, darkening over time, to that of uncertainty. — Le Havre’s seaside, France, (Argentic paper, print size 60 x 40 cm): Photograph 2023 © Yky. The reflections in pieces of broken mirror refer to our vulnerability, and the silver paper frame, darkening over time, to that of uncertainty.

***

Yky adds: I hope this post can lead to challenging talks with other artists on ‘our’ collective responsibility and the way it should be implemented, along with scientists. A good example of bouncing forward and non-linear thinking.

Find more

The Art of Resilience – exhibition catalogue (World Bank, 2019)
Art, a pedagogic tool for urban resilience (at Yky’s Picturing Urban Resilience website)
Panarchy: ripples of a boundary concept (Rocha, Luvuno, Rieb, et al, 2022: Ecoplogy & Society 27(3):21)
Bouncing forward with abstraction (at Yky’s Picturing Urban Resilience website)

You can read Yky’s earlier ClimateCultures post, Urban Resilience? Art, the Missing Link, where he shares Shakes, his work featured in the World Bank’s The Art of Resilience exhibition, and a fictional encounter between the artist, a resilience expert and two citizens to discuss the role of artist and scientist. And in The Art of Reimagining Managed Retreat, he shares ideas and artworks he presented to an international conference addressing scientific, social, and governance issues around ‘managed retreat’.

Yky

A citizen artist exploring urban resilience whose photographic works use silver paper's response to light to highlight the challenges raised by climate hazards in urban spaces.

We are Creatures – a Story of Mayhem with Masks

Artist and writer Nicky Saunter shares her recent photographic exhibition and the artist-activist collaboration that brought the wild into our city streets, revealing humans as creatures in a world that allows less space than ever for the natural.

1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

Back in the mists of time during the first pandemic lockdown, I became involved with a bunch of local creative people who were also into drumming and protesting about climate change with Extinction Rebellion. As a small group of enthusiastic activists based in a small west Somerset rural town, we were conscious that if we were to invest the time, energy and money in travelling to London to join other protesters, we should make it worthwhile by making as big an impact as possible. Hence the idea to make big animal masks that would transform us into creatures other than humans. We wanted to take nature into the protest and chose to become native animals that we saw in our countryside.

We are creatures: supported in a web of life

Sadly, today there is often more wildlife in cities and towns than in our increasingly sterile and denuded landscape. We rarely see large mammals such as foxes, insects are few around sprayed crop fields and amphibians are struggling with a lack of ponds. A study published by Buglife in 2020 showed that insects are in steep decline worldwide – with an average loss of over 8% per decade. Studies using other methods have produced even higher figures for insect population decline of over 2% per year. And we cannot survive without insects, for they form a critical part of the global food chain and maintain the soils we need to grow our food. There are some long words in the pyramid chart below, but you get the message: we need a lot of insect life at the bottom in order to support our food system at the top. For example, three-quarters of our food crops depend on insects for pollination. Without them we won’t survive for long.

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
– Rachel Carson (Scientist and author of Silent Spring, the book that brought the dangers of pesticides to the general public in the 1960s.

Source: Buglife, ‘We are losing 9% of insects per decade’ https://www.buglife.org.uk/news/we-are-losing-9-of-insects-per-decade/

Here is a BBC Ideas film that explains it really well too – and with beautiful animation and a voiceover by the brilliant bee man Dave Goulson: Why insects are so crucial to life on Earth | BBC Ideas.

With the help of a fellow local artist, Jenni Dutton, who is extremely skilled in both creating and teaching, we made a range of masks that went on parades, demonstrations and protests around the country. It is amazing what can be made from corrugated cardboard boxes, newspaper, glue and paint. From the fox to the frog, the owl to the dragonfly, these creatures came alive and danced and drummed alongside the humans. They brought a little of the wild into our city streets. It felt like a reminder of our ecological crisis, which was often forgotten in the headlines of carbon, energy and climate. After all, humans are just one of the many creatures affected by climate change, although we are the only ones to have caused it.

Protestors draw attention to falling biodiversity. Photo: Nicky Saunter © 2021

When people disappeared

There is less space than ever for wildlife in our world today. More concrete and less earth, more chemicals and fewer insects. In the pandemic, without the endless noise of machinery and traffic, many of us heard the birds again and some experienced the dawn chorus for the first time. People saw some strange and wonderful sights as animals wandered fearlessly into spaces usually occupied by humans, like car parks and city streets. Security cameras caught bemused-looking deer wondering where the humans had all gone. It was surprising how quickly the wildlife found its feet and began to use paths and places long abandoned to people.

We talk endlessly about our need for connection with nature, but it feels as if this is always on our own terms. The wild is fabulous in the right place at the right time, leaving no mess and creating no inconvenience for humans. Mud must stay in the field — although of course it runs down the road as the rate of rainfall increases and blocks our drains. Weeds must stay out of gardens so that plants we choose to call flowers can flourish, since they might be weak and easily overcome if left to fend for themselves. Animals that are potentially dangerous, from the snake to the wolf, are banished, hunted, slaughtered in a range of grisly ways and treated as unworthy of life in comparison with humans. Creatures that we find unappealing or are too good at surviving alongside us and our mess are designated as ‘vermin’. I wonder if — according to the data of who is a real danger to who and how much filth they each create — if we aren’t perhaps the ultimate vermin. Superrats even. After all, we are also creatures.

Wearing an animal mask for a street protest was an interesting experience, as from inside we could see the reactions of people around us. Some laughed, lots took photos, many smiled and children often waved or held out their hands. Recognition was immediate and response warm — something animals help us to do is to connect with each other, perhaps? I think of the ease with which dog walkers start conversations and even become friends with someone they would otherwise just pass in a park or street.

Black and white

There is something about monochrome photography that gets to the very essence of a thing. I don’t know why this is, but time and again, I see the impact of black and white images cut through the constant colour and clatter of today’s busy world and strike at the heart of the matter. This is particularly true of portraits, and therefore my choice to make a series of monochrome photographic prints of people wearing animal masks at night going about their business in our local small town.

The very first image was a take on the Beatles album cover on the zebra crossing at Abbey Road. It was a cold winter night and we had fun arranging ourselves artfully across the road, only to have to scuttle out of the way when cars came along — just like real animals. The final image was both funny and poignant too — people-creatures trying to claim back some space in our world.

We are creatures: Showing 'Crossing the zebra' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Crossing the zebra. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

I went on to take a series of ten images, imagining what might happen at night in a town as creatures show their faces in our human spaces. They are strong, confident and do not seem frightened of us. Have they come to take over? Or are they our almost forgotten selves walking the streets as we lie sleeping in our beds? Some are funny, and others are creepy or disturbing.

These images became part of an exhibition in a studio at East Quay in Watchet, an amazing art venue created by a local group of people called The Onion Collective. The main building houses national exhibitions, often with a local connection or collaboration, while several containers outside house artists’ studios. My exhibition was in one of these, loaned by the Somerset conceptual artist Jenni Dutton.

We are creatures: Showing 'Barn owl and ivy wall' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Barn owl and ivy wall. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

We are creatures: Showing 'Frog in the launderette' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Frog in the launderette. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

One of the things that visitors commented on most was how the combination of my statement and photos challenged their view of their own connection to nature. As we are in a rural area, many people recalled the pandemic quiet and how they took walks and saw wildlife differently — and how that had disappeared again so quickly once ‘normal’ life resumed. I had written about how my images intend to ask us to think differently about ourselves as animals and about the rest of the natural world that surrounds us and yet remains invisible in our daily lives. We see a beautiful vista, the blossom on a tree or enjoy the sound of birdsong, but rarely notice an ancient lichen, a pondskater on a forgotten pool or the perfection of a dandelion seed head. Our filters are set by our culture, which values some things randomly over others. Most of them need challenging.

Nicky Saunter is a writer and artist who uses mostly monochrome photography as part of her practice. She focuses on emotional connection to issues of the day, from women’s rights and colonialism to water pollution. She often features nature and in particular the wildlife of Somerset. More of her work — including the We Are Creatures series — can be seen at Through the Window.

You can read the Buglife report Nicky mentions in this April 2020 post at their site: We are losing 9% of insects per decade.

Nicky mentions multimedia artist Jenni Dutton and you can explore her work here. And you can find out more about the work of the Onion Collective, a place-based social enterprise in the small coastal town of Watchet in Somerset, “working to reconfigure economics from the perspective of our attachments to community, culture, nature and the future we hope for.”

Nicky Saunter

A practical activist, campaigner, social entrepreneur and artist with a particular focus on communication, between people and between humans and the rest of the natural world.

‘If I Were a Tree’: Notes for the Pyrocene

In her new exhibition, photographer Joan Sullivan is haunted by a recurring question, “If I were a tree, what would I feel when the flames arrived?” — and confronts the Pyrocene as the world heats to record-breaking levels.

1,610 words: estimated reading time = 6.5 minutes

My new installation, ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ (in English: ‘If I were a tree’), is the second in a series of immersive artworks that give voice to the nonhuman. It is currently on display at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada, until 20th December, 2024.

Notes for the Pyrocene: Showing IF I WERE A TREE at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada. Photograph by Joan Sullivan © 2024 — IF I WERE A TREE at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

While my previous installation, ‘La voix des glaces’ (in English: ‘Ice Voices’) focused on the disappearing ice of Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River, ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ focuses on the fires threatening Canada’s boreal forest. In both works, I cede my voice to the non-human beings (or nonhuman people, as invoked by the philosopher Timothy Morton) with whom we share this magnificent planet.

Black Summers

What would these nonhumans want to tell us before they disappear forever? Would we self-described ‘wise’ humans even be willing to listen to them if they could speak? I became obsessed with these questions in early 2020 following Australia’s ‘Black Summer’ wildfires that killed an estimated three billion nonhuman beings according to scientists.

It was this enormous loss of nonhuman life (rarely mentioned by the media) that pushed me over the edge and changed my artistic practice forever. I could no longer justify using my cameras to document climate change from a human perspective. I felt compelled to learn how to use my cameras in new ways to ‘see’ climate change from the perspective of nonhuman beings threatened by a rapidly warming world.

As described in my earlier ClimateCultures post, Giving Voice to the Nonhuman, Australia’s devastating wildfires triggered my transition away from 25+ years of documentary photography towards a more fluid, non-narrative form of artistic expression. But it would take another three years of research and reflection before the concept for ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ crystalized in my mind: an imaginary forest of burning trees in the middle of a gallery.

Notes for the Pyrocene: Showing "Forest burned in 2018, located north of the tiny crossroads of Labrieville near Lac Pipmuacan, witnessed in October 2024 during my trip to Nitassinan to visit the Innu of Pessamit". Photograph by Joan Sullivan, 2024 — “Forest burned in 2018, located north of the tiny crossroads of Labrieville near Lac Pipmuacan, witnessed in October 2024 during my trip to Nitassinan to visit the Innu of Pessamit.” Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Gallery – Images 1 & 2: “Forest burned in 2023, also located north of Labrieville near Lac Pipmuacan. These were also taken in October 2024 during my trip to Nitassinan, to visit the Innu of Pessamit.” Click on images to enlarge.

In 2023, three years after Australia’s fires, Canada experienced its own record-breaking wildfires that scorched all 13 provinces and territories. By mid-July 2023, there were already 29 megafires burning out of control, each larger than 100,000 hectares. The region where I live – on the southern shore of the Saint Lawrence River in eastern Quebec – was not directly affected by these fires. But we all looked anxiously across the river at the dark ferruginous skies; we all breathed its toxic fumes. Maybe next year would be our turn.

Throughout that summer, I was haunted by a recurring question: “If I were a tree, what would I feel when the flames arrived?” The first half of this question became the title of my current installation.

Gallery – images 3 – 8: from the ongoing series IF I WERE A TREE. “Imaginary photos of the Pyrocene: the age of megafires. Using the technique ‘Intentional Camera Movement’, I move my camera in an agitated manner to imagine a tree on fire. This image was created ‘in camera’ in one single exposure; no images in this series have been manipulated in Photoshop.” All photographs: Joan Sullivan © 2024 Click on images to enlarge.

I imagined myself rooted to the ground, like a tree. I tried to embody the anxiety of a sentient being unable to flee. Using intentional camera movement (ICM), I moved my body in an agitated manner to imitate the flames fanned by high winds whooshing through the parched forest. The resulting images oscillate between representation and abstraction, underscoring our collective ambivalence to the escalating ecological-climate polycrisis.

Fifteen imaginary trees ‘on fire’ were printed on silk fabric, each nine-feet long (2.7 meters). By sewing the two longest sides together, I transformed these two-dimensional prints into three-dimensional sculptures that resembled tree trunks. These tree trunks were then suspended from the ceiling, creating a hanging forest ‘on fire’ in the gallery space.

Inspired by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, I invite visitors to wander through this silk forest to touch the trees ‘on fire’ while listening to their voices through the music of my friend, James Darling. Can immersive experiences like this decenter ourselves and create empathy towards nonhuman people upon whom we depend for our own survival? According to Eliasson, “It is necessary to unlearn how we see in order to be able to see with our bodies.”

IF I WERE A TREE in exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Welcome to the Pyrocene.

2023 was the hottest year ever recorded in human history, and scientists are “virtually certain” that 2024 will be even hotter. But 2024 will most likely be remembered as the first full calendar year to breach the 1.5℃ limit above pre-industrial levels established in the COP21 Paris Agreement. A dubious honour, a stark warning.

Even Brazil’s Pantanal – the world’s largest wetland – is on fire. And ‘zombie fires’ have become a thing, at least here in Canada.

Welcome to the Pyrocene – the age of mega-fires

Each artist will respond in his or her own way to this unfolding drama. As a visual artist struggling with ecoanxiety, I have found solace collaborating with other artists, musicians, scientists and even an association representing people who are blind or partially sighted to create tactile and acoustic installations that help us to ‘see’ climate change in non-visual ways.

I am particularly drawn to musicians for collaborative research and creation, especially those projects that give voice to the nonhuman. In my experience, these collaborations have resulted in visceral experiences for the public that resonate at a much deeper level than just a selection of my photos on the wall.

In the small city where I live, I have had the good fortune to collaborate with two brilliant musicians for my two most recent installations, ‘La voix des glaces and ‘Si j’étais un arbre. For the latter, I commissioned the cellist James Darling to compose music that gives voice to the trees threatened by approaching flames. I have long wanted to collaborate with a cellist — the cello being the instrument closest to the human voice. Its low bass notes have the potential to resonate within the human body. Might this be a way for some visitors to experience, possibly for the first time, embodiment with a nonhuman being?

James Darling performing ‘Artefact’, composed for the IF I WERE A TREE exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec. Photograph: Katia Fournier © 2024

Inspired by my imaginary photos of burning trees, James created ‘Artefact’, a 13-minute sound sculpture rich in textures and harmonies for 16 cellos. Its title makes reference to archaeology, i.e., objects created by human hands that are left behind and discovered much later. This enigmatic work incites visitors to question what they want to leave behind for future generations.

In addition to the imaginary silk trees, ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ also includes several branches and tree stumps that were burned in the 2018 and 2023 fires. In late October 2024, I crossed the Saint Lawrence River by ferry to visit Nitassinan, the ancestral land of the Innu of Pessamit. With permission from Innu elders, I collected several burnt branches to travel back with me to the south shore of the Saint Lawrence to be included as sacred ‘artefacts’. Mélanie Bellefleur, an Innu Territorial Guardian with the Council of Innu, crossed the Saint Lawrence in November to offer one of these burnt beings during the opening.

Burnt branches from the Nitassinan forest fires in the IF I WERE A TREE exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Finally, two weeks after the opening, I met, quite serendipitously, the choreographer and performer Martine Cardinal. On her first visit to the gallery, Martine felt a strong connection to the silk forest and immediately accepted my invitation to improvise during an upcoming cultural mediation session with the public (which you can watch below). Her performance was breathtakingly beautiful and fleeting.

Like Canada’s boreal forest.

Notes for the Pyrocene:: Showing IF I WERE A TREE in exhibition at Galerie d'art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec - with performance by choreographer Martine Cardinal to soundsculpture 'Artefact' by James Darling. Photograph by Joan Sullivan © 2024 — IF I WERE A TREE in exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec – with performance by choreographer Martine Cardinal to soundsculpture ‘Artefact’ by James Darling. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Find more

‘Si j’étais un arbre’ (‘If I were a tree’) is on display at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada, until 20th December 2024.

You can read Joan’s earlier ClimateCultures post, Giving Voice to the Nonhuman.

The Pyrocene is explored by Steven J. Pyne in his book, The Pyrocene
How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (University of California Press, 2022). In his blog on the term, Pyne says “I coined the term Pyrocene as a catchphrase in a 2015 essay titled ‘Fire Age’ published in Aeon. Since then I’ve started using it regularly, and in 2019 began to propose it as an informing principle (in a literary sense) by which to understand the world our pact with fire has made. I have long regarded all of the Holocene as an Anthropocene. From a fire perspective I now regard the Anthropocene as a Pyrocene.”

Fellow ClimateCultures member and photographer Alan McFetridge has also explored the Pyrocene in his work, Landscape Fire in the 21st Century.

Joan mentions philosopher Timothy Morton in reference to ceding her voice to nonhuman people. There is a review of his book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (Verso, 2017) in The Guardian: Humankind by Timothy Morton review – no more leftist defeatism, everything is connected.

The quote from Olafur Eliasson — “It is necessary to unlearn how we see in order to be able to see with our bodies.” — is taken from the essay Olafur Eliasson: Interdisciplinary Approaches and their Interplay with his Art by Else Marie Bukdahl, in The Journal of Somaesthetics, No. 1 (2015).

Scientific American was one of many journals that published the finding that 2024 will most likely not “just be the hottest on record—it could be the first to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius“, as announced by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

‘Si j’étais un arbre’ was supported by a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

L’artiste remercie le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien financier, ainsi que le Programme Transformer l’action pour le climat (TAC) à l’Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR).
The artist thanks the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, as well as the Transforming Climate Action (TCA) Program at the University of Quebec in Rimouski (UQAR).

Joan Sullivan

A photographer, writer and farmer who focuses on climate change and whose abstract, phenomenological approach to photography expresses her ecoanxiety and gives voice to the nonhuman.