Starting a creative enquiry with climate & nature
Opening up to imagination in times of crisis
When I set up ClimateCultures in 2017, I wanted to tap into a growing sense that creative engagement is an important way to address the predicaments we face within the crises of climate and nature. More than that, to create a space where people intimately involved in that creativity could share examples, probe questions, explore opportunities.
Personal encounters
I wrote early on how my encounters with art had become important moments of personal shift. I see them as openings. Gaps or gateways, through which I can imagine, reflect, and reach into new ways of thinking about the crises.
I'd always been a keen reader of fiction - speculative, literary, fantasy and more - with this imaginative dimension offering a key to thinking about the world: where we are now, where we might be heading.
More recently - many years into working on environmental and climate issues - my imagination became engaged more through personal encounters with the physical presence of artists' creations. Maggi Hambling's 'Scallop' sculpture on Aldeburgh beach in Suffolk and Olafur Eliasson's 'Weather Project' installation in London's Tate Modern were two examples. Others included exhibitions by the Cape Farewell project, and the programme of the sadly missed art.earth initiative.
Art as tipping point
My freelance work with climate arts charity TippingPoint brought me into direct contact with many visual artists, poets, storytellers, composers, film-makers, playwrights and more. Immersive events brought them together with climate experts, biodiversity specialists and social scientists. For 12 years - I was with them for the final four - TippingPoint commissioned works from these encounters and collaborations.
Like TippingPoint before, the ethos of ClimateCultures is about helping creative minds express their encounters with climate and nature in the world, what this means to them, how their work responds. It's not about art being a means to somehow 'translate' the science so that audiences can 'understand the facts'. Nor to nudge us to act in the ways experts or policy makers or campaigners want us to, important though they are. Art is not about behaviour change, or even awareness as such. It's more an opening up: to connections, to contingencies and implications, to emotional and psychological truths, to possibilities. To the imagination we already possess, already inhabit.
Imagination offers insights into how 'the environment' (supposedly out there, separate from us) and its emergencies might have extra dimensions. An inkling into how nature can play out in unexpected ways, and how we are part of that. Above all, it engages us with how things can be different, our futures are not given, fixed by technologies, markets, politics, ideologies. Imagination is a fuse inside all of us. Art, in all its forms, a spark.
A creative archive
Now in its ninth year, ClimateCultures has shared more than 220 original blog posts from a growing network, on topics such as Art & Eco Activism, Challenges of Creative Engagement, Conversations, Cultural Change, Endangered Worlds, Environmental Keywords, Gifts of Sound and Vision, In the Elements, Learning in the Anthropocene, Signals from the Edge, Spaces, Speculative Worlds and Spiritual Ecology, as well as original creative works, reviews, and more.
As well as the blog, we feature shorter Creative Showcase snapshots of members' projects, and deeper dives into their creative practices or questions through essays in our Longer feature.
We've responded to strange times through threads such as our Quarantine Connection offerings during the first Covid-19 lockdowns, and our enquiry with the University of Bristol's Centre for Environmental Humanities into the language of environmental justice, resilience and transitions.
We're exploring the materiality of humanity's global reach, with members' contributions to our ongoing series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects and annual additions to our online Museum of the Anthropocene by human geography students at the University of East Anglia.
Recent creative explorations
Just this year, so far our blog has featured:
Poet and writer Joanna Guthrie, in an essay for our Longer feature on finding deeper connection with and through trees, and her introductory blog post on writing and ‘radical noticing’, asking: how else to deal with the times?
Author Rajat Chaudhuri on the backstories and inspiration for his most recent novel, 'Spellcasters', and how they connect to the plot of this part-psychological-thriller-part-climate adventure with a twist of the occult.
Poet and campaigner Fiona Moore on finding joy and celebration alongside loss in her review of ecopoet Helen Moore’s 'river / run' collection of poems exploring a living ecology, history and language shared with waterbodies and our fellow animals.
Ecological artist and researcher Laura Donkers on a community drawing project, uncovering shared emotional connections and promoting dialogue on ‘home’ as both place and process, impacted by climate change and ecological breakdown.
Writer, poet and artist Indigo Moon on her creative reflections on grief at loss - of loved ones and in the natural world - and the power of life to help us recover and stay connected with people, place and presence.
Composer Lola Perrin, in an essay for our Longer feature, on her recent Solarpunk symphony residency in Norway, and her introductory blog post on how this responds to frustration with cultural venues’ lack of response to the climate risks.
Writer Peter Reason on the possibilities of learning to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives, finding ways to invoke the living presence of a sentient world through co-operative inquiry with humans and waterways in a kinship ecology.
Playwright Chantal Bilodeau on a new anthology of short plays on the climate crisis from Climate Change Theatre Action. Its theme of ‘All good things must begin’ takes an imaginative leap through challenging times towards a just and regenerative world.
That's a flavour of the sort of work - from our archive and many other sources - that I want to draw on here in ClimateCultures & more, to explore how our crises are - I think - above all a failure of imagination. And how creative engagement is a vital route to discovering how we can make new connections, and make the better worlds we can already imagine.
Learning for the future
These are areas I'm still learning about. How engaging curiosity, creativity and imagination is helping artists, curators and researchers - can help all of us - to face into the emergency and make change meaningful.
By digging into the ClimateCultures archive and the latest content there, by looking at work elsewhere and reaching out, by opening this up for conversations here, I hope to find out what we can learn now and where this can take us.
I’m looking forward to exploring with you.
Pleased to have you here 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Hi Mark
Good to see your focused expansion on climate and nature issues here on Substack!