Places To Intervene In a System

About

Taking systems-thinker Donella Meadows’ 1999 article Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system1 as a critical and curatorial stimulus, each artist responds by researching aspects of a renewed relationship with nature through diverse practices.

In the year of COP26, when the implications of human generated climate emergency are ever clearer, and ‘zoonotic’ diseases point to the friction between humans and others sharing a finite living space, we scope out different ways to recalibrate human understanding, empathy and relationship with the natural world. To become more ‘eco-logical’2.

“Goals, power structures, rules and cultures” are the creators of systems of human behaviour, according to Meadows. Humans have instinctive awareness of the leverage points within these systems, the nodes where intervention is possible. And we almost as unerringly push the levers in the wrong direction.

Community engagement, citizen science, conservation, critical anthropomorphism and ‘multi-species-becoming-with’3, are all engaged through a sensory approach which seeks to turn things inside out and bring the outside in. Visitors will explore artworks and participate in events both inside the gallery space and outside in the Museum Garden and local nature reserves. 

Participating Practitioners and Research Projects 

Becky Lyon: Leaf hearing blue, moss tickling a soil
We inhabit a world where mushrooms ‘sense’ predators, trees have heartbeats and mallow weeds ‘remember’ the location of sunrise. How might the sensing abilities of other beings inspire us to discover new ways to meet the more-than-human? Join Becky for collaborative experiments in ‘practicing’ attentioning, creaturing and imaginative embodiment! Download a pocket-poster and audio mixtape and explore the practices in your own time. Email: beckyl.lyon@googlemail.com

Katherine Pogson and Claire Shovelton: Towards Light

Katherine Pogson researches multispecies relationships to redirect creativity toward more eco-logical ways of thinking and being. Towards Light is a collaboration with videographer Claire Shovelton.  

Katherine’s text voices the perplexed efforts of an amateur lepidopterist  to make sense of their encounters with the moths they study; Claire responds with a sensory film, navigating an imagined pheromonal world of light pollution and habitat destruction, in search of fertility and love. 

Email: info@katherinepogson.com

Phil Barton: Superseeded 

Superseeded responds to Phil’s 2019 residency with the UK National Tree Seed Project at the Millenium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. Developed during lockdown in Manchester, it explores the materiality of native trees, their fragility faced with imported pests and diseases, agriculture, climate change and urban development.  The Millennium Seed Bank intervenes in this complex system by preserving in cold storage 95% of the genetic diversity of 76 native trees. Through print, film, performance and community action, this research considers inside/outside, human/other, and past, present and future relationships between trees and humans, foregrounding the imperative to intervene wisely, working with and for nature in a symbiotic rather than a predatory way. Email: pbarton1@btopenworld.com

Catherine Herbert

Graduating with distinction from MA Art and Science in 2020, Catherine now works on environmental themes to empower communities by creating nature-based networks and experiences which fall outside capitalist systems.  Here, she focuses on the residents of Bethnal Green as part of ongoing research into community, social economy, heritage and environment. Using oral history and time-lapse photography of the local area, she allows places, stories and themes to emerge organically from within a community and the environment itself, to initiate meaningful environmental change. E: herbertcatherine@hotmail.co.uk

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Donella Meadows, Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. Hartland VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999 

Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, London: Penguin, 2018

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Durham: Duke Press, 2016