Tag: Climate

Nature as Co-Creator

This week I posted a photo of next doors’ cat, Ziggy, sitting on the recycled paper I was drying on my studio table in preparation for what I hope will be a piece of art. I labelled him ‘co-creator’, as a joke – and then of course my weekend sent me down a very enjoyable rabbit-hole of real artists making real collaborations with the non-human. So I thought I’d share some with you.

Losing Track, Holding Traces is a beautiful exhibition of works in mud, twig, felt, charcoal, paper, and fabric, created by three artist-friends out of their walks through the countryside of the Derwent river valley. Look at these altar-like displays of found objects and process notes that greet you as you enter! The swatches testing organic dyes, the photos of drawing in the rain, the treasures of lichened wigs and twisted grasses! Honestly, I think I love notebooks and the ephemera of creative practice more than the finished product sometimes; but in this case I also loved the finished works because the exhibition continued to be jointly-conceived, modular, free-flowing, and as full of playfulness as a mud pie.

I particularly loved the use of rain as a co-creator, which reminded me of Andy Goldsworthy’s rain shadows where he lies down when the rain starts and gets up when it stops, leaving his dry silhouette on the land. The willingness of it, to relinquish creative control to the weather.

Also, making by walking – yes please. Since reading Sonia Overall’s Heavy Time a couple of weeks ago, my intermittent habit of making poetry through walking has been given a boost, so it was gorgeous to see the same practice applied to visual and fibre arts too.

Finally, big shout out for modular installation! The piece I’m working on at the moment will take 200 squares of hand-made paper threaded together to make it complete. It’s astonishing how the act of repetition is enough to elevate a simple object or action to a greater level of significance. In poetry this happens in anaphora, when words of phrases are repeated to the point almost of incantation. In the Gateshead exhibition, the repeated mud and charcoal paper tiles achieve something similar – one simple act of painting, an infinite number of possible outcomes. Fingerprints of earth.

So now here I am, footling around in the internet to look for nature as co-creator projects. There are loads of course, but here are a few that I love the sound of:

Forest Is The Artist is an exhibition of canvases left in a Korean rainforest for a year so the forest could ‘paint’ them, which is awesome but not something we can all replicate; but we could do some painting with weather like conservation worker and artist Katherine Owen.

Bio-feedback music with plants is a vibe – check out work by Masterplants or Natural Symphony; and I’m pretty sure Newcastle-based poet Amelia Loulli has done spoken word/film-poetry using bio-feedback but I can’t find any links so maybe I hallucinated that!

There is a load of fascinating practice going on at the intersection of sculpture, textiles and fibre art, and fungi – mycelial sculpture is everywhere! Vases, gloriously weird animal head sculptures, mushroom book-shelves grown by our local fun-guys Threads in the Ground. You could spend a very long time finding out more about mycelial fabrics…

In April last year, Nature was added as a credited artist on Spotify, allowing musicians and sounds artists using field recordings to raise royalty income for climate initiatives. There are folks out there co-creating sculptures with bees. Folks, it’s wild times for re-thinking how to interact with the non-human!

So what might that mean for a poet? Not sure yet, but I wonder whether I can update my side-practice of erasure poetry and ditch the paint-and-ink blackout method in favour of a temporary composting methodology? Bury a page for 6 months and see which words remain un-rotted when I dig it up? It’s got to be worth a try, right?

Life on Mars

I saw this post and thought of Elon and all the tech-bro would-be-kings of the next frontier, spending all the wealth they’ve harvested from environmental death here on earth on big little boy rockets zoom-zoom-zooming them away from us whining plebs to all the new, empty planets they’d like to fuck…

I have a pamphlet coming out on 20th February with The Braag. It’s called Offworld and it’s full of weird little sci-fi flash fic poems that came out of a 2019 residency at MIMA.

All the titles are deliberate mistranslations of Portuguese exhibition and artwork titles I found in the archive folder for Brazilian artist Brigida Baltar, whose large photographic piece Cloud Collecting is in the Middlesbrough Collection. From this starting point, I prompted myself to create writing that embraced experimentation and narrative – a story of sorts emerged, about a girl and her friend Sai, and how they ended up drifting through the dustbowl dregs of a collapsing galactic empire, witnessing the slow degradation of endeavour and intention from utopian to authoritarian…

Wherever we go, there we are.

It should be available for pre-order soon, and there will be a launch at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle on 20th February, followed I hope by a Teesside launch, and online launch, and a bunch of readings around the country if I can get my shit together. I’ll keep you posted.

Plastic passions are hard to handle

Christmas blinking manically all around me, polyester charity-shop Shein-retrieval billowing brightly on my back, pen pausing in my hand mid-migration to its landfill destiny, clingy flutter of the Lotus wrapper tipping my thumb, toothed hoop holding my hair back like a best mate in the late-night ladies’ loos, keyboard carrying my mind to yours, boot soles carrying my body past window-gluts of tat in all shades of desperation and desire, blister-packs of ease for my symptoms, fugitive molecules circulate in my plumbing and the beading of my blood vessels, micro, macro, plastic, factual.

Plastic is oil. The international treaty on reducing plastic waste has failed to reach an agreement, with oil-producing nations pushing against the most stringent restrictions. It figures.

Figures. 400 million tonnes of plastic waste per year, 109 million in rivers, 30 million in the oceans. Predicted to treble by 2060 if we don’t stop now.

Trying to find a decent poem out there (finding lots of bad ones). Somewhere there’s Cindy Botha’s prize-winning poem about a hermit crab in a doll’s head. Somewhere in me there must be things to say, but what is there unsaid?

Teesside has the world’s first recycling facility capable of turning formerly end-of-life and unrecyclable plastics into liquid hydrocarbons. They employ 50 people. Teesside is a major manufacturing hub for Sabic, a global firm who produce over a third of all the polyethylene needed to make single-use plastics. They employ 800+ and bring £400m into our local economy. Some staff occasionally do voluntary beach cleans. The UK wanted the plastics treaty to work at it’s strongest; Saudi Arabia not so much. Sabic is a Saudi-owned company.

I can’t make the pieces fit. I’m a shucked crab, calling a dolls-head ‘home’. A pair of ragged claws.

The World Counts plastic ocean dump figures – real-time counter.

Ocean plastic tracker – where might your plastic end up if it reaches the sea?

Stories of Stuff – watch and share feature length and animated shorts showing the lifecycles of plastics, recycling, microfibres, microbeads

Plastic Count – see how much the UK wastes and take part in this annual citizen-science project monitoring plastic use and waste in UK households and schools

PlanetCare – install a microfibre filter on your washing machine outlet and reduce micro-plastic pollution in the water cycle

Bird-shaped holes in the world

Why declare climate emergency? Because of the absences I see everywhere.

The five sparrows on the wall when two years ago there were twenty .

The way the starling murmurations reduced from an abstract flash mob to sad little squiggles the year after their roosting site was knocked down for housing development.

How long it’s been since I cringed at an evening influx of daddy-long-legs, creepy-crawly bane of all childhood camping trips – I saw one on a bus stop this summer and stopped to take a photo, it had been so long. Bad luck for the bats, dunlins, plovers, choughs and crows and others that feed on them.

I’ve lived long enough and been watching, idly but enough to see baselines shift and biodiversity plummet, and I can’t even really look closely at the true numbers without wanting to scream. I’m taking a different road to my mum’s these days so I don’t have to look at the wrenched-up hedges and ravaged fields of another fucking housing estate going up. Hedgehog corridors gone, berries for the migrating flocks gone, everything gone, for brick-loads of mortgage debt and two-car driveways in an unwalkable development without amenities or green infrastructure, built with extractive materials we have no carbon budget for – my mind rants on and on!

Does anyone else get this clutching panic just looking at how many of us there are? And thinking about how much consumption and destruction we seem to find normal?

Does anyone else look out over the incredible skies of Teesside and imagine walking the marshes as a pre-historic hunter-gatherer, seeing not this era’s scratty gap-toothed off-cut skeins of geese but endless sashiko stitches of bird-flocks?

Lynn Pederson does something like this in her prose-poem ‘A Brief History of the Passenger Pigeon’, and I’m so glad to find it. I hope you enjoy it too.

A Brief History of the Passenger Pigeon

Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous cliff at the dawn of humans?
 
Nesting grounds eight hundred square miles in area. Skies swollen with darkening multitudes. Days and days of unbroken flocks passing over. Ectopistes migratorius.
 
And the last of the species, Martha, named for Martha Washington, dies in a cage in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.
 
Forget clemency. We are the worst kind of predator, not even deliberate in our destruction. Our killing happens à la carte, on the side (side of Dodo?).
 
And because the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for extinctions, there are no official witnesses to the slaughter, just participants. If you could somehow travel back to this scene, through the would-be canvas, you would run flailing your arms toward the hardwood forests and the men with sticks and guns and boiling sulphur pots to bring birds out of the trees, as if you could deliver 50,000 individual warnings, or throw yourself prostrate on the ground, as if your one body could hold sway.

So maybe this is the point of poets and poetry in the context of declaring climate emergency. To imagine forward and backward through out own lifetimes and beyond, to paint a picture of biodiversity as it was and should be, to keep alerting new generations to the baseline shift so they don’t unthinkingly accept the new normal of silent dead-scape.

I’m going to share one of my own poems as well, this one published in Passerine (where all the poems are called Dear Sophie)

9 October

Dear Sophie,

The clouds today are the blue-black of eye bags. 
The trees blaze against them, rebels to a sapling. 
Pointillist berries transport the green shadows with scarlet. 
The haws are set, thumb-prick carmine, and the sloes are blue as ravens. 

Along the old embankment, crowds of rosebay have withered 
to a froth of seed-split pods swaying on rattles of madder leaves. 

The grey wind. 

Long-vacated, you melt into the arms of the earth, sockets deep as inkwells. 
In twelve years, the scientists say, the damage will be irreversible. 
Your son’s lifespan, again. 

A break in the clouds reveals the trees 
are full of fluttering shadow-puppets, telling folktales 
about the beginnings and ends of worlds.

What about the whatabout?

Last week I put out a blog that contained twenty small and small-ish changes individuals and households could make to get a little more planet-friendly – things that me and my friends actually do; that lots of people do. It prompted some really interesting conversations on my socials, and highlighted a very real and common reaction that many people have …”what good will individual action do, when governments and corporations do nothing? What about systems change?“

I mean, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely systems change, absolutely governmental duty, COP pledges, absolutely environmental laws, absolutely corporate accountability, yes yes yes.

But also, the need for the big doesn’t invalidate the benefit of the small. “What-aboutery” is the name for the kind of reaction that sounds like an intellectual, rational, realistic, politically sophisticated response to any suggestion that we make individual changes. But it’s also a deflection, an emotional opting out, a shifting of blame that cuts the difficult journey of change dead in its tracks. Going straight to “what about” can snuff out the flame of hope, which we desperately need if we’re to remain committed, resilient, united and innovative in the storms to come.

Society is made up of individuals moving together in culture shifts…

I vote, but I am not a government.

I purchase, but I am not a corporation.

Where does my sphere of influence actually extend?

How am I willing to act within it?

In documenting those actions, who might I take with me?

In asking others for their experiences and ideas, what strength might I gain?

So, here ‘s a couple more ideas and stories of individual actions with wider implications. First up is this article just dropped into my inbox by Triodos Bank, with a bunch of festive sustainability tips for you. You’ve probably seen this kind of thing before? I’ve been doing charity shop and home-made gifts for years, mostly because I work in the arts and have sod-all money, but hey I’ll take the eco-credit for it too!

But seriously, what do you do with your money, those of you who have any? Triodos supports a Friends of the Earth initiative called Money Movers, which shows you how to use your current, savings and pensions accounts to help support climate action. Individual action, collective results. Systems are made up of people, we can play our part with intention.

Secondly I want to share OFFSHORE, a fantastic short film about oil, gas and wind powered energy industries – no really, it’s phenomenal! Beautifully shot, fascinating footage on the rigs, and an absolutely brilliant insight into how some highly-skilled rig workers themselves are making the move to, and the case for, wind turbines. The dangers, challenges, and systemic/economic barriers to change are all laid out in the most gripping and relatable ways, please take a look and see how individuals and this system inter-relate.

Fossil fuels and community cohesion are in the DNA of the north east. I live on the so-called East Durham Coal Coast. I wrote this a while back with a community group at Hawthorn, County Durham, thanks to a commission from No More Nowt.

We come from a land of beauty and blackness -
Wooded denes and fertile fields, 
wide rivers, far horizons, and the soft limestone coast
where the east wind draws mists from the sea and rainbows arc;
Black coal threaded below, ugly and precious,
ancient plants pressed into seams of fuel.
We come from a land of villages, of community, of closeness,
people linked together in work and in love.
A land of regeneration, making the best of what we have,
Strong and caring, a kind and canny land

Finally, I’d like to show you this resource created by Bridget McKenzie, founder of Climate Museum UK and co-founder of Culture Declares Emergency. I’m currently doing Bridget’s Earth Talk training, learning more about how to hold difficult climate conversations with folks both inside and outside my echo chamber. I’m very much a beginner, very much prone to doom-loading and freaking out, but I really want to find a way to hold space for all of the complexities of fact, myth, and emotion that we all feel. This infographic helps me to think about where my different actions and choices fall, and where there might be opportunities to make a difference that are both meaningful and sustainable. What do you see in this wheel? Where are you? Would you like to talk about it with friends? Drop in on me at ARC Stockton, 2-4pm every Thursday or email me on teessideclimatecreatives@gmail.com

White House, Orange Peril, Green Future?

With the world’s biggest climate change denier strutting back into power over at the world’s second-biggest carbon emitting nation, it’s a grey day to be thinking about the very niche impact of poetry as climate activism. Or so I thought, as I took my lunchtime walk around the wintery streets of Stockton, preparing for my second weekly Declaration drop-in.

Wandering down Silver Street, I saw that there were people doing exciting things with sewing machines and pattern-cutting in the gorgeous yellow Institute of Thrifty Ideas, the activities hub of Festival of Thrift. Popping in to say hi to tutor Lindsay and her group, I learned something that made me so happy – poetry was exactly the comfort some people sought when the news of Trump’s re-election hit!

What was the poem they sent each other to express solidarity, to offer solace, to remind each other of the need for renewed hope and commitment to nature? This one, of course…

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Later that afternoon I was joined by the lovely Amy Lord – author, blogger and digital marketer. We had a fascinating chat about the carbon footprint of digital work now that AI is everywhere, sucking up lakefuls of coolant. How can she mitigate against this in her work as a freelance marketer? With a Declaration, might she use her own stated climate ethics as a way to connect with clients who share her values? Can she use her marketing powers to tell the good stories of organisations who are embedding sustainability? As an author and blogger, will she lend her weight to the cause of Fossil Free Books in the wake of the Baillie Gifford litfest-funding kerfuffle? All brilliant thoughts and questions, which Amy has taken away to ponder further…

And for myself, I finally made a Declaration, one which will serve to connect me to the CDE community while I work on a larger creative response and continue to audit my practice. Its a start!

For you – a drawing in progress inspired by Klimt’s forests; looking for the peace of wild things at Billingham Beck nature reserve; close-up of a Van Gogh seen at the National Gallery this weekend.

My next Declaration drop-in will be a walk-and-talk on Tuesday 12th November, meeting 10.00am at the Whitewater Way car park for Portrack Marsh Nature Reserve – location and parking info here.

Want to be in touch about Teesside climate stuff for creatives and cultural practitioners? Email me