Liz Clifford

Memorials to lost trees.

Over the past year I have been working on a series of small assemblages made from plastic waste collected during my daily walk in the Hampshire countryside. These ‘bouquets’ and ‘floral tributes’ were started during my residency at Chapel Arts Studios, discussed in my previous post. The experience of the daily drive on busy A roads, coupled with arriving at the Chapel via the surrounding Andover Cemetery drew attention to glimpsed roadside tributes. These grassroots memorials are ubiquitous and anonymous for the passing motorist. Often there is nothing left of the bouquet of flowers but the plastic wrapper and cable tie. Just a shred of plastic that endures as a reminder of strangers’ grief.

Wall-mounted ‘floral tribute’ assemblages

Where I walk is very rural and essentially unspoilt but even here plastic waste accumulates. It is not cleaned away as it is in a town, although it is certainly not abundant in the way it is along our A roads. Each time I walk I return with something, from crisp packet to cable tie. The waste comes from recreation, agri-business, general road users cutting through the lanes and fly-tipping. Weird juxtapositions are thrown up between domestic objects, packaging and broken infrastructure. Still thinking of roadside memorials I have continued to build these assemblages, initially mounting them in a cluster on the wall.

Searching for a more resonant way of displaying the assemblages, and thinking about the grassroots memorials we glimpse on a daily basis, I set about placing and photographing groups of them in the landscape where I had found the materials. Contingent to this activity I had been reading about the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of commemorating the non-human with grassroots memorials that echo those used by humans to mourn both their loved ones and those who may not be personally known to them, but with whom they feel a strong connection. A well publicised example of this being the funeral ceremonies and memorials for lost glaciers in Iceland and Switzerland. Extinctions and biodiversity loss leading to collective mourning for nature. A plaque was installed in 2019 at the base of Iceland’s lost Okjökull glacier during a ‘funeral’ ceremony, a durable message to future generations more like a traditional gravestone and unlike the flowers of roadside memorials that decay. It is the plastic in these memorials that endure as it has done in the location I focus on.

What I was drawn to on my walk were the dead and fallen trees lining the route, most being ash. Since 2012 ash dieback disease has ravaged the UK’s ash trees, Fraxinus Excelsior, and a decade on climate change induced storms have been felling these trees in great numbers.

Looking at the images I’d made on the walks, I felt the most connection with those where a single tribute, two at most, had been placed on the dead tree, rather than the more cluttered groups. Something about the contrast of colour and texture of the plastic to its natural surroundings, as well as the lonely single placement resonated.

Once I’d sorted and selected the best images, then the question of how to use them needed addressing. Was this the work – the intervention of placing the objects back into the landscape and photographing them? Is the connection between fossil fuels and plastic waste then linking both visually and intellectually to biodiversity loss, the storms that fell the diseased ash trees, the global trade in trees that would have hastened the spread of the fungus that causes the disease, the fashioning of the plastic into objects that resemble bouquets used in honouring human loss now honouring loss in nature? The fact that trees are also traditionally used to honour memory of a human life added to the mix.

I’d had in mind to somehow present the ‘bouquets’ in a way that would reference the roadside memorials I’d originally been thinking of, so I began to lash them to a traffic management A frame to make a free-standing sculpture. There was no temporary road sign to go with the frame but it occurred to me that to make something of similar dimensions as a support for the photographic images would be a way of presenting the record of the placings on the dead ash trees and to create the link to the phenomenon of grassroots memorialisation of nature. I worked on degrading the images a little before building a collage of them on both sides of a ply sheet that can be attached to the frame with the same fixings as a temporary road sign.

In the resulting sculpture, the original ‘bouquet’ assemblages are lashed to the front, back and sides of the A frame below the collage. The viewer is encouraged to walk round the piece and view from all sides. The piece has been shown in the group exhibition “Traces” on the theme of remembrance at Chapel Arts Studios in Andover. I gave it the title RIP Fraxinus Ex in reference to both the human act of memorialisation and to the Latin name of the ash tree. The exhibition venue was the place where the original ‘bouquet’ assemblages had been made last year bringing the project full circle in some senses, though also presenting a need to unpack and simplify.

RIP Fraxinus Ex. 2025 151 cm x 100 cm x 100 cm

Verge

I recently took advantage of an opportunity open to CAS Associate Artists to takeover the gallery space at St Mary’s Chapel, Andover, Hampshire. I used the Chapel for a week to test and document new work that is concerned with the life of the verge. The journey to and from Andover along the major trunk roads A303, A34 and A31 helped inform the work that has been brewing for a while. Materials were found along the way.

The verge is an undefined space and the hinterland of the corridors along which we rush. It is between the countryside and the road. What goes on there is only fleetingly glimpsed out of the corner of an eye and soon forgotten. The work begins to explore imagined futures for the inhabitants of this liminal space and it starts with the juxtaposition of materials. These materials are both industrial and domestic, ranging from discarded steel road sign A-frames, fencing wire and plastic cones to pillowcases doubling as sandbags. What is glimpsed in passing sets up curious resonances and possibilities. Domestic detritus meets the industrial in accidental assemblage.

The experience of the daily drive coupled with arriving at the Chapel via the surrounding Andover Cemetery also drew attention to glimpsed roadside tributes. These are ubiquitous and anonymous for the passing motorist. Often there is nothing left of the bouquet of flowers but the plastic wrapper and cable tie. Just a shred of plastic that endures as a reminder of strangers’ grief. In the cemetery, many of the floral tributes are plastic, faded and fallen over, but are allowed time for consideration and attribution. My response to these is a group of wall mounted ‘bouquets’ made from plastic waste I have collected from my walks in the ‘unspoilt’ South Downs National Park. I wanted them to look as ‘pathetic’ as those roadside shreds whilst relating to the freestanding assemblages I was working on.

I tried hard not to clutter the Chapel too much with materials as it was such a joy to have an empty space to work with. As a result there was a lot of making and unmaking done over the week as well as transporting materials to and fro. In the end I had three distinct interrelated freestanding pieces along with the wall hung bouquets. I was able to use the roof high bar to suspend some elements from which made the work a response to the specific space but also suggests possibilities for subsequent iterations and outdoor installation.

In addition, the residency was an opportunity to test the use of a soundscape with the work. I’ve been making field recordings for a while of my own footsteps, birdsong and traffic noise. These have been layered into a soundscape in which the traffic noise ends up drowning everything else out. Playing it in the space was really exciting, somehow adding a powerful contextual element to the work. The video documentation of the installation uses that soundscape as it was played in the space. Follow the link below.

https://vimeo.com/935374744

Link to website https://axisweb.org/artist/lizclifford

The Spring/Summer iteration.

Earlier in the year I answered an open call and had my proposal accepted for a site specific work as part of an artist-run competition run by Little Forest Land Art. The site is one of ancient woodland, on the edge of a meadow, on what was once a pig farm.

A woodland path has been created and artists have worked directly with materials found on location as well as installing pieces made elsewhere. My proposal was to build my sculpture On Thin Soil in the area of the woodland that still has evidence of the farming activities. A series of derelict pig shelters are being gradually reclaimed by trees, as the images above show. The work had previously been sited during the Autumn in an urban park with a completely different feel to this tranquil rural setting. However, I was keen to juxtapose my piece, a third of which consists of plastic and other industrial waste materials that I have found in a protected area of The South Downs National Park, with this verdant location knowing that the owner of the site keeps finding vast hoards of rubbish buried there.

*On Thin Soil* at UCA Farnham Sculpture Garden November 2022

The piece is a visual metaphor for what’s known as The Critical Zone by earth system scientists. That is the zone of the earth’s surface from the upper bedrock to the lower atmosphere where life exists, and where that life has radically modified earth’s atmosphere and geology. I use stacked gabion baskets to hold the materials together in layers. From chalk at the bottom, then brick, concrete, steel, plastic and finally soil, living moss and a beech sapling. The gabion basket is a form associated with large scale engineering projects like road building and flood defences and here I’m also thinking of core-samples taken from the earth’s surface when prospecting for mining.

The beech tree in the top layer was ‘rescued’ during the Covid lockdown 3 years ago. It had seeded itself on the track right where it would be run over once the 4x4s were allowed to drive again. I potted it up and now it’s growing on a thin layer of soil over the pile of plastic waste that I’ve been picking up as I walk. The tree and moss represent the 1 of the ratio 1:10, biomass to human generated deposits in an average square metre of earth’s surface. The layers of plastic, steel, concrete & brick are becoming the geology of the future and a lasting human impact on earth, the quaternary layer in the new geological era known as the Anthropocene. The top layer of the sculpture thus references the depletion of biodiversity but also aims to be read as a message of hope for resilience and regeneration.

The urban environment of the UCA Farnham Sculpture Garden was a very visually busy location for the work, even though it had a clear flat site. Although it clearly read as a sculpture, it had to compete with architecture, street furniture and vehicles for attention. In the woodland context, however, the piece immediately stands out in contrast to its surroundings. This is in terms of colour, texture, materials and the verticality of the piece. There is a shock element to coming across the piece in the natural landscape. It is not visible from far away and creates a surprise as the viewer turns a corner on the woodland path. Perhaps the time of year has also helped, in that the extreme May green of the location makes the red plastic really jump out. The little tree has its new leaves and is sheltered from too much sun by the adjacent chestnut tree.

I had the opportunity to talk about the work to a small audience at the opening evening, which allowed me to explain the thinking behind it and the choice of its site near the derelict pig shelters. This was a very rewarding, confidence-building experience with the added bonus of being awarded the Little Forest Open Competition Prize for 2023.

All photographs by Liz Clifford.

Assemblage.

Over the past year I have been working on a series of sculptures that beg to be experienced as a group. Each individual employs assemblage techniques with salvaged materials ranging from discarded domestic fabric to brick, steel and fencing wire.

These works are assemblages in a number of senses. Firstly, in the bricolage tradition of 1960’s Arte Povera and of the 1980’s Object Sculptors such as Tony Cragg. Industrially produced materials are the substance of the work, and it is their provenance that is crucial. They are happened upon by chance, often bizarrely juxtaposed with the natural world. Where and how they have been found add to the layers of meaning.

The form and method of construction is low-tech, with the binding together of materials appropriate to their lowly status. The twisting of wire, tying and knotting, as well as binding and pinning, are ‘making do’ joining methods that evolve with circumstances and are associated with ‘fixing things’ in both the domestic and agricultural contexts.

Within the context of female artists using assemblage, these works owe a lot to Louise Bourgeois’ use of fabric and steel, Annette Messager’s installations and Sarah Lucas’ NUD CYCLADIC series of biomorphic forms. Cornelia Parker’s emphasis on the provenance of her materials has also been an important influence.

Secondly, these works explore assemblage as a post-human hybrid concept, a coming together of objects with their own agency to create a new being, with the accidental playing a hugely important part. The writings of Jane Bennett on lively materiality and that agency of objects are demonstrated in the business of stumbling upon the materials as they embed themselves into the mud and undergrowth of the Hampshire countryside. Donna Haraway’s notion of sympoesis holds out hope for the survival of our species as we navigate a future in which we repair the damage done to the planet and find a way of living in balance with other species. I call the pieces Symbio-Beings in reference to the term.

The group of sculptures is an assembly of objects that interrelate. It is an assemblage itself. The spaces between the forms are part of it and the wobble of the individuals suggest potential movement and invite the viewer to interact. By adding more pieces, I’m aiming to create several groups and will experiment with spacing and where I place them to set up different dynamics.

All photographs by Liz Clifford

On Thin Soil

I’ve recently had the opportunity to bring a piece of work together that has been in gestation for nearly two and a half years. In May 2020, in Covid lockdown, I noticed beech seedlings growing in the mud of a rural track normally driven on by off-roaders. Knowing that the vehicles would soon be back I decided to ‘rescue’ one of them with a view to planting it somewhere safer later. A month later the vehicles were back and I was picking up their debris where the beech seedling had been.

The potted up seedling began to thrive and was used in two pieces of work, Emergence 2020 and Byway 745 Observatory 2021 as a symbol of hope and also as a representative of the depleted flora I had been researching.

Liz Clifford, Emergence (detail), 2020

Liz Clifford, Byway 745 Observatory (detail), 2021

Since September 2021 the sapling has remained in the same gabion basket, breaking out of its cut down plant pot and growing on the thin layer of soil I’d spread over plastic detritus collected on the same rural track in the bottom. The moss I’d used to accompany this layer of biomass has really colonised the basket. It is no longer disguising the pot but is part of the ecosystem within the gabion. The tree still fits the space and now is the moment to present its mixture of vulnerability and resilience.

The opportunity to do just that came out of the blue when a group of year 2 BA students at UCA Farnham approached me to contribute to an outdoor sculpture show called Transient Traces. Outdoors would be so much better for showing the tree than a gallery, with the worry of insufficient light and water. I could also use it in conjunction with the reworking of previously used materials as requested by the curators as part of their research into the ephemeral nature of materiality.

The resulting work, On Thin Soil, uses materials found in the landscape whilst on my daily walk. It is a ‘re-working’ and a development of various previous pieces that use the stacks of detritus-filled gabion baskets.

The layers within the work build upwards from chalk (bedrock) through human-generated deposits of brick, steel, concrete and plastic to the thin layer of soil, moss, beech tree and air. It references the ‘critical zone’ as defined by earth system scientists and explored politically by the late Bruno Latour. The zone, a few kilometres thick, between the lower atmosphere and the upper bedrock, in which life on earth occurs.

The tree also represents that fragile proportion of biomass to human-generated deposits (1:10) that is present in an average square metre of the Earth’s surface (Jan Zalasiewicz Anthropocene Square Meter). Much of the steel and plastic used is generated by motor vehicles and the concrete pieces have a layer of tarmac on them. I have ordered the materials in layers that reference time, but that time is also distorted, the top layers of concrete and plastic are deeper than the chalk to emphasise the proliferation of human-made deposits that will become evident in the Quaternary layer of geology.

All photographs by Liz Clifford.

Launching together.

Since October last year, I’ve been involved with the launch of an artists’ collective. We are six women artists and we call ourselves Splynta, signifying something a bit spiky, under the skin and breaking away. The idea of the collective evolved during our second year on the part-time MA Fine Art at UCA, Farnham. The six of us got on, had worked closely together during the course, and wanted to set up a support network for the future. We started our activities by making work in response to a common theme, Under the Surface.

The six of us work with different processes and methods but are all committed to a research-based practice. We worked separately, but then came together in one of our studios for group discussions and crits which helped to establish the body of work. The outcomes for Under the Surface included sculpture, photography, painting and book objects. Rather than put together a physical show of the work, we created an online zine with it. Once we had designed a logo for the group, we built the zine in Adobe InDesign and published it on Yumpu. There is a brief introduction to the group followed by a double page spread of text and images for each artist. Click on the link below to view it.

Under the Surface Zine

Once the zine was online the next job was to get it seen. An Instagram account was the next move, with a link to the zine in the bio. We took turns to post our own zine pages, one a day, over the first week, then embarked on a series of artists’ takeovers of the account over subsequent weeks. For these we set a series of questions that we all had to answer. That gave the takeovers a structure and set up a dialogue between us and others. By pooling contacts we’ve begun to build up followers.

As well as the group crits, we have made outings to see exhibitions and have a Whatsapp group where we can share information and opportunities that we see listed. We have also begun another body of work stemming from responses to a piece by one of our members whose name was picked randomly out of a hat. This new body of work, known as ‘House’, forms our current proposal to galleries. We are gaining experience with every application we make, and being a collective, it seems easier to encourage ourselves to keep going in the face of the rejections that every artist is up against.

Observations of Brutality and Resilience.

Over recent months I’ve been working with my own photographs and drawings of barbed wire fencing stapled to trees to develop a body of work that begins to express links between the abuse of nature and our bodies.

Liz Clifford. *Wire Scarred Beeches*. 2021

Observing the resilience of these trees that grow around the brutally stapled wire, and seeing forms reminiscent of human body parts in their scars and deformations, I’ve been broadening the range of materials I use in my new sculptures. I have a collection of wire and rusty metal objects found in the landscape along with curious domestic detritus that also finds itself discarded there. Added to that is a growing pile of old pillows, duvets, sheets and cleaning cloths that have become so worn out and stained that they are destined to be thrown out.

The salvaged wire is used to bind these soft materials around a steel armature fixed to the gabion baskets that I’ve been using for a while. The forms can then break out of the constraints of the steel mesh in an echo of the way in which trees will grow around the constraints imposed upon them. The gabions are used to create the stability needed in a free standing sculpture. Thinking about the geology of the area, they are filled with chalk and flint as well as with layers of discarded bedding, brick, plastic and metal found in the landscape, to create a sturdy base.

The act of binding the soft forms, allowing the wire to work like a tourniquet or rather, a ligature, and attaching rusty steel objects that can be twisted to make it tighter, adds an element of implied violence to the work. Each piece relates to another with the ‘limbs’ and wire protrusions reaching across the space between the forms. My intention is to show a whole group together but, so far, only one pair has had a public outing – above right, Breaking Surface at The West Downs Gallery in Winchester.

Although colour is muted in the work, it is an element that is carefully considered. The stains of the fabric, the rusty metal and the found objects are rich in colour and that colour is also a signifier of the abject, of ageing, and of the materiality of the discarded. There is an ambiguous provenance to the materials and a question mark over their age. I will choose some elements for inclusion partly for their aesthetic qualities and partly for their symbolic value, as well as for the physical job they do in building a three dimensional form. The process requires much doing and undoing.

Although the forms emerge as individuals they definitely seem to ask to be displayed as pairs or groups. There is a relationship between them, suggesting dialogue or sparring.

The most recent are three-legged forms that move away from the weighted, layered gabion base. These are more animate and suggest mobility. Their corporeality reflects that of the viewer’s body through scale – they are about my height. Through their wobble – they have potential for movement. They intend to remind us of our bodies but through their absurdity suggest hybrids, or interspecies collaboration. The not-so-human outcome of symbiogenesis, perhaps.

Liz Clifford. *Teeter* and *Symbio-Being* 2022

All photographs by Liz Clifford.

Public Engagement – Winter Sculpture Park.

This ambitious exhibition curated by Gallery No.32 on public access land in Bexley, South East London has now drawn to a close and the work is being removed from the site. The install back in February was challenged by the arrival of Storm Eunice that blew some of the works over even before the show had opened, but the sun shone brightly for the opening event on the 26th offering an uplifting afternoon for the artists, their friends, families and many more.

Opening Event – Winter Sculpture Park 2022. Gallery No.32

More than 40 works were sited in an orchard and on open grassland that had once been landfill. Artists were from London and the South as well as much further North and at different stages of their careers. All were excited to have this tremendous opportunity to site their work outdoors free of charge and with the support of the curators ,Meg Stuart and Kieran Idle of Gallery No.32, who worked hard to promote the show through social media and produced an online catalogue on their website.

Lorraine Snape
“Super low frequency attenuation deflector”

The work shown was hugely varied in approach, materials used and issues tackled. It was great to have time as artists to engage with each other. Some of us had met during the challenges of the install and the WhatsApp group chat was useful for communication and support. The Gallery No.32 strap line is “Promoting creative exchange” and that extends to between the artists involved as well as between the gallery and the public. Two sets of artists talks were organised which enabled us to present the ideas behind our work to a live audience, many of whom were fellow artists. It was great to have responses and feedback and so good not to be on Zoom.

As well as the artists’ walks and talks, there was a school visit of Year 10s from Newham who toured the show and took part in a workshop run by Ema Mano Epps using clay. These events were attended by a sympathetic audience and most of the feedback was positive throughout the show. However, the space is completely accessible to anybody and someone was intent on destruction. Several pieces of work were pulled over before the opening, but after Storm Eunice…….Then one was burnt down just before the first set of talks and in broad daylight. The tallest of my structures finally succumbed with only a week to go. It had been pulled so hard as to break the welds on the steel mesh, buckling in its middle. This was the sort of public engagement we’d known was possible but hadn’t expected to the extent that it had happened. Thankfully no one appears to have got hurt.

Liz Clifford “Becoming Geology” with intervention.

Showing in the Open Air

February is not the best time of year to be involved in an outdoor exhibition, however it is also not the moment to say ‘no’ to a wonderful opportunity to site a piece of work in a public space. Gallery No.32 is an artist-run initiative started during the Covid lockdown as a space for artists to show their work for free to a passing audience. The site is publicly accessible land near Bexley railway station in South East London. The directors, Megan Stuart and Kieran Idle describe themselves as providing “a safe space for artists to show their work for free. Encouraging participatory and site-specific exhibitions and community events. Artists can exhibit their work horizontally in an anti-elitist environment, bringing art to the day-to-day public eye.” This year’s Winter Sculpture Park is their second and involves 43 artists. It will open on 26th February and run until 30th April 2022. The artists were selected from an open call.

4 acres of orchard and grassland available to artists for the Winter Sculpture Park.

The piece I am showing is an iteration of my work Becoming Geology first shown online and then at UCA, Farnham in 2021. The expanse of level grassland is a hugely expanded site in comparison with the garden and courtyard settings for the previous iterations.

*Becoming Geology* installed in a garden and a courtyard in 2021

This time I was keen to do away with the pallet base and to secure each column directly to the ground. This would free up the spacing between them and allow them to appear to be growing out of the ground. I used the weeks prior to the final install at Bexley to experiment with using 20mm rebar as a ground anchor for each structure.

In the end I did a complete rebuild of the piece in the garden to test its stability, and then dismantled it and labelled each section so that rebuilding on site could be as quick as possible. It has to be able to withstand wind and the possibility of being tampered with. Luckily Axisweb offers very reasonably priced public liability insurance for artists. The install took 2 days, the first challenge being driving in the ground anchors. My piece was to be sited in the vast expanse of grassland that had previously been a landfill site in a disused gravel pit. The resonance of this with the references in the piece is a happy coincidence, but the practicalities of the fact meant that the anchors could only be driven in 55cm rather than the 70cm intended before hitting a layer of concrete below the soil. I had to try several different places to get all four far enough in. The configuration of the structures was always intended to be less constrained than in the previous sitings and to allow viewers to wander amongst them. The intention is that they appear to grow from the grassy surface like some kind of core sample of the layers beneath.

By the end of the day I had built all the base sections although the rebar was protruding further than hoped and presented a challenge for the following day. Completely exhausted and facing a two hour journey home, I had achieved what I had set for the day. Day two was one of high wind and driving rain leaving me soaked through by lunchtime. However it is working on the upper parts of the structures that brings the piece together, so that process was enough to keep me going.

*Becoming Geology* at the end of day two.

The bleakness of this spot in London’s Green Belt with its remnants of an industrial as well as pastoral past, now used by dog walkers and littered with their droppings, feels right for this piece of work. It is about what we humans leave behind, buried or not.

Visit Gallery No.32 for more details. The opening event is on 26th February 12 – 5pm and the show runs until April 30th 2022. Follow link below.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/winter-sculpture-park-tickets-239393130297

Calling for Action.

This week I attended a fascinating conference hosted by Surrey Hills Arts at The University of Surrey in Guildford. The event brought together artists who work with and in the landscape to present their work and to tackle the question “How can we inspire action?” to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency.

The first presentation by artist duo Ackroyd & Harvey focussed on their work as artist/activists. Their recent work has required collaboration with institutions like Tate Modern and Somerset House and also with many individuals. In 2019 they co-founded Culture Declares Emergency – a movement of cultural workers dedicated to truth-telling, action-taking and justice-seeking on the climate emergency – providing the grass coats worn by the performers at the launch of the organisation. Grass is a material they return to again and again. Photosynthesis is the method by which they make images, allowing light onto the grass seed as it sprouts in some areas and not others, in much the same way as developing an analogue photograph. It is a symbolic material, a metaphor for nature and making use of it is an acknowledgement that grasses and humans are inextricably linked. Their most recent work was made in collaboration with Writers Rebel, a part of Extinction Rebellion. A large grass banner of text by writer and activist Ben Okri was grown during June 2021 in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern and then born to the banks of the Thames where it was floated in a ceremony accompanied by speeches and music. This event demonstrated that art has a role to play in making the issue of the climate emergency as visible as possible, and artists must collaborate with others to achieve that visibility.

Daro Montag is an artist and Professor of Art & Environment at Falmouth University working with natural organisms and producing charcoal to bury in the ground. This action is one that has been practised all over the world as a method of soil improvement for centuries. Although cutting down and burning trees feels wrong, if burnt without oxygen the carbon in the wood is not released into the atmosphere but trapped in the resulting charcoal. When the charcoal is then buried in the ground it is trapped – a cottage industry scale carbon sequestration and soil improvement system. Daro’s presentation video showed his charcoal burning process and whilst it was playing he began setting out bags of charcoal in front of the audience. About 8 kg of carbon is produced daily by every UK citizen. This was represented by a group of eight 1kg sacks of Daro’s home produced Rane-char wheeled onto the stage in a cabinet. In theory one would need to make and bury this much daily to off-set one’s carbon footprint. Sixty 100gm bags, one for each audience member, were then placed on a shelf along the back of the stage. At the end of the 20 minute presentation the audience was invited to take one of these small bags each and scatter it on the soil outside, thus off-setting their carbon footprint for that last 20 minutes. This performance and audience participation provided an elegant visual demonstration of the enormity of the task before us as well as a simple action that can help. An artist’s drawing material put to use in an unexpected way.

Sculptor Will Nash showed us his habitable public sculpture projects and talked through their evolution, involving local communities, including his piece called Optohedron for Surrey Hills Arts near Newlands Corner. This piece has a steel frame but is packed with coppiced logs to form a habitat for forest creatures. The approach of combining a sculpture with a wildlife habitat was first explored by the artist whilst working for Warnham Nature Reserve, Horsham. The cairn-like structure of reclaimed Horsham stone that references the local industrial archeology evolved in the making to become a bat bothy with an interior cave-like space and narrow entrances. The siting of the work next to a pond is also important for these creatures and the artist was assisted by volunteers to build the piece on site. Between working on The Bat Bothy and Optohedron Will Nash has also developed sculptural swift towers in Norwich and Shalford. These structures must be at least 6 metres tall so that the swift chicks can take flight safely and include technology to attract the birds – a solar powered MP3 player relaying swift calls. The works all use mathematical principles and a collaborative brief to achieve engaging and multi-purpose results.

Andrea Gregson talked us through the gestation of her two public sculptures Checkpoint 1 & 2, each the culmination of a residency, one on the island of Fyn in Denmark, and the other in Grizedale Forest, Cumbria. Both works focus attention on the particular landscapes in which they are sited by literally requiring the viewer to adopt a specific viewpoint and at the same time present facts about the landscape that are not apparent on the surface. The viewer is invited into the sculpture and from there can view the landscape through a set of holes. In the interior the artist’s drawings are displayed that reflect on the research undertaken during the residency. The industrial past of the area is referenced along with current juxtapositions of roads, power supplies and the tourist industry. The second part of Andrea’s presentation involved drawing our attention to the work of the late Gustav Metzger with whom she had worked in 2015. His call for a day of action by artists entitled Remember Nature on 4th November 2015 is being relaunched by herself and fellow artist/curator Jo Joelson. There will be a day of action across the arts on 4th November 2022 in partnership with the Gustav Metzger Foundation, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UCA Farnham and Dartington Arts School. There is a webpage on which to register your interest as either an individual or organisation and propose an event, action, performance or artwork for the day that promotes the message Remember Nature.

All the speakers made use of documentary video to support their material, but the most powerful was the one of Gustav Metzger appealing to his audience in 2015. “We live in societies suffocating in waste” he says “Our task is to remind people of the richness and complexity in nature; to protect nature as far as we can and by doing so art will enter new territories that are inherently creative. The aim is to create a mass movement across the arts to ward off extinction.”