Tag Archives: Nature

From control towards vulnerability

Claire Morgan is an Irish artist, born in 1980 in Belfast.

“Being alive can be beautiful and horrific. Every living thing is in this state of constant transition. I am intrigued by those simultaneous senses of spiritual communion and unpalatable intrusion that come about through awareness of our connectedness, and of our vulnerability.

My practice has been focussed on how we humans understand and interact with the rest of the natural world, and our unwillingness to acknowledge our absolute lack of autonomy or control. I look at humans as animals, and the complexity of our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us. We behave as individual entities with fixed identities, but the reality is less clear.”

Paying attention to space

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a contemporary visual artist working across varied media of sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the extraordinary to the ordinary and the ephemeral or discarded to the highly precious; they have included organic materials, foodstuffs and precious metals, such as caul fat to gold leaf. Central to her practice is a response to the particularities of place; its history, locale, environment and communities. She is interested in how the exchange of knowledge might develop through collaborative working and in the contexts of landscape, heritage, science and community as offered by each location.

Destabilizing assumptions and expanding imagination

The collaborative artist as avatar 0rphan Drift (0D) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. It was co-founded by Maggie Roberts, Ranu Mukherjee, Suzi Karakashian and Erle Stenberg in London. It has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In recent years 0D has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.

Perception and Reality

David Rickard is a New Zealand artist based in London, UK. His original studies in architecture have had a lasting impact on his art practice, embedding queries of material and spatial perception deep into his work. Through research and experimentation his works attempt to understand how we arrived at our current perception of the physical world and how far our perception is from what we call reality.

The Boglands are Breathing

Siobhán McDonald is an Irish artist based in Dublin. In a practice that emphasizes field work and collaboration she works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. Her solo exhibition, ‘The Boglands are Breathing’, presents a new body of work that critically explores the role of boglands as both repositories of our past and guardians of our future. In a multifaceted body of work, Siobhán McDonald blends scientific and creative processes to make sculpture, video, works on paper, paintings and sound pieces.

The Sacred Balance: blending Western science with Indigenous knowledges, David Suzuki’s influential book has been updated for this moment

Jana Norman is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. Jana also teaches in the English, Creative Writing and Film Department at the University of Adelaide. Jana’s research interests in environmental humanities and legal theory focus on critical and creative approaches to collaborating across difference towards reparative shared futures. Her book, ‘Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene’ (Routledge 2021) received the Socio-Legal Studies Theory and History Book Prize in 2022 and the Chris Beasley Prize for Gender and Sexuality Theory from the Fay Gale Center for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide in 2021.

How art inspired by peatlands can help us confront the climate crisis

Benjamin Gearey is lecturer in environmental archaeology, University College Cork, with a wide range of research interests focused on wetland and especially peatland environments. He is PI for the ongoing IRC COALESCE funded project IPeAAT, and was CO-I for the recently completed EU Joint Planning Initiative/Cultural Heritage funded project ‘WetFutures’ and other IRC funded projects.
He is a member of the United Nations Global Peatlands Initiative and an elected member of the JPICH Scientific Advisory Committee with expertise in past climate change. He is editor of The Journal of Wetland Archaeology and has published extensively on aspects of peatland heritage, environmental change and human impact, in peer reviewed journals and books, including the recently published ‘An Introduction to Peatland Archaeology and Palaeoenvironments’ (Oxbow Books, 2023).

Maureen O’Connor is a lecturer at the School of English and Digital Humanities in University College Cork. “I am an Irish Studies scholar, specializing in women’s writing, from the late nineteenth century to today. Much of my work is ecofeminist analysis, including my first book, The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing.”

Dr Rosie Everett is a Lecturer in Forensic Science at Northumbria University with a specialist interest in forensic ecology and environmental trace evidence. As a former environmental archaeologist, she has research experience and interest in past environmental archives (pollen, diatoms) for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction with a focus on peatlands and peatland heritage. She has worked with government bodies and NGOs to develop policy and action to support peatland restoration groups and communities in the management and protection of peatland heritage in the face of climate change.

Let’s protect nature, but not merely for the sake of humans

Simon P. James is Professor of Philosophy, Durham University.

“I came to philosophy by a roundabout route, taking a BSc in Biological Sciences followed by an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science, before obtaining a PhD for a thesis on environmental ethics. I have written a number of articles on environmental philosophy as well as the following books: ‘Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics’ (Routledge, 2004), ‘Buddhism, Virtue and Environment’ (Routledge, 2005; co-authored with David E. Cooper), ‘The Presence of Nature: A Study in Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy’ (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) and ‘Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction’ (Polity, 2015). My new book, ‘How Nature Matters’ (Oxford University Press, 2022), presents a new theory of environmental value, based on the concepts of meaning, constitution and cultural identity.”

William Wordsworth and the Romantics anticipated today’s idea of a nature-positive life

Sir Jonathan Bate is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a Senior Research Fellow in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was formerly Provost of Worcester College. The author of twenty books, several of which have won major prizes, he is a world-renowned expert on Shakespeare and the history of English and European Literature, especially the Romantic movement and contemporary poetry and fiction. He was the first to introduce ecological approaches to the arts and humanities into British scholarship and has also made significant contributions to discussions in the public sphere of the value of the humanities. A Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, he is the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.

Elemental Forms

Nadezda Nikolova is a Croatian-Bulgarian-American photographic artist working with wet plate collodion photograms. Her practice is informed by an experimental approach to early photographic processes and her interest in the image as an object. The abstract landscape series, ‘Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscapes and Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscape Rearticulated’, emerged as the artist’s direct response to her surroundings and to feeling a sense of well-being and security within the landscape. She believes that each locale has its specific identity, history, and emotional imprint.