Independent artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces a special new essay for our Longer section, reflecting on his practice of open deep mapping as an inclusive, creative approach to working with and in place, and moving beyond ‘Business-as-Usual’.
1,500 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
Longer is the place for works that don’t fit within the normal ‘short reads’ format of our blog. Longer is for essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail the creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces it here with an original post, where they can reflect on the motivation or inspiration behind the work or the process of creating it.
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Mark Goldthorpe and I have been having an exchange about open deep mapping and, as a result, he kindly suggested I write an introduction to this inclusive creative approach to place for ClimateCultures.The result is a longish essay called Open Deep Mappings today: a personal introduction — which is published today in the Longer feature of the site. Since that in turn needs an introduction on this blog, and because people understandably expect to know something about the relationship between what we do and what we say (perhaps the creative equivalent to being asked to “put our money where our mouths are”), I’ll start from an old blog post called Two dimensional aspects of deep mappingthat shows just thatand work my way forward into the essay.
As I say in that blog:
I’m interested in ‘polyvocal’ drawing that helps me explore ideas – often about landscape or landscape related issues – through combining different media and/or categories of sign. It’s an informed ‘playing around’ that aims to keep different elements ‘talking’ to each other, rather than to arrive at an aesthetic solution. However, aesthetic qualities remain indicative of imaginative ‘fitness for purpose’, like the goodwill that sustains a conversation between people who hold very different views on a single topic.
For health reasons, I’ve had to give up the extended fieldwork that was central to the open deep mapping I did between 1999 and 2013. That period of work produced a whole range of material, some of which appears in that old blog post, but also included everything from A Hidden War (with and for Anna Biggs) — a double mapping of Mynydd Epynt made as a result of a field trip organised by Mike Pearson [Fig. 1] — to 8 Lost Songs,an artist’s book and CD made in collaboration with the musician Garry Peters [Fig. 2]. However, my interest in open deep mapping as a process, and its influence on what is now primarily a studio-based, rather than walking-based, practice continues to this day.
Fig. 2: 8 Lost Songs, CD and Book cover Photograph: Iain Biggs
The first thing to say about open deep mapping is that, although as a process it may result in the production of non-fiction books, art works, performances, artist’s books, even unorthodox maps, it’s best understood as generating conversations-in-process about a place-in-time. (Hence the section in the essay that’s entitled Why ‘deep mappings’, not ‘deep maps’?)
Something of how my attempts to capture that ‘conversational’ element in recent two-dimensional visual form can be seen in the shift between two images – Edge 2: fluctuations for Josh Biggs [Fig. 3] (one of the set of three images made as a result of groundwork on the Isle of Mull and included in the Two dimensional aspects of deep mapping blog post) and Notitia 7: Tamshiel Rig [Fig. 4]. As one of a series of hybrid collage/painted construction pieces made since 2016, this attempts to convert my experience of deep mapping into a lyrical ‘micro-mapping’, one that evokes a condensed sense of the richness, the polyvocality, central to an expanded experience of place-in-time. Judith Tucker writes of this series of works that they provide:
the kind of levelling out, or lack of hierarchy of visual experience, that also occurs when walking. As when walking, it is up to us to consider what we are presented with. What is of the relative significance of a discarded wrapper, a stony outcrop, a rare plant, a dank smell, the sound of birdsong, of traffic or silence?
She then adds:
What is key in terms of environmental thinking is that Biggs is neither privileging the human view, nor is he writing himself out of the place… This kind of composite work with its constellation of viewpoints, montage, collage and bricolage does not allow any fixed reading of the landscape that is referenced. It is at times as if we are mapping from the inside of the land out.
As I hope this suggests, ‘place’ in the context of open deep mapping is best understood in Edward S. Casey’s sense, as: “an essay in experimental living within a changing culture”, and this notwithstanding “its frequently settled appearance”.But also as a space in Doreen Massey’s sense; that is as “a simultaneity of stories-so-far”. As the example of The Tahualtapa Project (concluded before the term deep mapping was first used) makes clear, open deep mapping is as much an inclusive orientation to the world as anything else.
A strange alchemy – working with/in place
Following on from that section I have included another, simply called Further examples, which includes links to eleven very different types of open deep mapping. That in turn is followed by a further section that explains my use of that term, called The ‘openness’ of open deep mappings. For those who want a better understanding of how open deep mapping sits in relation to other cultural concerns, I’ve included two sections, one on Contexts and consequences and the other called Open deep mappings as ‘partial’.
Throughout the Introduction I’ve tried to stress that open deep mapping is, as Judith Tucker notes of my Notitia works, based on the articulation of a constellation of viewpoints; that it does not allow any fixed or settled reading of place to take a once-and-for-all precedence over any other.I’ve also tried to stress that open deep mapping is not a strictly bounded ‘genre’ but bleeds almost imperceptibly into other approaches and practices.
The example of this I end with is the Irish poet Eavan Boland’s book of photographs and poems called A Poet’s Dublin, which I see as a ‘close cousin’ to an open deep mapping. In that book Boland says, in conversation with the poet Paula Meehan, that at a certain point she realised that: “a city could be mapped, not just by cartography or history, but by instinct, memory, passion”. It’s something of that impetus, that same alchemical working out of wonder, listening, poetic insight, fine-tuned attention to what is, and a depth-soundings of deep memory, that inform both a work like A Poet’s Dublin and open deep mappings. And I believe that it is with that strange alchemy that we need to work in and with place, whatever we then choose to call the process involved, if we wish to help develop an understanding capable of moving us on from the mentality of ‘Business-as-Usual’ that now threatens not only our own psycho-social wellbeing but, in all probability, the ongoing survival of the entire biosphere.
The quote from Judith Tucker is taken from ‘Walking backwards: Art between places in twenty-first century Britain’ (Judith Tucker, 2020) in David Borthwick, Pippa Marland & Anna Stenning (eds) Walking, Landscape and Environment (Routledge, p. 137).
Doreen Massey (2005) For Space(SAGE Publications p. 11).
Eavan Boland 2014 (Paula Meehan & Jody Allen Randolph eds) A Poet’s Dublin(Carcanet Press p. 106).
‘Business-as-Usual’ is the term used by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone to denote a mentality predicated on such mainstream contemporary ‘progressive’ economic values as ‘getting ahead’, and a ’view of life’ in which “the problems of the world are seen as far away and irrelevant to the dramas of our personal lives”. See Macy and Johnstone (2012) Active Hope; How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (New World Libraryp. 15). You can read an excerpt, How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy, at the NEL blog.
Mynydd Epynt, the subject of one of Iain’s deep mapping works included here, is a former community in the uplands of Powys, Wales, which the UK Ministry of Defence evicted in World War II and remains a military training zone. You can find out more at the Abandoned Communities site.
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.
Artists Andrew Howe and Kim V Goldsmith share the story of their collaborative Mosses and Marshes project, which investigates connections between fragile wetlands and their communities in England and Australia, seeking new interpretations, multiple perspectives and less-heard voices.
2,900 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes
Reimagining the future of fragile wetlands through new contexts and fresh perspectives, while still allowing site specificities and shared commonalities to assert themselves, was the challenge we set ourselves as artists on opposite sides of the globe.
The connection between these landscapes — a lowland peat bog on the border between Wales and North Shropshire in the UK and a seasonally inundated marshland at the tail end of the Macquarie River in central north-west New South Wales, Australia — was made through our collaboration that began when we were paired together in 2018 under the Arts Territory Exchange remote exchange programme initiated by artist/curator Gudrun Filipska in the UK.
We had both worked outside our practices in natural resources and environment sectors for decades, and quickly identified a shared interest in how water and land are managed, in particular in our local but internationally significant wetlands, the Fenns, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses National Nature Reserve (UK) and Macquarie Marshes (Australia). Both sites are rare habitats vital for combating climate change and supporting biodiversity.
The two photos below were taken in 2020 before water arrived in the Marshes after drought (click on images for full size).
Ancient Eucalyptus coolabah tree on the floodplain on “Burrima”, Macquarie Marshes, Kim V. Goldsmith, 2020
Burnt reed stubble reshooting after rain, Kim V. Goldsmith, 2020
Over the next three years, we conducted research and field visits at each site while maintaining an ongoing dialogue, almost entirely by email and digital file-sharing. This informed a series of individual and collaborative artworks. The initial question of what is it that connects us formed an ongoing theme throughout the project, from which sprang many other questions. Taking a holistic approach, we sought new interpretations, multiple perspectives, and less-heard voices in our investigation of these landscapes and how they are valued.
Partnerships and consultation
As the Mosses and Marshes project took shape, we developed partnerships with land managers, environmental scientists, other artists, and local communities. We each secured funding from various sources in Australia and the UK, including a project grant from Arts Council England in 2021 that allowed us to develop a series of arts events, site interventions, community engagement, talks and discussions.
Our aims were to use art to encourage people to build connections with the natural environment, think about human relationships with wetlands, and take part in conversations about the values of wetlands in addressing climate change, biodiversity, water management, as well as some of the less tangible ways, such as cultural and aesthetic values.
In the UK, Andrew partnered with Natural England and Shropshire Wildlife Trust (SWT). Natural England leads the BogLIFE project with Natural Resources Wales and SWT. This six-year project, funded by grants from the EU and The National Lottery Heritage Fund, ends in 2022 with the aim to restore 660 ha of degraded peatland and surrounding peat edge (‘lagg’) back to a functioning, healthy ecosystem. As a separately funded exercise, a derelict former scrapyard on Whixall Moss was purchased by SWT to be cleared and remediated. Over 100 truckloads of waste metals and hazardous materials and around 50,000 tyres were removed from the site.
On first visit, it can appear that the Mosses are a natural wilderness with few obvious signs of human activity, yet it is the long history of underlying human impact that resonated with both artists as one of the key themes of enquiry in our respective landscapes.
Recognising the importance of past economic and industrial practices, both negatively and positively, needs to sit uncomfortably with our modern aspiration to live in accommodation with Earth’s systems. Providing visual clues of what went on in these wetland places before their reconfigurement is critical in order to remind us of what the Global North is responsible for, what humanity has gained and lost and what more we could lose without more entrenched responses in support of sustainability.
English Wetlands: Spaces of Nature, Culture, Imagination, Mary Geary et al.
Kim’s partnerships took place in less formal ways, engaging local landholders and community members with connections to the Marshes through gathering and mapping audio stories about those connections, contacting scientists and academics to provide background information to issues she was exploring, and more generally connected other artists and communities in the Macquarie-Castlereagh catchment through meetings about the project and formal presentations.
Creative engagement with the mosses and marshes
Mosses and Marshes has resulted in the creation of new artworks and documentation in a range of formats for local, national, and international audiences — online and in physical exhibitions within each site’s catchment. The artworks have included sound and video installation, prints, and paintings using dyes and paper made with natural materials gathered from the landscape.
We sought to work closely with the landscape and reveal sounds and sensory experiences not ordinarily encountered by visitors. These included recordings made of sounds encountered at night time, underwater or from within trees.
At the Mosses, a new self-guided public art trail was created using locative media for an immersive sound trail with temporary sculptural waymarkers along the trail, created by artists Elizabeth Turner and Keith Ashford. The sound trail incorporates work by both of us as co-lead artists, including the collaborative I am Walking spoken soundscape, that places the participant in a walk alongside us in the Mosses, and then into the Marshes. This sound trail, and another created in the nearby town of Wem, include soundscapes based on a range of field recordings and contributions from poets and local community members.
In the UK, community engagement centred around a project with Wem Youth Club in partnership with local artists Sue Challis and Kate Johnston and Shropshire Wildlife Trust. Groups of young people took part in site visits and workshops to create new artworks including three seven-metre-long banners that have subsequently been shown in exhibitions at Wem Town Hall and Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury. This highly successful project developed a momentum of its own, with evident desire to create long-term impact by helping the young people involved continue to build confidence in, and a sense of ‘ownership’ of, the landscape.
Sustainability, for example, is not a law of the universe – ecosystems change, species come and go. It is instead a human construct, based on value judgements – we want to conserve some biodiversity, but not the Coronavirus. The concept only has meaning when choices are made about what timescale to define and how wide a net of interdependencies to consider. It is consequently as much a cultural matter as it is a scientific one.
Science cannot help with decisions about what meaning to give to any experience in the environment, or how to be reconciled to aspects of the natural world that may be spiritually challenging. Some of the deepest truths are expressible only by poetry or metaphor.
– Dave Pritchard, writing in the Foreword to Mosses and Marshes
The project to date has been documented in the Mosses and Marshes project book, published in October 2021. This publication has allowed us to expand on the themes of research and express thoughts that may not otherwise be evident in the artworks.
Edited by Dr Liz Charpleix, with a foreword by Dave Pritchard (Ramsar Culture Network, and fellow ClimateCultures member), the Mosses and Marshes book contains contributions from curators Gudrun Filipska (UK) and Jamie-Lea Trindall (Australia), ecological, environmental and cultural writings by Tim Hosking (NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment), First Nations educators and artists Fleur and Laurance Magick Denis of Milan Dhiiyaan and Sooty Welsh (Wayilwan Elder/artist), Cathie Sleigh (Shropshire Wildlife Trust), Robert Duff (Natural England), and many other project partners and people from the communities around the Mosses and Marshes. The book cover features an overlay by Sooty Welsh, titled Walking through Country.
This book is beautifully written and presented, with the clever use of QR codes, that allows the reader to experience through sound and vision this beauty. It encouraged me to further explore the effects of colonisation on this diverse landscape, to the present-day challenges of climate change. Positively thought-provoking and beautiful.
– Natalie Cutler, an interested reader with historical family connections to the Marshes, Sydney Australia
New voices, new stories
The cultural exchange came to a significant meeting point in November 2021, through an international online panel discussion on the topic of ‘Alternative ways of understanding and valuing special environments to help shape their future’. The event brought together a group of natural resource managers, scientists, academics, and cultural consultants from Australia and the UK, all with a wealth of experience in land and natural resource management issues. Facilitated by Jessica Moore of Dubbo Regional Council, the panellists included Tim Hosking, Kate Mildner, Fleur and Laurance Magick Dennis of Milan Dhiiyaan from Australia, and Dave Pritchard, Dr Tim Acott, and Robert Duff from the UK, who discussed six questions put to them as pre-recorded videos by provocateurs from both countries — all of whom had connections to the wetlands.
From the panel event, it was evident the Mosses and Marshes may be separated by over 10 thousand miles, but many of the issues impacting them are not so different. Land ownership, access to land, and the legacy of Enclosure Acts and colonialism have been lenses through which we’ve been able to look at how the sites have been used for extracting financial value from agriculture and or peat.
Kim V. Goldsmith recording underwater video on “Burrima” near the North Marsh, Macquarie Marshes, May 2020.
It also created an opportunity for under-represented voices to be heard. The stories of Aboriginal access to the wetlands, shared by Fleur and Laurance Magick Dennis of Milan Dhiiyaan, were so important. Speaking powerfully, with an emotional depth that could only come from an intimate, authentic connection with the land and its people, Fleur and Laurance referenced missing sounds in the landscape, the urgent need for resources to gather legitimate community representation, and a fundamental lack of access to Country. It was uncomfortable, but necessary, listening.
What they had to say aligned with other indigenous cultures across the globe around honouring what the Earth provides, taking only what is needed and acknowledging that we are all custodians and not owners of the land.
These basic sustainable principles are in direct opposition to prevailing systems for exploiting land and resources in most parts of the world. It seems like an impossible seismic shift is needed to change attitudes towards these basic principles in a river system with so many competing interests like the Marshes. Maybe in the interim, it’s about accepting that scientific and evidence-based languages aren’t the only way of knowing and doing, particularly if we accept that language often shapes behaviours.
The environmental issues of each site do not always present clear-cut solutions, with issues being more nuanced than they first appear. It is also questionable as to whether pragmatic solutions, allowing for as many concerns as possible to be considered, is ultimately best.
On the regulated Macquarie River of New South Wales, there are many competing interests impacting the Macquarie Marshes further downstream. River water supports towns, livestock and domestic users, industry, irrigated agriculture, the environment and recreational users. Taking a pragmatic, top-down approach using one set of established values could result in some wetland areas of the wider Marsh landscape being allowed to become too degraded to conserve. But as Laurance Magick Dennis said during the panel event: “If you’re a family and you’re walking in the bush and some of the family can’t make the walk and it’s up to you to look after those individuals, what are you going to do? Are you going to leave them behind to suffer, to starve, to die of thirst? That’s exactly what will happen to our river systems and the ecosystems around our wetlands. If we don’t look after those, they’ll be gone forever.” His point was that the parts form a whole – a family. Like a functional family or community, we’re all needed in the decision-making.
Through our work on the project, we came to understand that wilding is not necessarily a solution on its own without careful human guidance and management, and for that it is vital that local communities have an awareness of the issues, to understand where compromise might be acceptable, in addition to having access and opportunities to develop or regain a sense of ‘ownership’ in the landscape.
At the Mosses, for example, as part of their ongoing work towards restoring the peat bog, Natural England and partners are re-establishing the waterlogged, low nutrient conditions necessary for Sphagnum moss to flourish. However, it is acknowledged that some means of site management may need to continue beyond the BogLIFE project to control the growth of purple moor-grass which rapidly covers the bog surface and inhibits the Sphagnum moss. This is occurring more vigorously due to the increase in air-borne ammoniacal nutrients arising from nearby farms.
From several perspectives, we have identified how the landscapes must be considered in relation to deep time — both in terms of their prehistory and from the viewpoint of future generations. The video developed by Kim for the project’s exhibitions, An Ancient Land: a history of the wetland in chapters, references how Australia’s landscape formed over millions of years came to be explored, surveyed, staked, mapped, named, carved up and farmed by those with the sense and sensibilities of strangers in a foreign land.
Natural England knows that the work they are doing today may not come fully into effect for many centuries to come. So, how can people be encouraged to consider these timescales when the issues of today seem so urgent?
Unfinished work
The Mosses and Marshes project has broadened local, national and international recognition of these wetlands and their cultural and environmental importance. It has provided a platform from which to develop further artist residencies and projects involving the arts linked to the wetlands. We strongly believe our international exchange has created new contexts for each site that considers some of those intangible values previously overlooked, and it has started to bring fresh perspectives to the fore while recognising localised differences between our two wetlands.
New presentations of our creative work open in the Australian capital at M16 Artspace in Canberra, in April 2022, and at Outback Arts in Coonamble, New South Wales, in May. A programme of public events will continue in both the UK and Australia. The project is also entering a new phase we’ve called Values. Voices. Action., which follows up some of the key issues raised in the discussion panel. Those first tentative questions we asked ourselves back in 2018 have led to a range of actions that have given agency to a multitude of voices now invigorating this evolving project.
Find out more
The Mosses and Marshes book is available at both artists’ websites, with northern hemisphere sales handled by Andrew and southern hemisphere by Kim: Of the Mosses – Andrew Howe & EcoPULSE – Kim V. Goldsmith
The exhibition at M16 Artspace in Canberra, Australia ran to 1st May, and then at Outback Arts in Coonamble, New South Wales, until 3rd June.
Kim V. Goldsmith (in Australia) and Andrew Howe (in the UK) began working together in 2018, having been paired together through the Arts Territory Exchange remote collaboration programme. Both the artists conducted research and on-site work in their respective wetlands that informed the creation of a series of individual and collaborative artworks for exhibitions in the UK and Australia under the title Mosses and Marshes.
Kim is an environmental artist and content producer based in the Central West of NSW, Australia. She has 30 years’ experience working across rural and regional Australia in media and marketing communications. As an artist, Kim has a keen interest in the environment and sustainable regional futures that she explores through a range of digital media and writing.
Kim acknowledges and respects the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands on which she works and lives.
Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist and project manager, based in Shrewsbury, working solo and in collaboration with other practitioners and community groups. He uses walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, informed by over 30 years’ experience in engineering and environmental consulting. His practice includes painting, collage, photography, printmaking, books, and digital media.
You can read Andrew’s earlier post for ClimateCultures, A Personal History of the Anthropocene – Three Objects #13, where his objects include a bitumen spill from an old tanker on the former industrial land at the Fenn’s, Whixall & Bettisfield Mosses National Nature Reserve.
You can read about the Marches Mosses BogLIFE project at Fenn’s, Whixall & Bettisfield Mosses National Nature Reserves and Wem Moss Nature Reserve at the Marches Mosses BogLIFE website.
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.
An artist exploring layers of nuance, complexity and hidden elements to present rural, regional and remote landscapes and communities in ways that make the familiar, unfamiliar.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants’ insights from a workshop exploring the word ‘Justice’. This was the first in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.
2,900 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes
It was during an online Creative Environments workshop from the University of Bristol last September, led by Dr Paul Merchant, that I first came across his work with the Centre for Environmental Humanities there, and he mentioned the idea of looking at keywords associated with the forthcoming COP26 conference in Glasgow. Later, he brought together a group of interested people inside and beyond the university for an informal exploration and we offered to support the idea of a project. We quickly settled on a short investigation into three words that have complex meanings and usages in different disciplines and contexts and where there is an ever-present risk of groups talking past each other as we grapple with the urgencies and nuances of our climate and biodiversity predicaments.
Paul and facilitator Anna Haydock-Wilson devised a series of workshops and, while I can’t be at the workshops myself, we agreed I should follow up each one with short discussions — by email or Zoom — with the researchers, community group members and creative practitioners who take part. My aim is to explore their insights from the events and their experiences of the different keywords.
As such, this post is not an account or evaluation of the ‘Justice’ workshop or an ‘objective’ overview of that word and its meanings — even less, an attempt at a definition. I hope it’s a fair reflection of some of the things participants have shared with me once they’ve had some distance from the workshop. And that it offers one way in to further conversations on justice, how we talk about it, and its role in helping us navigate our climate and environmental futures. I encourage all ClimateCultures members and other visitors to our site to offer their own insights and responses, ideas and examples.
Fresh encounters
This group’s exploration of the word ‘Justice’ began with a ‘Walk and Talk’ in the Easton area of Bristol. Participants — as local residents, community project workers and activists, writers and artists and researchers — met, shared ideas of justice and made personal notes as they walked, about what this means for them in an environmental context. Everyone then gathered back at the local community centre to share their perspectives on the walk and their own work or involvement with the issues, and split into two groups for a role-playing game. In that session, each group made a ‘justice map’ of the local area to help bring their ideas into focus, before a final discussion together at the end.
One of the community participants said of the session as a whole: “It was a great group of people, and I found it really interesting to have representatives from both academic and non-academic backgrounds in the same room and to hear about the different types of work people are doing linked to climate. I would love to find more ways to translate some of the research and work being done into projects we’re doing locally at a very grassroots level. I’m really glad these workshops have begun, and I think there’s a lot of work for us to be doing to make sure the spaces where words like justice are discussed are shaped by people who have traditionally been on the receiving end of injustice.”
Another said: “I really loved that there were people from very different backgrounds there — both cultural and from the work they did and the experiences they had, on all those fronts.”
A third person told me how: “It has motivated me and confirmed a value for what I do. It was good to have different perspectives in a room coming from different backgrounds or professions. I also really enjoyed the game Anna devised with the role-playing — thought that worked well.”
One member of the group shared a couple of strong and, it seems to me, complementary memories from the introductory walk — of “the river Frome overflooding under a motorway bridge” and of “how easily conversation flowed with everybody.” Another explained how “I see the environment as a key factor to enable or disable people being exposed to it. On our walk, we had lots of opportunities to explore this and how this might contribute to environmental justice.” Someone else told me how in “an interesting conversation I remember … I noticed that much of her thoughts surrounded the ‘why’, which I felt was powerful.”
As a prelude to shared conversation within the usual ‘workshop’ environment of a closed room — such as the community centre offered later on — a walk allows for a more open-ended mix of private thought, personal encounter with the local environs and chance conversations with different people one-to-one. In a way, it’s a little like an extended version of that experience when we first arrive at a venue for an event: the bumping into new people at the initial pre-conference tea or coffee, but with the added fuel of fresh air, new perspectives gained out-of-doors and the ever-changing location brought by physical movement. After all, we don’t normally expect to be walking around for a meeting.
The fact that the walk preceded the formal part of the workshop — was actually integral to its design — was clearly appreciated. For one participant, this spoke to a core aspect of our own nature. “Through being active and interacting with the world, particularly walking around, we have a chance to develop new neurons. And our brain, as with other parts of our body, is changing depending on the environment and our interactions. … The physical and the mental go hand in hand and the environment is crucial as it provides the stimulation you need, both on the physical and the mental side.” In this sense, our personal environment — and therefore our shared environment, as social animals — is embodied within us; the boundary between ourselves and the ‘external’ world, where our body stops and the world begins, is not fixed in the ways we commonly think.
“In fact, where our body starts is an interaction between our brain, our environment and our body and the way our senses work to define what is actually around us. We do this all the time. We have to combine what we see, what we hear, what we feel to be able to know what ‘belongs’ to an object, to us, to someone else.”
Here, then, justice starts to have a very direct relationship with personal experience and with being in and moving around a place. But — like an urban river — that relationship can be submerged, can sink out of our conscious mind until a new context brings it to our attention. As one person fed back to me: “The walk made me notice things which I sometimes take for granted, or you just accept them as they are. Like poor, not thought out architecture in this instance. The grotesque wheelchair access at the train station; the motorway. So if an area has been poorly designed, what are our rights to change anything? Things feel so set in stone sometimes, we don’t know we actually have a voice to change things.” Another pointed out how “We have this idea when we talk about disability or inclusiveness, this tendency to restrict it to someone in a wheelchair or who is blind. But that’s more or less it. Anybody else, with all the sensory variability that is out there and all the consequences that has, is not at all considered.”
Our urban and others spaces can design in forms of injustice, as illustrated above: embedded in the ways we become accustomed to think about what should even be part of that design process. While this can be addressed through greater care in new design codes, attention will always be needed to what lies outside the efforts to improve these. You cannot code everything. Standards cannot capture all the ways that our dynamic natural environment and we as diverse humans interact. Like a river, the human and the more-than-human break out and exceed the boundaries and order we try to impose.
A testing ground for conversations
While in some places, some people and communities do find voice and agency — their own ways to make change happen — in too many places many cannot: “I considered the active involvement in a neighbourhood — guerilla gardening in a small patch close to the Bristol-Bath trainline — vs no involvement in the garden/play space square in a concreted-over sad excuse for a playground in a social housing complex.” This participant had spoken with another “about the will or capacity of people to do such things to a space outside their own house boundaries” — capacities that can be bound up with different, perhaps overlapping identities.
“We spoke about cultural differences, about new residents from other countries not wanting to stand out, or draw attention to themselves. I have noticed behaviours before with poor recycling rates, with the problem being the visible bins — where residents did not want their neighbours to see what they consume. There is a social status which needs to be upheld. This is the same for people participating in the flea market as traders of second-hand goods. New residents i.e. first-generation arrivals from other countries, need to prove themselves to others from their own cultures that they are being successful.”
Someone else shared how in the group session another member of the group had “mentioned the word justice terrifies some people. It never occurred to me to think that, but made me make the connexion with my fear of the police. I will be very careful to define what it means to me when engaging in conversation with others. From now on I will make sure that when I talk, ‘Justice’ and ‘Environment’ are together.” A point echoed by another person, who said to me: “It was really useful to connect the word and concept of justice as a focus to the environment. It anchored the importance of the issues for me.”
Another comment gets to the heart of the matter, sharing how in their work with local communities: “a common theme that has come up when speaking with people is how disempowering the language used around climate can be and the negative impact it can have on people feeling that they don’t belong in ‘green’ spaces. Based on that feedback, I’d been thinking about ways we could start working together within our community to build more shared understanding of what the words often used in climate action and decision-making mean, so that more people can use them and the power they hold. When Paul got in touch about the workshop on justice, I was keen to get involved, seeing it as something of a testing ground of how we might begin having these conversations.”
I was sent a link to locally-led research demonstrating how resilient blue spaces are connected to higher quality of life, from which this participant concluded: “so the quality of more greenery around rivers, which we consider good for our wellbeing, would be rather seen in spaces with less deprivation. The justice of the river itself — so majestic round Snuff Mills [a park in the Stapleton area of north Bristol], and in flood it is a powerful beast — to then be turned into a drainpipe and hidden away under concrete for the last bits of its journey into the city. … You feel differently as you follow the river, depending on where it is.”
This also starts to point me to a wider or expanded sense of justice. If environment, body and mind are in relationship within and around each of us and ‘social justice’ contains something of that relationship then — just as where our body ends and the world starts is less fixed than we suppose — justice must encompass something of the wider natural world as well as ‘society’. Something in that phrase, ‘The justice of the river itself’ — a river that has its own life in itself, a powerful beast, and yet is forced into concrete, underground, away from us — speaks to injustice on a more-than-human scale.
When asked how they felt about the word ‘Justice’ now, whether this was different since the workshop, one participant said “It feels a lot closer to the bone,” while I’ve already quoted another: “From now on I will make sure that when I talk ‘Justice’ and ‘Environment’ are together.” A third person shared that “I would say that justice used in this climate conversation felt very complex. Already all intertwined, decision-making done with consideration to every living being and their livelihoods is ‘Justice’.”
A further response suggests that a process such as this walk-and-workshop itself is an enactment of what we are seeking: “That’s for me ‘justice’: the listening, the learning and the working together.” And what flows from that might be something that retains a diversity, that “we would start to think of whether we can develop what we call almost a shared mental model … where we know which angle we are coming from but we have an understanding of where they might all fit together. And then instead of having a fixed outcome, rather think of it as a theory of change; how can we change these things and move together to something that is more just, more resilient?”
To appreciate the ‘angle we are coming from’ and how others’ paths intersect, converge, overlap our own, is an expansion of our own map, our mental model, into something larger and shared, although always incomplete. Two conversations gave me different impressions of an area I’ve never visited but can imagine from my encounters with other places I’ve lived or worked. Different but, importantly, not necessarily conflicting — and both speaking of injustice.
One was an email where a few lines provided almost a prose poem: “the trainline with lots of freight trains, high pollution in a local neighbourhood; the architecture at the train station; graffiti and street art; River Frome, DIY skatepark; the lack of green in neighbourhoods, pocket parks; then finally the council estate with a concreted over play park. Had a few trees, but I was surprised and shocked actually at such a loss of opportunity.”
The other came during a Zoom call, reflecting on the same scene as “On one hand a very sad space but on the other almost an amazing space, when you think about the way the youth make it their own. The dumped sofas, the building rubbish and rubble and whatever, integrated as obstacles into the skatepark; the graffiti going over them as if they are becoming part of the landscape; the ceiling of the M32 with an enormous graffiti, it’s the skeleton of an animal, which brings in almost the life and the change of all these things. The River Frome then going over its edges, going onto the car park, where it can come out and starts to become a river again. So all that is to see how nevertheless life takes over. The walk to the train station there, the little path where the flowers break out to try to get their own space. That’s actually really nice. And I think that by gentrifying that area that community would lose a lot. That’s where justice comes in again: how do you approach such things without destroying what the community creates to survive? That was one of the things where I hadn’t appreciated just how much they’re making that space liveable for them and useable.”
I also saw something of this possibly creative tension between different ways of living in, of seeing, the same ‘environment’ in what another person shared as one of their strongest memories of the event: “the feeling that some areas, particularly those with lots of graffiti, gave a harsh feeling to the area. As graffiti is a huge part of Bristol’s character it’s not a question about removing it but more about offsetting it in the areas it’s the most prominent by revitalising playgrounds and greenspaces.”
Maybe a vision of justice might be something fluid, able to move with people and environment and the others we share it with. And part of that flow might be to recognise not just that justice must include the many and the diversity that we are and share, but the seemingly conflicting forms and appreciations of what is ‘good’.
What does the word ‘Justice’ mean to you?
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See below for comments on this post – and contribute your own to be part of the conversation!
Environmental Keywords is a short interdisciplinary project at the University of Bristol, investigating three keywords — ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’ — that are common in the environmental discourses that shape how we think of, talk about and act on the ecological and climate predicaments facing us.
With funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, the project is led by Dr Paul Merchant, Co-Director of the University’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, and involves colleagues from different departments and disciplines, as well as local community groups, ClimateCultures members and other creative practitioners.
The project focuses on three workshops in Bristol, facilitated by Anna Haydock-Wilson complemented by online content here at ClimateCultures:
‘Justice’ — Wednesday 16th February 2022
‘Resilience’ — Wednesday 9th March 2022
‘Transitions’ – Thursday 24th March 2022
You can find out more at our new Environmental Keywords section, including the suggestion to explore an ‘undisciplined glossary of our three keywords: do let us have your thoughts, questions suggestions and examples via the Leave a Reply box on this post or via our Contact page.
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.
Experimental artist Veronica Worrall offers a story of shared hope in students’ reactions to her photographic series ‘Unseen’, and how young people’s actions and art in the USA, China and around the world provide examples ahead of COP26.
2,150 words: estimated reading time = 8.5 minutes
“Advocacy by young climate activists such as Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi show that youth are anxious about their collective futures. … Youth might be more likely than adults to experience ill-effects associated with climate anxiety. … Young people are agents of change, our future leaders, and most likely to succeed in improving planetary health.” — Climate anxiety in young people: a call to action – Judy Wu, Gaelen Snell, Hasina Samji (published online in The Lancet, September 2020).
Climate crisis, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, threatened ecologies, mass extinction, and tipping points — attention-grabbing, anxiety-raising phrases employed in ever-increasing numbers by news reporters, environmental activists and corporate marketeers. Climate change awareness levels rise as we approach 2021’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). As a prelude to the discussions more and more scientists — as in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6, 2021) — confirm the urgency for humanity to reduce its impact on our planetary systems. Global unsustainable drilling and destruction and 21st-century consumption and convenience all need urgent re-evaluation.
I shall follow the COP26 discussions and sincerely hope that wisdom and leadership are shown by those holding the power to recalibrate how we do business. Will they have the courage to make the right decisions? Decisions that may be unpopular; u-turn decisions that may be humiliating and power threatening. This is the time for world leaders to demonstrate they have understood the science and recognise their responsibilities to alleviate global environmental disasters and offer a future to our next geneation.
Nevertheless, we at home have our part to play. As artists, many of us harness our creativity to express our concerns and share our work with a hope to raise awareness and stimulate conversation.
A selection of images and the front piece from ‘The EnviroArt Gallery’, a virtual exhibition curated by Undergraduate Environmental Alliance – Duke University, USA (2021). https://www.enviroartgallery2021.com
My recent photographic series ‘Unseen’ focussed on the undervalued habitats and overlooked ecologies locally under threat in Suffolk. An edit of my images was featured in The Enviroart Gallery, the Undergraduate Environmental Alliance virtual gallery from Duke University, USA, in April 2021. The gallery takes visitors on a journey through a series of 600+ artworks created by practitioners, students, and children, sharing artistic inspiration and nature sentiments from across China, Australia, the UK, South Africa, Latin America, Canada and the USA.
Eco-art photography: ‘Unvalued No 1’
I was pleased to be one of the environmental artists selected. Each contributing artist had the opportunity to write an insight into their interpretations, to sit alongside their work. Beside my image ‘Unvalued No 1’ I cite Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, acknowledging her foresight and reflecting on our subsequent lack of understanding of where our western lifestyle was leading.
Series: 'Elemental Expressionism' by Veronica M Worrall, Art Photographer'We stand now where two roads diverge...The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.' (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962)For a year I journeyed over my own home landscape in Suffolk. I found threatened wild places, vestiges of salt marsh and pockets of woodland being squeezed out by human activity. As an artist I wanted to renew connection to these fragile places. I pondered how to portray their unseen, undervalued essential ecosystems.I spent time reflecting on our living world. I became immersed in the natural flux and slower rhythms of a coastal biosphere. I buried my photographs back where they had been taken as an antidote to the acceleration of human power over nature. I learnt to slow my image making from 1/80th second to 80 days. Time, water, weather and creatures painted over my digital images leaving traces of elemental activity. The altered images were my dialogue with nature -- no longer representing a particular moment more an evolving enquiry. What is our relationship with ecosystems? How do we replace our anthropocentric ways of thinking, of valuing and of acting? Nature was my new partner in art. The photographs represented an aesthetic partnership of expressionism. This series, emulating a famous expressionistic painter of the past, is simply one art photographer's reaction to overwhelming environmental reports of the global degradation and the socio-cultural challenges we now face as humans. I reflected on the losses within my lifetime and contemplated how much we are taking from the next generation? Will these children thank us for beautiful pictures of lost wilderness and creatures, which we could have saved?
However, it is not only as artists that we can respond to our global environmental crisis. Along with everyone on the planet, there are mitigating steps we can take. Together we can help the planet retreat from the brink.
I believe there are two significant ways. First, we can take time to understand the global implications of the crisis and support the leaders who take the necessary tough decisions. Secondly, we can realign our own lifestyles to be less environmentally costly. This may well mean life becomes a little less convenient and less comfortable but together our actions will accumulate and become significant. Our collective action can not only lead to a decrease in CO2 emissions but will influence corporate policy and government decision-making. For instance, we can learn about the true cost of flying and eliminate unnecessary trips. We can move to non-plastic containers, tools and toys and to non-synthetic textiles. We can consider food miles and adapt to local seasonal foods. We can check whether our banks and search engines support a sustainable Earth and ensure our investments are moved out of damaging mining, petrochemicals and harmful pharmaceutical stocks into companies supporting green initiatives. We can encourage species-rich natural areas — gardens, window boxes and community parks.
These are a few of the ways. I personally know how difficult the changes can be. In our busy lives, these changes require time, effort and are often less convenient. In conversations I find I need to stay positive when the poor environmental records of large countries such as the USA and China are quoted back to me. Our global environmental problem can seem so huge and my colleagues’ counterarguments can suggest that it is not worth the effort for an individual to change their lifestyle. Hence, I share this one small story linking the young people of these two huge continents. I demonstrate how across the globe concerned undergraduates are determined to make a difference.
Unseen — from USA to China
When my ‘Unseen’ environmental photographic series was selected by students in the USA for their virtual exhibition, these pictures came to the attention of another group of students, this time in China. And out of the blue, I had an exceedingly polite email from a Chinese undergraduate asking my permission to show one or two of my art pieces in an exhibition his team were curating in Shanghai. The exhibition was to be called ‘Breathing’.
Unfortunately, a second wave of Covid meant the exhibition could not go ahead but they persevered and later I learned they were to have an outdoor show in Mixc City, Muse Mart, at an art festival. I sent a digital file and we discussed the best ways to print. They kept me informed throughout and eventually sent me photographs and a video of their stall, including my image, at the Shanghai Art Festival — a stall communicating their concern for the planet.
‘Breathing’ Outdoor Art Festival, Mixc City, Muse Mart, Shanghai (2021)
These environmentally aware Chinese students call themselves the ‘Beauty and Beast’ Team. They are dedicated to challenging environmental understanding and policies both locally and across the world. I am so proud they asked for my work to be displayed in China, the country which is frequently given as a reason that it is not worth making changes to our Western lifestyles. These youngsters tell us we are part of a global movement that recognises the importance of individual action. They believe we can join forces across the globe. Below I share an extract from their email thanking me for participating. These beautiful words demonstrate their deep reflection and determination to make a difference.
Dear Artist
With what gesture do we touch the muscle of the world? The hunter cuts the flesh with a sharp blade, the fisherman stops the struggle with his nets, the steel that comes from the soil is tearing it apart and the earth gushes black blood. Is it that the breath of man is a curse imposed on the land? Or is it time for us to take a few steps back and release the repressed and suffocated creatures into the wild?
In this special exhibition, artists from around the world focus on themes such as over-hunting, over-deforestation, resource depletion, excessive carbon emissions and ocean pollution through painting, poetry, and photography, demonstrating a cross-over awareness and care, and through this special exhibition, the B&B curatorial team hopes to evoke the world's thoughts on the environment and development, and how we should live with everything.Beauty And Beast (Student Team) 24.9.21 Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China | 昆山杜克大学
Altered images — an art photographic philosophy
“Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.” — Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005)
A few years ago I reflected upon my own environmental footprint both generally and specifically for my art. Photography can take a heavy environmental toll — flying to exotic places, continually updating equipment, and production costs. As a consequence, my art practice became local and my creativity focussed on threatened ecologies.
I learned about my local diminishing wild landscape and the threats to natural habitat by human activity. I took pictures of this terrain and its beautiful biodiversity but this was not the creative exploration nor the expression of my concerns which I was seeking. However, I did become immersed in nature’s wonder and felt its deep concern.
I contemplated the philosophy of ‘Deep Ecology’ — the interrelationships of life and time. I decided to give my prints back to the natural world in order to trace its struggling systems. I buried my photographs for 80 days back where they had been taken. I waited patiently.
Together, nature and I were demonstrating an ecological philosophy of partnering and we produced my original series ‘Project Unseen’. The resultant images were my dialogue with nature. They have since been printed on sustainable fabric and filmed as ‘banners for nature’ back in their original location. My photography no longer represents a particular moment but, I hope, asks questions.
And so, I write this reflecting how I had originally worked in partnership with natural processes in coastal Suffolk in the UK to produce my eco-art photographs — and now I find I am partnering across nations, helping to build awareness and instill an appetite for change. I believe as artists we can share our visions. We can contribute to the pressure for environmentally friendly decisions from our world leaders. I am encouraged by young artists across the globe, who care and are willing to work across cultures, and I find there is hope for our planet’s future.
Find out more
You can explore Veronica’s ‘Unseen’ series, and more, at her website — including a one-minute film of the images in experimentation, transformation and presentation. And you can read more about her approach to partnering with nature in her art in her previous ClimateCultures post, Art Photography — Emotional Response to Global Crisis.
The EnviroArt Gallery exhibition from the Undergraduate Environmental Alliance at Duke University, USA features over 600 images. Veronica’s featured ‘Unseen’ images are: Unvalued No 1, Unvalued No 2, Unvalued No 3, Unvalued No 4, and Unvalued No 5. The Beauty and The Beast team’s Breathing popup exhibition was held at Muse Mart in MixC, Shanghai in September 2021.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published in 1962, is published by Penguin.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported in March 2005: “The bottom line of the MA findings is that human actions are depleting Earth’s natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. At the same time, the assessment shows that with appropriate actions it is possible to reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently underway.”
An experimental artist using photography to capture movement, time and natural processes, working with nature and traditional alternative photography in attempts to reduce her artist footprint ...
Artist James Aldridge shares insights from Iain Biggs’ book Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place and resonances with his own projects exploring the value of outsiders’ viewpoints and voices not often heard in discussions on the Earth Crisis.
3,000 words: estimated reading time = 12 minutes
When we both attended an online event in March featuring fellow ClimateCultures member Iain Biggs, editor Mark Goldthorpe invited me to write a post about the book Iain had co-authored — Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies. My first thought was that I wasn’t the right person to write a review as I’m not an academic but an artist who uses their arts practice to carry out research into the role of art within place-based learning, largely (though not exclusively) outside of academia.
It was when Mark reassured me that he wasn’t looking for a traditional book review, that this piece of writing evolved, an exploration of how my practice as an artist working with human and non-human communities of life relates to and could be informed by the themes of the book.
Interestingly, once I began I realised that, despite first appearances, Mary and Iain didn’t specifically intend their book to be read by academics:
“Although our professional experience is within the arts and academic research, we hope to encourage you, whatever your background, to understand your skills and knowledge through this book within larger intra-related ensembles of practices and endeavours.”
Much of my current work takes place as part of Queer River, a research project I set up in 2020, which explores the values of queer perspectives on rivers and other wetlands, to inform what they need from us in a future affected by climate breakdown. As such my research is exploring the value of an outsider’s viewpoint, of voices and experiences that aren’t often heard within discussions on the Earth Crisis.
Queer River gives me the freedom to set up opportunities that I don’t find available elsewhere, to consider how my experiences inform my understanding of ‘ecologies of place’ and how my arts practice (my creative engagement with these places) can offer ways of seeing and being with them that I don’t often see reflected within mainstream discourse.
So far I’ve been invited to work with staff and students from Ashridge College and Glasgow University, have exhibited with other rurally-based queer artists at Reading University’s Museum of English Rural Life, and presented in a range of arts and community settings.
In the introduction to the book Mary and Iain write: “…we would be the first to advocate that readers reflect carefully on the socio-political implications of this text on the basis of your own experience.”
For me this was a promising start, an acknowledgement by the authors that the writing included in the book, although they may be speaking from ‘a privileged position’, is an attempt to “…move thinking away from the sovereign self and its hyper-individualism so as to stress ‘mutual, dialogical, participatory and horizontal relations’”.
One thing that I particularly value about the way that Mary and Iain write is the sense that the reader is being invited in and welcomed. The introduction in particular is sprinkled with phrases that invite the reader to take the concepts explored within it and to make them their own.
So does this exploration then include me after all? Are we all in it together or am I still reading it from the position of an outsider, looking in, whether as a non-academic or queer person? I decided to try and leave that question to one side, rather than risk putting up barriers unnecessarily, accept the authors’ invitation, and continue reading.
Although the book contains several in-depth explorations of artists’ practices, in this piece of writing I’ve concentrated on how/whether it speaks to my own.
One key thing I wanted to explore is what the key phrases used in the subtitle actually mean, and whether/how the concepts they represent relate to my work; Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies.
The authors write that they prefer “to identify our concerns with the field of geopoetics seen through the lens of mutual accompaniment rather than… replicate the presuppositions of possessive individualism”. They continue “The dominant social order (‘the master’s house’) that has been built on possessive individualism has become… so toxic, that it is destroying not only the fabric of human society but the ecologies upon which all things depend.” They go on to explain how the division and categorisation of knowledge and practices leads to a fragmentation “which has immense personal, social and environmental implications,” which “in turn makes it too easy for individuals to disregard the consequences of their actions.”
At this point I feel that we are acting from a very similar position. In Queer River, and my wider practice, I start from the viewpoint that we have become unable to experience ourselves as continuous with the rest of what we call ‘Nature’, or to recognise the harm that we are carrying out as a result, and that through walking, talking and making with (human and non-human) others, we can start to glimpse our true interconnected nature.
Mary and Iain describe their approach as ‘disciplinary agnosticism’ which allows them to work with and hear from a range of people, including those that they describe as having knowledge and experiences that “sit outside of disciplinary thinking”. In Queer River my own methodology is to walk, talk and make with others (archaeologists, botanists, writers etc) allowing our perspectives to interweave and find their own balance, in a similar way to disciplinary agnosticism’s “…multiple aspects of understanding that overlay and inter-combine”.
Queer River gives me the freedom to follow the work wherever it wants to go, and to come to know a place with the river and its human/non-human inhabitants. Although I set up the project, the work isn’t ‘done’ by me alone, it arises through dialogue, and depends on an openness, a shared commitment to not knowing where we are heading.
Similarly, the authors quote Kenneth White in his description of Geopoetics as being “more than poetry concerned with the environment… Geopoetics is concerned fundamentally with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world… a place where all kinds of specific disciplines can converge. Once they are ready to leave over-restricted frameworks and enter into global (cosmological, cosmological, cosmopoetic) space.”
In exploring and sharing how the book informs my understanding of my Queer River research, it’s useful to look at some of my writing on Queer perspectives.
In A Queer Path to Wellbeing, a previous piece for ClimateCultures, I wrote:
“Not fitting in can be hard, being excluded when you want to belong. But when you realise that what you are excluded from are the very structures that are denying people the opportunity to experience the reality of the world of which they are a part, it can become a privileged position, a bird’s eye view of the divided terrain.”
If you’ve not grown up fitting in then you don’t necessarily accept or become constrained by some of the divisions and boundaries that Mary and Iain describe. For me, queer perspectives come with the potential for an ability to blur binaries and see beyond culturally constructed barriers. When you don’t fit the categories that a culture provides for you, you can be left with a kind of a superpower of seeing through the walls of categorisation.
As I wrote in A Queer Path to Wellbeing:
“My experience of exclusion from mainstream society was traumatic, and has left me hyper-aware of other’s actions, of the danger of being open about my sexuality in certain situations. Yet these experiences have also given me a chance to experience kinship with the more than human world, in ways that I might not otherwise have accessed, should I have slotted more easily into the role set out for me.”
I’m not able to go into a huge amount of depth on all aspects of Mary and Iain’s book, as it touches on a range of rich, creative practices, so I’m concentrating on what strikes me first and most deeply, the relationship between the disciplinary agnosticism that they describe the need for, and the opportunities that queer perspectives provide.
Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies
When thinking and reading about Deep Mapping, I started with the idea that this was the more natural fit for my practice. I’ve always been fascinated by maps and mapping. All my work is concerned with the way that art can facilitate coming to know a place and oneself through relationship, a reciprocity that arises out of reaching out to touch and being touched in return, of experiencing continuity with what is generally externalised as Nature.
As part of this work, I make drawings and rubbings, I write and collect, to document and process my experiences. The art objects are evidence of our interwoven nature, they map what is beyond my everyday awareness, what I don’t know consciously. But is this all deep mapping?
Last week I took Queer River to Glasgow at the invitation of Glasgow University as part of The Dear Green Bothy, “an open space where researchers, artists and communities can gather to respond creatively and critically to the challenges of the ecological crisis”. I spent time collaborating with local rivers, artists and others for the Queer River, Wet Land Project. In my walking, talking and making with others, I aim to set up a space for dialogue, between us (both rivers and people) and within ourselves. Our bodies, emotions and intellect come together, drawing from in-the-moment experiences and past encounters.
On each walk, there is a framework there to support us: a planned route along the river, a set of resources, a time to meet and to end, and an invitation to share a description of our work beforehand; but there is also a commitment to letting go of that planning when it serves the group, and a deliberate amount of space left for not knowing. Not knowing what we are going to say, what the weather will be like, what we will notice on the day, and how/whether we will choose to record what we notice.
Mary and Iain write that “in imagination and dreams, deep maps must always exceed our ability to realise them.” I take this to refer to the importance of being in a state of not knowing. The documentation produced on Queer River walks maps what happens as it happens, with a chance to reflect on and make sense of it retrospectively; otherwise we are limited to what we already know, and what we have been taught to see/experience.
They continue “..deep mapping projects may have little in common beyond a sense of their being an open-ended creative process deployed over an extended period.”
Recently in Queer River, I wonder whether the documentation is always necessary. Sometimes it is key to my understanding, sometimes it facilitates the dialogue, but occasionally it feels like I’m doing it to show that it is an art project, that there is something concrete to show for it, when actually the process of walking, talking and noticing is enough. In that case, where does the art exist? Without the documentation, the art object, what kind of art is it — a performance?
“Whether or not we wish to call what emerges from this process a ‘map’ (or the process itself ‘mapping’) seems to me less important than the fact that it is taking place at all… deep mapping can be looked upon as an embodied and reflexive immersion in a life that is lived and performed spatially.” — Les Roberts, quoted in Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place.
After my time in Glasgow, and particularly my conversations with artist Minty Donald, Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, I’m starting to understand that my practice has always prioritised process over product, and to wonder whether describing elements of it as performance could actually liberate it even further.
As for the concept of a Slow Residency, although Mary and Iain don’t expect the slowness to be taken literally, I see it connecting with my own exploration of the need to slow down and to notice, using art and embodied experience to listen to what the world needs us to hear, rather than parachuting in to project our own ideas of what a place is or needs onto it.
In this time of ecological collapse and climate breakdown, it is tempting to charge about ‘taking action’, but there are many kinds of action that are needed. Perhaps counterintuitively, when individuals and organisations around us are declaring an emergency, we need opportunities to slow down and to notice the reality of the situation we are living in, taking time to learn from human and non-human others with whom we share our locality. For me, that is what my arts practice, and Queer River specifically, is for.
Space beyond binaries in ecologies of place
I’m still working my way through Mary and Iain’s book. I’m enjoying reading a chunk and letting it settle, before dipping back in again. Iain has kindly donated a copy to the Climate Museum UK library (I’m an Associate Artist with CMUK), as he’s keen that the book reaches more people, via libraries and other organisations. So we will be able to use it as part of CMUK’s work, engaging with a range of cultural, educational and community-based organisations, sparking conversations around the Earth Crisis, art and interdisciplinarity.
As a consequence of my time in Glasgow with Minty and our fellow collaborators, we will be working on Queer River, Wet Land Part 2, putting together a performance score that people will be able to download and use to inform explorations of their own local rivers, before coming together to share reflections at an online event this Autumn, linked to COP26.
As I take Queer River forward, I’ll carry questions with me as a legacy of reading the book and writing this piece, considering further the relevance of deep mapping, geopoetics and slow residencies. Returning to the question that I posed earlier — ‘So does this exploration then include me after all? Are we all in it together or am I still reading it from the position of an outsider, looking in, whether as a non-academic or queer person?’ — I find myself remembering that Queer Theory and quantum physics (which offers much in the way of inspiration around dialogue and multiplicity) offer me a space within which I can claim both positions; the right to exist both inside and outside of academia, outside and inside of the mainstream. A space within which my lived reality has room to grow, in a way that fits both my personal experience and the underlying ecological reality:
“The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence.” — Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity.
“What is essential here is the presence of the spirit of dialogue, which is in short, the ability to hold many points of view in suspension, along with a primary interest in the creation of common meaning.“ — David Bohm, On Dialogue.
Perhaps that’s not so far away from Iain and Mary’s disciplinary agnosticism after all.
Find out more
The online event with Iain Biggs that James attended in March 2021, Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, was part of a series from the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Queer River is the practice-led research project where James Aldridge collaborates with human and non-human others to explore the relationship between: diverse experiences of rivers and other wetland environments, including those of people from the LGBT+ community; Queer perspectives on Climate Justice; the impact of the climate and ecological crisis on river ecosystems and communities; and wetland regeneration and rewilding.
In the Queer River, Wet Land project, James is walking, talking and making with Glasgow-based artist Minty Donald, Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Glasgow University, and others to document their experiences of the River Clyde and Molendinar Burn. The project focuses on the interrelationship between the water and the land, in an exchange of practices that draws on work with their local rivers, and the substrates that they flow through/over. The collaboration is part of the Dear Green Bothy — a programme of free public events and activities marking Glasgow’s hosting of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November 2021, and demonstrating the vital role played by the arts and humanities in understanding and addressing climate emergency.
James mentions his exploration of the need to slow down and to notice, and you can read more about his approach in Slowing Down, Going Deeper on his blog. James is an Associate Artist with Climate Museum UK which was founded by independent researcher and creative Bridget McKenzie.
A visual artist working with people and places, whose individual and participatory practices generate practice-led research into the value of artful, embodied and place-based learning ...
