ISSN 2977-0602





The MA Art & Ecology cohort of 2023-2024 began their time on the programme knee deep in Deptford Creek, attuning to the River Thames’ lifeways with the art collective Matterlurgy. Matterlurgy have recently asked what it means to turn a noun into a verb, prompting a reflection on the importance of practice and how emancipatory change might involve processes of attending not only to kindred spirits and the overwhelming necessity of reparations, rewilding and repair but to the flows and opacities of toxicity, legacies of violence and ongoing settler colonialism, not to mention the claustrophobic contradictions of our most intimate relations being shaped by algorithms, digital filters and pervasive precarity. In the work of artists Molly Astley, avrgbbs, Paola Bascón, Kai Edwards, George Harris, Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway, Isobel Humphreys, Urte Janus, sarah koekkoek, Kirsty Robinson, Juliette Suchel and Jiatong Yuan forms of radical reimagining emerge in the interstitial spaces that language cannot always reach but that bodies of matter move through. Their practices involve deep listening, inhabiting chaotic garment relations, sensory re-burials, tending to unruly weeds, queer mycological futurity, gentleness, mineral dreaming, embodied soil study, journeys into wildness, painting while menstruating, decolonising archives, and playful but serious investigations of cuteness as an emergency measure to retrain our affective relations with invertebrates in the face of the current ‘insect Armageddon’.

While predominant modes of artistic ecological investigation remain documentary or forensic, what is noticeable in this graduating cohort is the commitment to addressing the realms of the affective, the sensory and the embodied, and how their practices demonstrate that this work, which ranges widely between the satirical and the sacred, is no less political, critical and urgent. Rather there is a sustained questioning of some of the knowledge hierarchies that persist in industrialised societies based on extractivism. Over these months of unfolding genocide and ecocide in Gaza, resurgent far-right and aggressive patriarchy, this cohort have been extraordinary in how they have so consistently channelled their grief and rage into practices of courageous protest, convivial joy, relational nurture and more-than-human collaboration, reminding us, with Kropotkin, that ‘all flourishing is mutual’.

Ros Gray, Programme Director, MA Art & Ecology





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The Journal of Art & Ecology published by MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

All Rights Reserved by Respective Authors, 2024.