The Stories we tell ourselves:Reimagining Ecologies
Dr Wood Roberdeau, Dr Jess Potter, and Dr Jol Thoms
| Centre for Art and Ecology members Dr Wood Roberdeau, Dr Jess Potter and Dr Jol Thoms recently participated in the University of Exeter conference The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Re-imagining Ecologies. They put together a panel titled Story-sounding with Goldsmiths University Centre for Art and Ecology. Dr Wood Roberdeau presented their paper Tsunami Listening, and screened Jess Potter’s film Mountain Songalongside Jol Thoms’s ongoing project Radio Amnion. |
Motoyuki Shitamichi, Taro Yasuno, Toshiaki Ishikura, Fuminori Nousaku, Cosmo-Eggs, 2019.
REGENERATE! SYMPOSIUM
Dr Jess Potter
| Dr Jess Potter presented their film Mountain Song at the Regenerate! Symposium at the Jan Van Eyck Academy on the 20 and 21 March. Mountain Song is born of a circular mountain: Beinn a’ Chearchaill (mountain of the hoop/loop), which sits at the inland edge of the Torridon mountain range in Wester Ross. Informed by the cyclical structures of Gaelic working songs, Mountain Song is shaped by the sounds of water running through glacial rock formations and peat beds, woven with samples from Nan Mackinnon's songs and stories held in the Tobar an Dualchais archive. They are songs from the Highlands and Islands; songs born of a struggle for land rights, they abound with beauty and hope and force. The songs call us to listen to the land, to remember and learn from Gaelic voices—to preserve and connect with them, to imagine new interconnected and restorative forms of life. The voice of Nan Mackinnon shines out of these songs—a voice that spoke and sung and shared over 400 songs and stories passed down through generations. As Gaelic was not taught in schools in Nan’s time, these songs and stories only exist in the space of her voice. Nan’s voice opens the shape and space of lives, their duration, history, work, and care. Nan’s family were among a small group of settlers to move to Vatersay to stake a claim on the land by planting potatoes and building small homes. Regenerate! brings together creative use of new or old materials by, for instance, artists and designers, with current material developments in the preservation and conservation of arts and heritage. Together we seek to create a space for debate and experimentation that examines – and contributes – to the ecosystemic turn in material research and heritage practices. How can materials advance new understandings of conservation in relation to circularity, repair, and regeneration? Which new forms of (co-)creation, (co-)ownership, business models, legal and policy frameworks, are emerging from shifts in material research and heritage practices? In which ways do material practices push new imaginaries of protecting endangered material, environmental, and cultural heritage? |
Image courtesy Jess Potter.
Study Day at the Court of Intergenerational Climate Crimes, Ambika P3
Dr Ros Gray and Dr Jol Thoms |
| As part of the CICC School at Ambika P3 and the Serpentine Gallery, Dr Ros Gray and Dr Jol Thoms led the Planetary Healing Study Group in presenting a Study Day to assemble a performative glossary for planetary healing. In recent months, the Planetary Healing Reading Group have gathered texts to deepen their understanding of how planetary health relates to questions of justice. Through readings, objects, somatic exercises and other offerings, the Study Day convened discussion of key terms relevant to practices of and possibilities for planetary healing, attending to the different ‘ecologies of knowledge’ and relations of power that impact health and environmental justice, with particular focus on inter-scalar and intersectional perspectives, and how the microbiome is a site of struggle for planetary health inextricably linked to social justice. Alongside key terms such as planetary health, microbiome, dysbiosis, inflammation, metabolic rift, environmental racism, extractivism, slow violence, deep medicine, healing, ceremony and repair, other terms also emerged through the collective work. The Planetary Healing Reading Group is convened by Dr Ros Gray and Dr Jol Thoms with MA Art and Ecology students, PhD researchers and Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London. |
Foreshadowing, the transnational ecological grief council
Dr Youngsook Choi
| Youngsook Choi celebrated the public launch of Foreshadowing, a transnational eco-grief council that she founded and has operated internally since 2023. On 22nd May, 2025 a full-day convivial gathering took place at Delfina Foundation, dedicated to sharing eco-grief practices from various geographies across North England post-mining fields, Malaysian rainforest, Venetian lagoon, and Saigon river, concluding with a prop-making session for an eco-grief procession to St. James Park where the evening picnic resorts further conversation. Following this, Youngsook will co-hosted 'Begin Again' with Abbas Zahedi on 7th June at Tate Modern and discuss the transnational organising of ecological grief. |
INRODUCTION TO SCENT DISTILLATION
ART AND ECOLOGY LABORATORY
In May, the Art and Ecology Laboratory held a practical workshop with Centre for Art and Ecology PhD affiliate Becky Lyon, introducing the use of a steam distiller to extract essential oils from plants. Becky gave an introduction to the world of scent and olfactory materials, sharing her collection of scents for participants to experience and explore.
Participants brought a plant of their choice, and a communal scent was distilled at the end of the workshop.
Becky Lyon is an English-Jamaican artist and researcher from London. Her practice is committed to recalibrating relationships to nature and strategising more liveable worlds. She’s interested in sensory and bodily knowledges as a way of reclaiming our relationship to place and resisting harmful power dynamics. Her work takes the form of tactile objects, hand-made moving image, sensory installations, audio experiments and publications.
New works by Carl(e) Gent
| Carl(e) Gent has recently had writing published in Gestures: a body of work(Manchester University Press) and Aqueous Humours: Fluid Ground (The Poor House Publishing Room / Matt’s Gallery), the latter also featuring work by fellow Centre member Harun Morrison. On 27 April 2025, Carl(e) performed at Goldsmiths CCA as part of TISSUE, a series of performance events and a fundraiser. Carl(e) also presented Queens, a two-person exhibition with Arash Fayez at Pulsie, Amsterdam, which opened 10 May 2025, and performed at The Participatory Clinic at Glasgow Women’s Library on 17 May 2025. |
Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space
Dr Jol Thoms
Centre Member and Studio Lecturer on the MA Art & Ecology Jol Thoms presented his lunar ocean sound ritual Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space at Haus Der Kunst, Munich on 25 April. The live event intimate/beyond, an expanded radio listening ceremony, connected nondistinct water bodies with new audio/visual performances simultaneously broadcast over Munich’s Radio 80.000, and featured special guests from the physics and arts community. In this dynamic range of sensual aural tunings to waters of Earth, the flow moved from quantum to cosmic, oceanic to celestial, local to non-local.
Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space is a multi-year sound art project for the water-bodies of the Earth by quantum ecologist Jol Thoms. The radio station broadcasts commissioned compositions by contemporary artists into the Pacific Ocean at a depth of more than 2 kilometres during each full moon. Radio Amnion is part of a pathfinder experiment in preparation for the planned Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE), a cubic-kilometre telescope to observe extragalactic neutrinos.
Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space is funded by the Canadian Council for the Arts.
An evening in partnership with Armin Linke, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München; Radio 80.000; and the Collaborative Research Center 1258 ‘Neutrinos and Dark Matter in Astro- and Particle Physics’ at the Technical University of Munich. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
KAFKÁRNA - CENTRE FOR ARTs AND ECOLOGY UMPRUM RESIDENCY
Dr Sophie Seita
| Dr Sophie Seita was invited to Kafkárna, Centre for Arts and Ecology in Prague in April for a mini residency at Ovenecka 33, and for an artist talk and workshop at Kafkarna, which focused on multi-sensory encounters, forms of embodied listening, touch, texture, and explored ideas around queer ecology, more-than-human collaborations, speculative archives, experimental pedagogy, and the importance of somatic awareness within ecological discourse. Image courtesy Kafkárna - Centre for Art and Ecology UMPRUM. |
LAND CINEMA: New Generation Thinkers 2024
Dr Becca Voelcker
| If cinema is often associated with Hollywood or the European New Wave, since the 1970s activist-filmmakers around the world have been involving local people in telling their own stories. Co-creating films about land rights, food security, and pollution, these filmmakers pioneered what Becca Voelcker calls Land Cinema. In her essay, she shares examples made by Zhang Mengqi, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Ogawa Productions and Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien. Dr Becca Voelcker is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC to put academic research on radio. At Goldsmiths, University of London she lectures on art, film and visual culture, particularly in relation to politics and ecology; and has written for publications including Screen, Frieze and Sight & Sound. |
Image courtesy BBC Radio 3.
The Interspecies Council
Dr Anna Colin and Melissa Thompson
| Centre for Art and Ecology members Melissa Thompson and Dr Anna Colin took part in The Interspecies Council, a more-than-human response to the Land Use consultation recently launched by Defra, the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Laments, warnings, pleas, words of wisdom and recommendations were heard during the Council, which was followed by reactive group work around the principles set out in Defra’s Land Use Reform draft. The day’s outcomes and many proposals on how to return to more-than-humans their lost agency will be compiled by the organisers Moral Imaginations, Feedback and Get Lost and submitted to Defra. |
Image courtesy Anna Colin.
Building Ecoliteracy with River Communities
Dr Sophie Seita and Dr Youngsook Choi
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Image courtesy Sophie Seita and Youngsook Choi.
THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN COMMUNITY TOOLKIT
Dr Tobie Kerridge
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microbiology workshop
ART AND ECOLOGY LABORATORY
Back in February, Centre for Art and Ecology member Louie Destouches led a microbiology workshop for MA Art and Ecology students in the Art and Ecology laboratory. Louie introduced the preparation of LB petri dishes and demonstrated how to create a DIY growth medium using everyday items such as Marmite and sugar.
Samples were collected from the Art Research Garden, as well as bedroom dust, feathers, skin and mobile phones, to visualise the microbial communities living all around us (and on us). By the next day, the petri dishes were teeming with an array of wild strains of bacteria.
The Art and Ecology laboratory is equipped with sterilising equipment and an incubator for cultivating microorganisms, as well as microscopes with both digital and analogue cameras for observing and documenting microscopic worlds.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: LEARNING WITH MOUNTAINS; RECALIBRATING HOW WE UNDERSTAND ART AND PLANET
Six members of the Centre for Art and Ecology—Dr Anna Colin, Dr Ros Gray, Sara Trillo, Claire Baily, Dr Lenka Vráblíková, and Dr Jol Thoms—participated in the international conference Learning with Mountains: Recalibrating How We Understand Art and Planet at the Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies.
Learning with Mountains: Recalibrating How We Understand Art and Planet is an international conference exploring the connection between art and ecology. It is organised by Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies and took place on the 6th and 7th of February at Artos Cultural and Research House in Nicosia and on the 8th of February at the Kapedes Primary School in Kapedes.
The conference negotiates how contemporary art demonstrates a deep engagement with planetary issues and increasingly aims at shifting our attention to the natural world, ecology and the need to develop environmental consciousness. Since the 1970s, cultural practitioners have been active in trying to sensitise publics on issues related to the planet, climate change and the ecological commons- land, water and air. Through soft practices, the creation of collectives and communities, the production of eco-conscious artworks, and activist involvement in ecological movements, they have contributed to a recalibration of our relationship with the natural world. What is more, interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, scientists and environmental organisations have exposed the impact of war, colonialism, extractivism, ecocide, capitalism, neoliberalism, large scale agricultural production methods and other systemic exploitations of the environment.
The conference programme unpacks how planetary issues are negotiated through the prism of artistic practice and art theory. Like never before, the visual arts are playing a key role in understanding important environmental issues of our times. Some of the key issues addressed by the conference presentations and parallel activities are how the arts approach nature as subject, how the effects of climate change are represented, considering alternative ways of living together with the natural world, developing sustainability through cultural practices, and shaping environmental art and ecological activism.
The full programme and abstract booklet can be accessed via the conference website.
Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies is a non-for-profit arts organisation, based in the village of Kapedes in rural Nicosia. It focuses on ecology, queer discourses and civic/social issues through art and culture. Celadon aims to create a collaborative framework, where cultural producers, artists and researchers come together to cultivate artistic and critical thinking, ecological awareness and respectful practices. Its goal is to nurture a creative long lasting community of diverse ecologies, operating within an expanded network of exchanges with like-minded people and organisations, locally and internationally.
Soil: THE WORLD AT OUR FEET
Harun Morrison AND DR Paul Granjon
| Marking Somerset House’s 25-year anniversary, SOIL: The World at Our Feet is a landmark exhibition unearthing the wonder of soil, its unbreakable bond to all life and the vital role it plays in our planet’s future. Featuring over 50 works in a diverse range of media, including new commissions, sensory artworks and scientific artefacts, SOIL connects a range of stories and responses from a group of global artists, writers and scientists. Among the exhibiting artists are Centre for Art and Ecology members Harun Morrison, Paul Granjon and MA Art & Ecology graduate Fatima Alaiwat. |
Soil Exhibition Somerset House - Unearthed - Mycelium by Jo Pearl © Elsa Pearl.
Alternative Pedagogical SpaceS: From Utopia to Institutionalization |
DR Anna Colin
Grounded in empirical research, Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalisation is a critical inquiry into the establishment, development, and transformation of alternative pedagogical and social spaces. Written by Dr Anna Colin, a former director and co-founder of Open School East, an independent art school and community space founded in London in 2013, this essay-length book explores the instituting factors, organisational life cycles, and alignments and misalignments between values and practices that permeate such a project.
The essay delves into the qualities and prerequisites for what Colin calls “multi-public educational organizations.” It also scrutinizes the hurdles associated with the effort to remain alternative, including processes of habituation, temptation or pressure to scale up, ethos-bending fundraising exercises, and long tenure, as well as the plain desire for stability and sustainability.
Alternative Pedagogical Spaces proposes where to look for a reconceptualization of waiting, slowness, and longevity, and asks how these ideas may benefit cultural practice and the design of future institutions (or the redesign of existing ones). Overriding the common assumption that success equals longevity, the author searches for institutional models that resist chrononormativity, drawing from social movements, psychotherapy, biology, and permaculture.
Image courtesy Sternberg Press Ltd.
Shaped Sound sculptures
Dr Julie Freeman's studio
| Dr Julie Freeman has been awarded an Innovate UK Creative Catalyst grant to develop Shaped Sound with her studio team. Shaped Sound are a collection of sonic sculptures that people can lie, lean on and touch, while sound is transmitted through the wood and felt through the whole body. The sculptures will be showcased at South by South West festival in Texas this March. Dr Freeman's studio will also be travelling to a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic, Svalbard, to record and monitor glaciers – thanks to Arts Council funding and generous support from the Norwegian Academy of Music. The Arctic sounds will inform future Shaped Sound audioscapes and through a BRAID commission, ighlight the extreme energy consumption of AI systems, which will be exhibited in Edinburgh in August 2025. |
Image courtesy Julie Freeman.
Tributaries: A Wet Ritual for Witnessing
Dr Sophie Seita
Dr Sophie Seita has received a Canada Council for the Arts grant, alongside their long-term collaborator Naomi Woo, to tour their performance ritual Tributaries: A Wet Ritual for Witnessing in collaboration with Victoria Perrie and Jehan Roberson. Originally developed for a multidisciplinary encounter in the wetlands of Xochimilco, Mexico City, the performance will now be reimagined for three new sites in the UK, US, and Canada.
Tributaries is a ritual about water, about time, about absence, about queer ancestors who have been lost and who we commit to remember. It is a ritual of blessing and complicity, of coming together, of mixing. We invite you to remember, reflect, and repeat this ritual, always concluding in tight embrace.
The ritual was devised for Sembrando Humedad (Sowing Moisture), a five day learning gathering in the ancient wetlands of Xochimilco, Mexico City, organised by Ruta del Castor and Carolina Caycedo, in collaboration with local and international artists, activists, farmers, community members, collectives, organisations, educational institutions, and students, to collectively reflect on our relationship with water as a binding body that weaves together cultures and ecosystems.
Sophie Seita, Victoria Perrie, Jehan Roberson, Sophie Seita, and Naomi Woo, 'Tributaries: A Wet Ritual', part of Sembrando Humedad, Mexico City, 2024. Image courtesy of Ruta del Castor.
BSSS ANNUAL CONFERENCE
In December 2024, we participated in the annual conference of the British Society of Soil Science (BSSS) in Cardiff, at the invitation of Centre for Art and Ecology member Dr Jacqueline Hannam. The conference was themed around 'Sustainable Soils for People and Planet'. We presented The Singing Compost, the artwork by Harun Morrison and Paul Granjon, commissioned by Dr Anna Colin for Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in 2023 as part of Seeding the Garden, a project funded by Research England. It was a great opportunity to discuss the work with soil scientists and share our illustrated pamphlet about the artwork, copies of which are still available from the Centre for Art and Ecology.
The Singing Compost has involved the creation of a functioning system that not only generates healthy, nutritious compost from garden waste but also makes visible and audible the bacterial activity and metabolic processes of soil in all its liveliness, transmitting clicking noises that have become part of the surrounding sonic landscape. The Singing Compost can be understood as a prototype for a sensorial, educational, and ecologically regenerative artwork, inviting connection and relation with the living ecosystems that we all are part of and depend upon.
Image courtesy Anna Colin.
Alleycumfee exhibition
Sara Trillo |
| In October 2024, Centre for Art and Ecology member artist Sara Trillo opened the exhibition, Alleycumfee, in the Daphne Oram Gallery, Canterbury. In old Kentish dialect 'Alleycumfee' means a fictitious place, an imaginary destination you named when pressed with unwanted questions about where you were travelling to. Sara Trillo uses the term Alleycumfee to name spaces within the Kentish landscape; places which, although inspired by ancient sites of human activity, have now largely vanished and for the most part exist only in the imagination. The work represents the artist’s quest to visit what remains of these locations and fuse this experience with research into their histories to create the work shown here. The different types of places Trillo has explored in this exhibition represent diverse aspects of the county’s topography: the sea, the coast, and the subterranean. The exhibition was accompanied by a specially commissioned walk, during which Trillo shared mythologies and histories about the surrounding landscape and looked for traces of vanished places. |
Artwork by Sara Trillo, image courtesy Anna Colin.
Rewilding After Imperialism
Dr Ros Gray
| On 12 September 2024 Centre for Art and Ecology co-director Dr Ros Gray contributed a lecture to the seminar series Histories of Ecology at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil. The lecture, Rewilding After Imperialism, is now available online and will be published in a dual language edition later in 2025. |
Sheroanawe Hakihiwe, Hena riye riye (Green Leaf), 2021.
ArtAngel publication Making Time
Dr Ros Gray and Dr Jol Thoms
| Dr Ros Gray and Dr Jol Thoms have co-authored an essay for the ArtAngel publication Making Time, which marks the end of the first year of an artists' residency programme dedicated to re-thinking artists' materials in the context of the climate emergency. The essay reflects on what has been learned in the first three years of the MA Art & Ecology, including the new approaches to sustainability, reciprocity and decolonising material relations that students on the programme have been developing, as well as the broader politics of Anishinaabe ethics of sustainability that centre Respect, Relevance, Responsibility, Relationship and Reciprocity. Congratulations to Centre for Art and Ecology member Claire Baily, who has been selected to be one of four artists in the next Making Time residency. |
ArtAngel publication Making Time.
MOUNTAIN SONG
Dr Jess Potter
| Mountain Song, a short film by Dr Jess Potter, is now available to view on the Copy Press website as part of the Becoming Fireflies series. Mountain Song is born of a circular mountain: Beinn a' Chearchaill (mountain of the hoop/loop), which sits at the inland edge of the Torridon mountain range in Wester Ross. Informed by the cyclical structures of Gaelic working songs, Mountain Song is shaped by the sounds of water running through glacial rock formations and peat beds, woven with samples from Nan Mackinnon's songs and stories held in the Tobar a Dualchais archive. They are songs from the Highlands and Islands; songs born of a struggle for land rights, they abound with beauty and hope and force. The songs call us to listen to the land, to remember and learn from Gaelic voices—to preserve and connect with them, to imagine new interconnected and restorative forms of life. Text Credit: Mountain Song Notes, Dr Jess Potter, 2024. |
Poster for Mountain Song by Opel Morgan.