Part 1 BEING HERE Correspondences with a wet-wood-land: 24 hours at Alder Coppice
‘In May 2025 four of us inhabit the ancient wet woodland of Alder coppice for 24 hours… to be with the woodland, to become part of the woodland and for the woodland to become part of us – to correspond. The experience changes how we sense time passing; we become more aware of cold and warmth; light, dusk, dark and dawn; sun and shadow. We tune in – becoming aware of rhythms of wind in the trees, waves of increasing and decreasing sound; woodland time. We made a shelter – fabric dyed with gathered plants. We created seventeen versions of sound; a series of drones and a score based on chance operations over 24 hours. We slowly settle in and the human world drifts away…’
Getting Into Hot Water is a long-term social artwork that explores water and climate with the people of and around Dudley. Getting Into Hot Water aims to question the habitual ways by which we know water, stimulate dialogue regarding our relationship with water, engender a sense of curiosity and create a change in ourselves and human-water relations locally.
The key for us as social artists is process: of bringing people together, of inquiry through creative dialogue with places, entities, people and ideas, producing imaginative artistic works that are co-created and speak to others of new possibilities and more-than-human ways of thinking-doing-being.
As part of Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice, we are producing a body of processual, iterative and cumulative artwork. Getting Into Hot Water material art-things are not just product or a deliverable, they embody or carry the traces of our work; where we have been, what we have done, who (human and nonhuman) we have done it with, what we have encountered and what we have learned, serving as springboards into possibilities for the future and further process.
Climate action for us involves doing things, artistic things that take us away from the usual, mainstream climate change narratives to narratives that expand what counts as climate knowledge – many sensory, embodied, or affective ways of knowing. Perhaps our work creates imaginative capacity as a climate change resource; invites participation through experience and intimacy rather than persuasion; reveals the everyday, small, local, and neglected as a sites of climate action; makes space for ambiguity, allowing people to consider uncertainty. We consider ourselves to be activators rather than activists.
Part 2: A Sonic Lighthouse July 3rd – 5th
Part 3: Revolution Booth Oct 2nd-4th
https://www.workshop24.co.uk/ https://www.gettingintohotwater.org/