Paper short abstract:

Ferme ornée is a public art commission that I am producing for the University of Reading campus, through which I am investigating the allegorical and political poetics of climate change, towards the potential for a non-didactic evocation of its structural relationship to power and knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

What use is art in the face of climate change? The complicity of art with the very forces of planetary demise and social inequality, despite, and often because of, its best intentions, make this a zero-sum question.

The artworks I am developing include photograms of meteorological storm-related phrases, inscribed in mud, reproduced as banners suspended from lampposts, and an 1800s gate designed ‘expressly for Ireland, America, and the Colonies’, emerging gilded and cock-eyed from the ground above a bronze relief of grass. A bridge that straddles the ornamental lakes will become an aeolian harp, singing in the wind as a siren or gale warning.

The work arises from a conflict of interests and imperatives that I see as inherent in the intersecting values of climate change and art production. Problematic universalism collides with Romantic individualism. The uselessness of art in the face of the arguably sublime monumentality of climate change. Didactic climate messaging typically self congratulates or averts the gaze.

Can we open a space in the midst of these competing demands that is both poetic and political, that embraces the useless as effective and affective non-productivity, that is inclusive yet undemanding?