Our cultural practitioners are contributing to the climate change debate through creative writing, film, fine art, exhibitions and more.

Engaging communities with challenges facing our world

Climate change is complicated and can often feel as if it is happening far away. But it is part of our everyday lives and its impacts are all around us.

Our cultural practitioners are working with communities here in our region and around the world to explore climate change.

They’re using art, film, photography, creative writing and more to engage people young and old with the challenges facing our planet.

Find out more

By Eva Masterman and Irene Brown

Fine Art and Music collaborations in Baroque opera began in 2018, when the charismatic new Head of Performance and internationally-recognised countertenor, Larry Zazzo,  persuaded Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Irene Brown to collaborate in the staging and performance of the Baroque pastoral opera, Handel's Acis and Galatea.   Zazzo runs the ambitious Performing Baroque Opera module where students gain experience and develop performance skills through the fully staged production and public performance of an early opera.

Irene’s role was set designer for the one-night-only production at the Victorian Tyne Theatre and Opera House, Newcastle, in spring 2018. As a sculptor and site specific installationist, Brown most often makes work for museum’s and heritage sites, so she is familiar with working in challenging environments. This project had its own particular requirements however; the set had to describe the location of Arcadia,  be impactful, contain some kind of fountain or water feature, be large enough to occupy the expanse of the stage, alter throughout the performance and had to be climbed by the villain, the giant Polyphemus. And all on a shoe string of approximately £200.  It also had to fit in a van and be installed by 2 people in just a few hours.

Irene decided to create a three screen video installation as the backdrop to the Opera. Working in video supported ambitions of scale, breadth of imagery, simplicity of design and low expenditure. The only costs incurred were for 3 large, projection screens, constructed in the workshops in Fine Art.  Two postgraduate art students Shaney Barton and Ryan Boyle helped to produce the video content and install the screens. The waterfall, mountain and temple videos were synced together, gradually fading from full colour to black and white as the harmony in arcadia becomes disrupted, jumping suddenly to red as Acis the hero is murdered by Polyphemus. The opera was also performed at Seaton Delaval Hall, the romantic ruin of a baroque mansion (National Trust) designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1718, the same year as Handel’s Acis and Galatea premiered.

The success of this inaugural collaboration was followed in 2019 by Eva Masterman, Norma Lipman Ceramic Fellow in Fine Art, this time working as set designer for the opera Dido and Aeneas. Her work deals with the intersections of staging, theatre craft and ceramic sculpture, and she therefore jumped at the chance to work on her first real stage set. Eva was awarded a HaSS Faculty Research Institute Pioneer Award to support the production of  the set as part of her research practice.  With student mentoring built into the project, students from the Fashion Club and Fine Art were involved in costume and set design. Taking inspiration from traditional Baroque stage design that used ‘flats’, the set comprised of a large set of arches that, through dramatic lighting changes, switched from Palace, to Cave, to Ruin as the story unfolded.

Due to numerous issues (including COVID and a broken leg), the full opera was unfortunately cancelled. However, the set and a sound piece of Dido’s Lament, sung by graduate music student Anna Dias, will be exhibited as an installation at Seaton Delaval Hall from the 23^rd June – 17^th July 2021.

These initial projects between Fine Art and Music act as successful test cases for future and perhaps wider collaborations, potentially with Opera North and the National Trust, once public performance is back on the menu.

Acis and Galatea Promotional Video https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AA3B9mQH76jecBE&cid=679AA49E52CB8E24&id=679AA49E52CB8E24%2171149&parId=679AA49E52CB8E24%2168950&o=OneUp

By Clifton Evers

On behalf of the team: Maia Almeida-Amir, Clifton Evers, Mark Ireland, Greg Mutch, Anthony Zito (PI)

On July 8^th, 2021 an interdisciplinary team (cultural studies, geosciences, engineering, public policy) from Newcastle University are launching an exhibition at the socially-engaged art space Headway Arts in the Northeast coastal town of Blyth, Northumberland (9 Jly2021 – 25 July, 2021).  We have been closely working with the local community, multiple community art organisations, archives, industry, and government.

Pilot funding was provided by the One Planet fund and the Institute for Creative Arts Practice at Newcastle University. Interest grew and we now have support from many organisations, including the Shadow Places Network of scholars, artists and activists will collaborate through a series of real and virtual encounters to document, co-produce and reimagine connections between places and peoples in an era of climate change.

For the exhibition we commissioned 9 outstanding regionally based artists and sourced archival footage. The exhibition invites the community of the Northeast coastal town of Blyth to share in low-carbon energy industries and the cultural transformations they may bring or already have brought. As part of the exhibit, all visitors are encouraged to share their own thoughts and reactions to Blyth’s energy futures. This is not just an opportunity to speak to each other but to listen together, to nurture shared futures and world-making.

Blyth has a long proud industrial history. It is a key location for the UK government’s decarbonisation plans. There are many promises. Then again, Blyth has borne the brunt of deindustrialisation (particularly of fossil fuel led industries) resulting in very high unemployment, poverty, and concomitant health and wellbeing challenges. While there is hope there are questions. Who benefits? What power do different stakeholders have? Who is accountable to who? Can you say no? What do locals know? What emotions are being felt? How does what happens here connect to ‘over there’? What are the more-than-human considerations?  These are urgent ‘just transition’ questions. In academic discourse the ‘just transition’ concept places the rights of workers (both current and past) and communities whose livelihoods depend or depended upon fossil fuels at the center of the climate debate.

The exhibition is the first stage of a project with a creative and participatory ethos at the core, and is aimed at cultivating a wider inclusive discussion about how renewable energy industries are understood and received by local communities with a fossil fuel industrial heritage in the north-east of England. Challenges for these communities include future socio-economic and health well-being, local environmental concerns, and evolving identity given the arrival of new low carbon technologies and industries in their midst (e.g., wind turbines, sea cables, battery gigaplant, biomass power plant, geothermal, carbon capture technologies). We examine how the fossil-free future is imagined by local actors and imbricated in the (re)making of subjects, places, and conditions of life.

Crucially, the creative practice underpins the whole project. We do not view the creative practice as simply communication of research. It is research. Creative practice as research can help people to access and non-verbally express thoughts and feelings, move people to understand and feel place-based experience differently, connect people to institutions in novel ways, better account for more-than-human influence in the making of world(s), and facilitate democratic change through an engaging and empowering participative process. Arts-based research is arguably effective in generating critical and reflexive evaluation of functioning of power, making tacit knowledge available to research, and for speculating about a diversity of futures.

Anna Hickey-Moody (2013, 2016), provides multiple excellent examples of how by proceeding with an idea of creativity understood as an iterative compositional process that cuts across objects, bodies, artefacts, tools, thought, and a particular time and place that can produce an ‘affective pedagogy.’ Hickey-Moody (2016) writes, “aesthetics teach us by changing how we feel” (79) and can re-adjust what a person or institution is or is not able to understand, produce and connect to (261). Creativity as research allow us to not only recognise and appreciate change but transform social, cultural, political, material, and spatial conditions of possibility. In so doing, the potential for alternative future(s) ways of knowing ways of life can occur.

Our hope is to continue to learn from the communities and industries we are working with to further nurture this arguably generative and collectivising research approach.   

Dr Clifton Evers is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at Newcastle University. Through participatory and interdisciplinary international research he performs creative practice ethnography with communities and nonhumans about environmental issues, such as polluted leisure, blue spaces, as well as just/inclusive transitions. He is also interested in the intersections of masculinities, sport, and pollution.

By Rob Mackay

Following the Flight of the Monarchs: An interdisciplinary ecoacoustics project

‘Following the Flight of the Monarchs’ is an interdisciplinary project bringing together artists and scientists, connecting with ecosystems and communities along the migration routes of monarch butterflies as they travel the 3,000 mile journey between Mexico and Canada each year. The project, led by Rob Mackay (Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University), connects with the international BIOM project led by Leah Barclay at the University of the Sunshine Coast (http://www.biospheresoundscapes.org/) and SoundCamp (http://soundtent.org/) to map the changing soundscapes of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves through art, science and technology. 

Streamboxes are being installed in 5 locations along the monarch butterfly migration routes between Canada and Mexico. These will livestream the soundscapes of these different ecosystems 24/7 via the Locus Sonus Soundmap (http://locusonus.org/soundmap/051/). The first of the boxes was successfully installed in the Cerro Pelón UNESCO monarch butterfly reserve in Mexico in 2018, and another streambox was installed at Point Pelee National Park in Canada in 2019. Further streamboxes are due for installation in Virginia, Texas, and Northern California. A collaboration is also underway with Stanford University’s Jasper Ridge Biosphere Preserve in Southern California. The streams are being used for ecosystem monitoring as well as integrating into artworks which are raising awareness of the issues the monarchs highlight, whose numbers have declined by nearly 90% over the past two decades due to industrial use of herbicides, deforestation, and climate change. 

So far, there have been a number of creative outputs, including an immersive audiovisual installation which toured internationally, including the Eden Project and the New York Electroacoustic Music Festival. More recently an audiovisual telematic performance piece has been developed connecting performers in Mexico, USA, Canada and the UK in real-time with soundscapes streamed from ecosystems across the monarchs’ migration routes. 

Rob created a 30 minute radio programme about the project for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears series, which was broadcast in January 2021. It was Pick of the Day in the Radio Times. It is still available to listen to online, combining interviews with monarch specialists in Canada, USA and Mexico, alongside binaural field recordings (including the rushing sound of millions of monarch butterfly wings), and musical performances recorded in the reserves. 

Links:

• Project Website: https://followingtheflightofthemonarchs.com
• BBC Radio 3 programme: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qyhz
• Flight of the Monarchs installation videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhbv63REKrM
• Networking the Flight of the Monarchs Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpbb9dnOHPY&feature=youtu.be
• Personal Website: https://robmackay.net
• Interview on WGXC Radio, New York (13’24” - 31’05”): https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/hjjaj1

By Liv Collins, 4th Year Fine Art, School of Arts and Cultures

In December 2020, I decided to establish a community art project, Tea towel Project – For Sue, based in the small rural village of Oulston, North Yorkshire (where I grew up). The aim of this project was to commemorate and celebrate the life of Sue Allum, a beloved member of our community, who sadly passed away at the end of 2020. Due to strict covid-19 restrictions, only her close family were able to attend her funeral. Thus, I felt compelled to start a project which would allow my community to say goodbye to Sue, and to come together at a time when we were being told to stay two metres apart.

So, I gave pieces of paper to over 50 women and girls in my village and invited them to do whatever they pleased with it. I wanted to make this a feminist project in order to reflect Sue’s brilliant feminist values. I was bowled over by the response, from origami to poetry, my community had created a plethora of unique artworks which celebrated Sue. Due to the funding I kindly received from the Institute for Creative Arts Practice, I was able to design and print a collection of tea towels which exhibit all of the artworks together. These tea towels will be distributed to every household who participated in this project. These collaborative tea towels will sit in our kitchens, as a vibrant reminder to the importance of friendship, community, and the brilliant legacy which Sue has left behind.

For more information on the project, please contact: O.collins3@newcastle.ac.uk

Elisabetta Fabrizi, PhD candidate, School of Arts and Cultures

Elisabetta Fabrizi’s research at Newcastle University stems from her practice of Head of Exhibitions at the British Film Institute and of Curator at BALTIC, offering an analysis of the significance of curators’ creative work and their role in institutionally embedding the moving image at the centre of the contemporary art field.

Elisabetta’s curating and her reflections on creative practice have been recently included in a new book, ‘Artists Moving image in Britain since 1989’, published by Paul Mellon Foundation and Yale University Press to which she contributed an essay analysing her own curatorial work at the British Film Institute – describing the creative opportunities and challenges of curating a contemporary art programme for a gallery sited within a Film institution. This important and timely publication offers a critical appraisal and art historical survey of a period of great transformation for this area of creative practice; a book which aims at considering the practice of artists alongside that of curators who had an impact on the field in the period.

In the book Elisabetta reflected on how curatorial practice holds a central role in the network of forces shaping exhibition, collection and production making strategies, of which moving image is now an important part. Following her PhD research, she did this by referencing some of her commissions, including one with artists and Newcastle University Fine Art Professors Jane & Louise Wilson, who have also been acknowledged for their important contribution to the period with the inclusion of their text part of the 'Artists' section of the same publication.

Elisabetta also reflected on her work with practitioners whose work navigates between gallery and cinema auditorium, and the importance of curatorial practice in shaping the opportunities offered to them in terms of site, context and content: examples cited are John Akomfrah, Michael Snow, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, whom she worked with in both their capacity of visual artists and mainstream filmmakers, including by offering them access to the BFI’s extensive Film Archive to create a new commission.

Through a more personal and practice-based outlook which she has developed while at Newcastle University, the text complements The BFI Gallery Book , a book she previously published (BFI, 2011). Both Artists Moving image in Britain since 1989, and The BFI Gallery Book are available from the Robinson Library.

Elisabetta also articulated some of the ideas stemming from her PhD as part of the current Oslo Biennial; and in two reviews published by Art Monthly (in the current November issue and in the forthcoming Dec/Jan issue, https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/). She also discussed her research on art radio Resonance fm, in a panel comprising critic and broadcaster Morgan Quaintance (Art Monthly Talk show, https://www.resonancefm.com/).

E.Fabrizi2@newcastle.ac.uk

In September 2019, the Cultures of Memory research group teamed up with local artists Lloyd-Wilson (Toby Lloyd and Andrew Wilson) to host a public ‘Broadcast Bartender’ event at the Ex-Libris Gallery at Newcastle University.

Our collaboration with Lloyd-Wilson sought to bring voices from outside the University into a conversation on the role of memory in our lives. It also aimed to explore alternative ways of dialoguing around topics that are unresolved and can only be advanced, we feel, through exchange and alternative forms of listening.

Under the banner of ‘Why is Memory Important?’, we hosted three sessions: a breakfast café conversation on ‘Memory Work’, a lunchtime session on ‘The Art and Science of Memory’, and an evening session on ‘Decolonising Memory’. Across the course of the day, we heard from artists, neuropsychologists, museum and gallery curators, Newcastle University Students Union, and academic colleagues from: Media, Culture, Heritage; Architecture; Oral History, and more. These conversations are all available as podcasts.

Unlike more traditional forms of academic communication, for these sessions, guests were invited to sit around a purpose-built bar and engage in a conversation between each other and the bartender (the chairperson for the session, as it were). While there was an audience for the events, the guests at the bar largely faced away from the audience and were instead focused on conversation with each other. The space became an informal setting for conversation to flow. Lloyd-Wilson’s setup, and their role as hosts for these sessions, created an environment that felt completely distinct from our usual public, academic events.

With each session drawing an audience of 20-30, in addition to the invited bar guests and bartender, the collaboration resulted in a lively and engaging day. For those of us who work in memory studies research in our day to day work, the event was refreshing, providing us with an opportunity to hear from new perspectives, to re-engage our own intellectual passions.

The collaborative work was also a positive experience for Lloyd-Wilson. They commented:

“Collaborating with the Cultures of Memory was an opportunity for us (Lloyd & Wilson) to test the format of Broadcast Bartender in new and challenging ways: holding three events over the course of one day, with 'dry' sessions (morning and lunchtime) and an evening session serving alcohol. Working alongside CoM introduced us to new areas of thinking and research, as well as a diverse range of event participants and the possibility to reach new and responsive audiences. This has been true in terms of those who attended the live events, and those who will continue to listen to the discussions online. We (Lloyd & Wilson) have often worked with academics to produce Broadcast Bartender events, but never within the context of a university and over such a broad range of disciplines. Having a diverse range of participants from the university and cultural institutions helped us to develop the project and think about how it could be used in other contexts in the future.”

The recordings of these sessions are available online. Although this Broadcast Bartender event took place before the pandemic, our experiences this year have often challenged us to re-think how our memory practices shape our everyday and the environment we inhabit. Returning to these conversations brings new perspectives to the discussions. We would of course encourage you to take the time to listen to these conversations, and to hopefully feel as energised by them as we were.

The series of recordings is available to listen to here.

For more information please contact alison.atkinson-phillips@newcastle.ac.uk

It began as a six month residency with Berwick Visual Arts (BVA), Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice, and Centre for Rural Economy (CRE). Now there’s ice on my windscreen, its bobble hat weather and Christmas is coming.

You may have questions…

• Who am i?
• What is this project? (http://www.berwickvisualarts.co.uk/artists/23/joanne-coates-january-october-2020 )
• What's an artist residency? (See below)
• What's my star sign? (Taurus sun libra rising, just in case you’re wondering.)
• Why are you still in Northumberland? (Again see below)

Well, it’s that old COVID chestnut. Lockdown put a hold on the residency. (A side note. The arts and many artists have suffered. I can not wait to spend time in galleries, just looking at work and feeling emotion.Thank you for all the work everyone has done to make their programmes accessible.) I’m very lucky James Lowther, at BVA, made sure the residency could continue. I undertook safety training and we were off again. I can’t deny it. The residency has been hard work, I work with communities on long term socially engaged projects using photography. It’s all about working with people, which means lots of organising and consideration. Arts residencies are seen as different things to different people. For me, a low income working class lass, isolated by location finding the arts world hard to navigate, it meant I had the chance to focus on a project whilst not spinning multiple plates. Logistically to make work, I usually need to take on assignments, commercial work, running a small arts org, visiting lecture work, workshops, guest speaker work and milking some cows to top up my income. Having no money in the arts, you feel like a lemon being slowly squeezed. That’s fine until there’s nothing left. It’s A LOT to manage. The problem with that is there’s no space to work. No time to think. No time to make art. As a rural based artist with a partner who is a farmer, the issues really resonated with my practice.

These past months; I’ve worked with academic Sally Shorthall, I’ve spoken to academics in the USA, farmers overseas on land access, listened to audio from the past around the bondagers, put on a work in progress show, spoken at a academic conference about the work, listened to 36 female farmer focused podcasts, walked the cheviot hills, read 29 related research books, talked at the local PechaKucha, printed work, looked at mapping land, creating a quiz with female farmers, played with wool, looked at boundaries, shared work with Collective Form, attended 2 crits, visited the archives, spoken with 44 female farmers based with Northumberland and the borders, recorded audio, made photos together, explored forgotten farming scapes, looked at political and societal issues within agriculture.

So what does this mean to me? As an artist with a mental health disability I’ve learnt slowly about my boundaries and limitations. That artists should be paid for the work they do, they are the lifeblood of the creative industries. A residency for me enables me to make work, it gives me the space to make art. To work hard, to consider ethics, to think carefully, to plan participation. To try out ideas in a work in progress show in Berwick where the public, local artists, and farmers themselves came and fed back on the work. One of the core elements to diversifying arts is paying them. It’s a healthy relationship, it is saying ‘I respect your work and value your worth.’ A residency is a way of nurturing artists, making sure they watered and fed, so they can continue to grow.

I’m here until the end of December 2020 and have activities planned everyday, (apart from my walking day, everyone needs time off, IT’S HEALTHY!) That’s Merry Christmas from me. If you want to see the work catch it at The Gymnasium Gallery in Berwick 2022.

This project brings together artist, scientist, naturalist and film maker in the collaborative production of a highly experimental artwork as the focus for exploring the potential of contemporary art to bring avian conservation and ecology concerns to the forefront of cultural conversations. Creating a complex video work, a ‘living taxidermy’ case of common British birds using innovative and experimental wildlife filming techniques never attempted before. The research, development and production of the project is intended to create a hub, attracting an expanding group of interested participants. The exhibition of the artwork will act as the catalyst for a series of talks, seminars and workshops on avian wildlife conservation.

It is instigated by Irene Brown, Head of Fine Art, who’s research is engaged with wonder; investigating the threshold between aesthetic and scientific realms. The collaborative team includes Mark Whittingham, Professor of Applied Ecology, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, SAgE. Mark has been Senior editor for Journal of Applied Ecology for 6 years, and is a Fellow of Royal Society of Biology. Also, Tom Cadwallender, Professional naturalist and guest lecturer at the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences. Tom has a long career in wildlife conservation and landscape management and has been engaged with gathering data on bird populations and behaviour for the past five decades. And also Cain Scrimgeour, freelance wildlife filmmaker, Media Director and Expedition Leader at Wild Intrigue. Cain is a Lecturer in Wildlife Media at the University of Cumbria and has produced films and worked for the RSPB, the Natural History Society of Northumbria, ORCA Northumberland National Park, English Heritage, Taskscape, Northumberland Wildlife Trust, and ITV

We know through scientific data collected by volunteers, that many common bird species are suffering declines in their populations. Many of these reductions are as a result of the impacts of human activities that have been well rehearsed through modern information media, much of which goes largely unheard. However we are now reaching crisis point for some species and we need new innovative ways of stimulating conversations about wildlife conservation, particularly birds, with members of the general public and decision makers. Interpretation of wildlife conservation themes need to be accessible, thought provoking and enjoyable to all age groups, as enjoyment is a key component to our understanding and appreciation of the natural environment. Art can influence society by changing opinions, instilling values and translating experiences. This project brings together a specific group of experts in an act of beauty and activism, the creation of an artwork that connects people with nature, engages new audiences and provokes dialogues on wildlife conservation themes.

The research, development and production of the project is intended to create a hub, attracting an expanding group of interested participants. The exhibition of the artwork acting as the catalyst for a series of talks, seminars and workshops on wildlife conservation.

If you are interested in being involved or contributing to the research project please email Irene. Website: irenebrown.co.uk