Condition ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’
An exhibition inspired by the words of Greta Thunberg
19-26 Jul, 10:00-18:00
A group art exhibition addressing the climate emergency. Inspired by the words of Greta Thunberg, in her speech to the Youth Climate Conference 2021.
Featured Artists are: Heather McAteer, Kristin Rawcliffe, Ingrid Jensen, Peter Driver and Susan Cunningham. Each artist makes a response to local and national climate change issues. The aim is to inspire action on climate change and counter the ‘Blah Blah Blah’ of those in power.
Date: 19th - 26th July
Time: 10am - 6pm
Meet the Artists: 20th July, 2-4pm
About the artists
Heather McAteer
Taking George Monbiot’s writing as inspiration, Heather’s works for this exhibition play with a dichotomy of beauty and menace to portray the catastrophic impact of human activity on the environment. Created on found paper, the works are suffused with a melancholic sense of loss and absence, evoking an unsettling, ’eerie’, disrupted pastoral view of nature to suggest crisis and uncertainty.
Kristin Rawcliffe
“We are bleeding at the roots.” Sharon Blackie If Women Rose Rooted
Modern society cuts us off from the natural cycles of nature we used to live by. Climate apathy stems from a failure to be present in our environment, and to understand and value the ecosystems we live in. This damages our own health and wellbeing as well as the safety of future generations.
Kristin’s work for this exhibition is a response to how we interact with nature, what we domesticate, what is wild, what spaces nurture us, and how we think of the planet and the living things that share it with us.
Ingrid Jensen
Ingrid’s practice combines interests in ecology, history, and polarisation in public perceptions. We have known about global warming and climate change for at least 50 years, but opposition of attitudes has limited effective action to reduce human effects on the planet. “Blah, Blah, Blah” is not good enough in this time of The Last Moment Before It’s Too Late.
Peter Driver
Peter’s work reflects on time spent walking and birding the edge-places of his home villages in Berkshire and Cambridgeshire. It is his daily routine to wander around graveyards, along farm tracks and footpaths, behind the local nuclear weapons factory and between landfill sites and gravel pits to find his own wilderness, where wildlife ekes a living and nature clings-on.
Source material for the varied artworks comes from a wide range of stimuli, including: memories, pop music, mapping, our nature-depleted landscape and the catastrophic decline of Britain's bird populations.
Susan Cunningham
Susan Cunningham is an artist who explores the presence or absence of ‘nature’ within urban environments. Her current art practice is based on a series of walks around the IDR (Inner Distribution Road), Reading, between August and September 2023. These walks were a phenomenological study of insect and plant life. The resultant images are a re-imagining and re-embodiment of the insects and plants found.
