LAND2 & Book Arts at the CFPR, UWE Bristol hosted members and the public for this event held at The Station, Bristol on Thursday 30th March 2023.

This free, one-day symposium explored environmental themes including water quality, land degradation, pollution and damage to the landscape, language, interventions and ideas. The event shared some of the outcomes from UWE Bristol’s HAS-ACE Connecting Research Project Grant Scheme – Slow Violence and River Abuse: The Hidden Effect of Land Use on Water Quality – alongside curated presentations from local and national speakers.

We brought together artists, poets, environmentalists, human geographers, water scientists, mycologists, historians and geologists to present six paired conversations and open discussions with the audience. The day consisted of short talks, group discussions, a pop-up handling exhibition of prints and artists’ books, and PhD students’ posters.

An accompanying large-scale exhibition The Mountains Are Calling presented 90 artists’ books, publications and small printed works by members of LAND2, from the archives at the Centre for Print Research, and new works by associated artists (Friday 3rd March – Monday 17th April 2023 at Bower Ashton Library).

Our presenters, in order of appearance were:

Gillian Clayton & Niamh Fahy
Gillian and Niamh have collaborated on a project in Somerset, UK. Niamh created artwork using several print processes which respond to the specificity of water bodies investigated by Gillian, and the initial findings gathered through fieldwork and lab analysis. The conversation will detail the process of collaboration, discuss river health/water quality, and the relationship between land use and aquatic health.

Dr Gillian Clayton is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Water Sciences with research focusing on international sustainable development such as the development or repurposing of technologies that can be used in water, healthcare and agri-food sectors. Gillian is based in the Centre for Research in Biosciences, in the School of Health, Science and Society at UWE, Bristol.

Niamh Fahy is an artist and researcher working at the Centre for Print Research UWE, Bristol. Her work addresses themes of environmental change. Through fieldwork, print, installation and photography she visualises relationships between land and culture.

Tracy Hill & Ros Todhunter
Porosity is an ongoing conversation between walking bodies and spaces where we experience a transition from a known landscape into another world. Can we learn to read the unseen? Can ‘Place’ be seen as both fluid and deeply rooted?

Tracy Hill, a visual artist and research associate at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, University of Central Lancashire concerned with exploring our forgotten understanding, lost relationships, and connection to place.

Ros Todhunter, a former mining geologist and applied geology lecturer, enjoys unravelling the hidden 4-D evidence of the ever-changing deep history of the earth beneath our feet. Affiliated with RIGS.

Claire Loder & Anna Pigott
This was the first time that Claire and Anna had met in person: Over the past year we have shared many thoughts via email and voice messages about the relationships between art and ecology, (decolonising) gardening, soil, trees, language, and our personal dilemmas about who we are and what we do in these times of collapse and repair. We explored all this and more in our conversation.

Claire Loder is Pathway Leader for MA Ceramics at Bath Spa University and erstwhile object maker – grappling with speculative clay, the possible overlaps between clay/ceramics in horticulture, ecology and arts practice. Claire’s Instagram: @myself__now_includes

Anna Pigott, currently a lecturer in Human Geography at Swansea University/amateur willow weaver, is interested in stories, imagination, creativity, and emotion, and how these relate to social-ecological care and change. Instagram: @basketry_anna

Chitra Merchant & Saf Nazeer
Savesoil is a volunteer led organisation that seeks to turn the world’s attention to our dying soil by inspiring about 4 billion people (60% of the world’s electorate of 5.26 billion) to support policy redirections to safeguard, nurture and sustain soils. Savesoil is part of a larger movement called Conscious Planet whose efforts are to align human activity to be supportive of nature and all life on our planet.

Chitra Parvathy Merchant has been engaged with exploring the forest ecologies of the Western Ghats in South India for a few years now. Having grown up in this region, she travels back regularly and has a longstanding connection to it passed down from her grandfather who was a forest officer in these parts. She volunteers for Savesoil and through her artworks hopes to raise awareness of the pressing issue of soil degradation.

Iain Biggs & Elinor Gwynn
Given Elinor’s concerns as a poet and her background in environmental science and law, together with the fact that she has worked closely with visual artists, our conversation focused on her interest in the intersection between language and landscape and the projects that her interests have given rise to or animated. In particular we explored how she feels the language-landscape connection manifests itself in people’s everyday lives and the current importance of the values attached to that.

Elinor Gwynn is based in north-west Wales and has spent many years working for various organisations, mainly in the heritage and environment sectors. She has recently completed a doctoral research project at Aberystwyth University looking at the connections between language and landscape – two of her main passions in life.

Dr Iain Biggs RWA, is a coordinator for and co-founder of LAND2, a freelance writer, educator and artist who is affiliated with the Universities of Dundee and Bath Spa.

Judith Tucker & Nathan Smith
Archives, Fieldwork, and Collaboration: From Painted Plants to a Welsh Herbarium

Judith Tucker and Nathan Smith discussed their previous collaboration Entwined, the role of archives and fieldwork in art and science, and how this might shape the future symbiosis between artists and scientists.

Dr Nathan Smith, FLS, Senior Curator of the Lower Plants at the National Museum of Wales is a mycologist and historian who studies why people study fungi and what makes mycology so odd.

Dr Judith Tucker, Director of Research and Innovation: Culture and Impact in the School of Design at the University of Leeds and co-convenor of LAND2, is a painter who has worked with landscape, place, and environment for her whole creative life. Recently she has been painting pioneering salt marsh plants which are both vulnerable to sea level rise, but that also help to protect the land from flooding. Instagram: @judithtuckerart

PhD student posters

Sally Wetherall
Every Contact Leaves a Trace: An investigation into the potential of ceramic and print process to extend understanding of the temporal, material and transient in landscape.
School of Art, Film and Media, Bath Spa University. More info about Sally

Niamh Fahy
Violent Impressions: An investigation of Slow Violence in the landscape through printmaking and photography.
Centre for Print Research / School of art & Design, UWE, Bristol. More info about Niamh

Rachel Marsh
What can Mary Stella Edwards’ poetry and painting in Bucks Mills in the last century teach us about responding to the climate crisis today?
Centre for Print Research / School of art & Design, UWE, Bristol. More info about Rachel

Many thanks to all our speakers, to helpers: Angie Butler, Marian Kilpatrick, Helen Rollinson, and Marie Lister for photography and roving mic. Special thanks to UWE, Bristol for sponsoring this event which allowed free public participation.