Jane Lawson interview Part One
Jane Lawson graduated from the Salford University Visual Arts BA in 2012 after previously being self-employed as a knitwear designer, helping to set up the radical art and design collective UHC and to organize the first three UK Climate Camps, and working as a researcher into corporate ethics for Ethical Consumer magazine. Since graduating she has worked for Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, first as Artist Development Co-ordinator and now as Artist Environmental Lead. She is part of the group that has co-curated Manchester Art Gallery’s Climate Justice Gallery and through her work at Castlefield Gallery has initiated SPARK, a network of artists in the North West wanting to intervene in the climate emergency.
She makes diagrams to help her understand the economic, historical, geographic and biological processes and structures that shape human society and our impact on the world, such as the global financial system, the Earth’s climatic history, the road to Brexit and the effects of technology on democracy. She also attempts to embody alternatives to the dominant cultural narrative which claims that the present economic system, although flawed, is our only realistic option.
Exhibitions include Earth Eaters (Hoxton 253, London); The Ground Beneath Your Feet (Castlefield Gallery, Manchester); Press Room (Creative Time Summit at the Venice Biennale); Show Me The Money (NGCA, Sunderland; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; People’s History Museum); Small Change (AirSpace Gallery, Stoke); BiblioTECH (Portico Library, Manchester); Start Where You Are: Second Degree Potentias (Bloc Projects, Sheffield); Emergency (Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth).
She is an alumna of School of the Damned, Year of the Monkey and is currently studying for an MA in Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths.
1. How to do feel that the climate crisis affects your art work, if at all?
The climate crisis is the drumbeat behind most of my artwork. It’s something I’ve been aware of it for a long time, and as I write this scientists are telling us, again, that we are close or possibly past to dangerous tipping points such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap; meanwhile, only 26 countries have ramped up their plans for cutting emissions since COP26 in Glasgow, the three main warming gases hit record highs in 2021, and oil companies are reporting record profits.
Before I returned to art education in 2009 I was one of the large crew that organised the first three UK Climate Camps. These were a cross between a protest camp, a summer school and a temporary ecovillage which took place in the UK from 2006 onwards and which were run on broadly anarchist principles. Each Camp targeted a different climate criminal – the first targeted Drax power station in Yorkshire, a coal-fired power station which was the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide in the UK; the second Camp joined with the local campaign against a third runway at Heathrow airport and the third Camp targeted Kingsnorth power station, to highlight E.ON's plans to build another coal-fired power station at the site, which would have been the first new coal-fired power station to be built in thirty years in the UK.
Since then, Drax has continued to be the biggest single source of carbon dioxide in the UK; the Heathrow third runway was shelved; and the proposed power station at Kingsnorth was cancelled. A child of the UK Climate Camps was the French Climate Camp, on the site of a proposed airport in Brittany, which seeded a successful resistance to the airport and an occupation of the land which is now the site of a beautifully complex experiment in commoning. Activist-artists the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, who I have worked with on various occasions, have been Instrumental in this resistance.
I see capitalism and its need for continuous growth and extraction of resources as the driving force behind the climate crisis. A lot of my work involves making diagrams to understand why things are the way they are and how they could be different; this has included timelines of how the financial system developed to the point that it crashed so disastrously in 2008; how we have come to be living in a “post-truth world”; how the UK came to vote for Brexit; and how the climatic history of the Earth has unfolded. I make these so that I can understand these processes and share that learning with others. My first large timeline was made for the Kingsnorth Climate Camp and mapped human social and technological development against global CO2 and temperature since the end of the last glaciation; unfortunately it was confiscated by the police as an offensive weapon and didn’t make it onto the site.
I also want my work to embody other possibilities. Capitalist realism states that capitalism and its attendant individualism, although flawed, are our only realistic options (I realise that this is a very Western-centric viewpoint; unfortunately Western individualist economic and financial culture is currently in the ascendant). Our memories are short and we are very adaptable, so already in the UK we are forgetting that it used to be normal to have state-owned utilities, to have free university education, to have a functioning health service where no one had to wait eleven hours for an ambulance and to have wages at a level where no one had to claim benefits or go to a food bank even though they were in full time work. It’s easy to think that the way things are now is the way things have always been, that this is “natural”. So it’s important to me to present other ways of doing things, either that have already happened or that could happen. In 2016 I did a curatorial project, Second Degree Potentias, which looked a the idea of the potentia - a form of social organisation that prioritises human flourishing and environmental sustainability; a key component of human flourishing being the flourishing of non-human persons, down to microbes and beyond. A potentia is like a Utopia but rooted in the here and now; it is possible to trace a route from here to Potentia. Looking back, I’d say this definition is still too human-centric, and that in a potentia non-human persons will flourish for their own benefit, not ours!
In particular, I work a lot with fungus because, in line with the ethos of Radical Mycology, I believe that being in direct contact with fungi’s highly resilient lifecycles and their interactions in nature can teach humans how to relate better to each other and the world we live in. And – they are extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating, as well as offering solutions to many of the problems we face; for example there are fungi that can digest plastic.
2. Are there specific actions that you are taking to mitigate or lessen your climate footprint, regarding your art practice? e.g. flying, packaging etc? Can you please share these?
I’ve massively reduced the amount I fly since 2001 – I’ve made four trips by air since then, all for what I’d describe as emotionally significant reasons. This does reduce my opportunities for international networking and exposure. I’m fortunate in that I can get to places in Europe by train -but it takes much more money and time. It’s part of the current craziness that flying in Europe is so much cheaper than train travel. I don’t have a car and my diet is mainly vegetarian.
In terms of materials...it’s common to grow mushrooms in plastic growbags which are hard to reuse, so I’m learning how to grow them in reusable containers (I think this has been standard elsewhere for a long time, e.g. I believe it’s traditional to grow enoki mushrooms in jars).
I reuse packaging as much as possible and my web hosting is with a company that uses renewable electricity.
The environmental impact of the materials I use is in my consciousness all the time; at the same time, I love paper, which is problematic as its production requires huge amounts of water. All I can say on that front is that I use a lot less of it than I would if I wasn’t bothered about the environmental impacts. Along with glitter, which I no longer buy, it is my weakness!
At Castlefield Gallery our curator Matthew Pendergast has developed an aesthetic around resuing materials such as wood and mdf from one install to another; so the marks of making for one exhibition become part of the look of the next exhibition.
The artist Ellie Harrison has an environmental policy and records her emissions every year; I’m planning on formulating my own environmental policy while studying for Art and Ecology MA at Goldsmiths this year, and starting to quantify my usage of materials such as paper. My main impact is likely to be travel; although train travel is lower carbon, if you go between Manchester and London a few times it still racks up the emissions.
In 2017 Lund University published research on what individuals can do to reduce their carbon footprint https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choices-most-reduce-your-carbon-footprint; the four most effective actions for individuals are to adopt a plant-based diet, restrict their flights, not have a car and to have one fewer child. I don’t have children so I’ve done reasonably well on these, apart from my blind spot around dairy. At the same time, it’s important to remember that climate change is a systemic problem and that there needs to be much larger scale change to how our infrastructure is organised and how our societies are organised. Individual actions will not be enough.
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