Notice Board

Exhibition 78 features work by Tom Martin of the Participatory Action Research group connected to the project ⵜⴰⵖⵓⵔⴰⵔⵜ.
The Participatory Action Research project used co-produced creative strategies to understand gender issues in Morocco and amongst Indigenous Amazigh women, specifically in terms of their experiences of climate change.
ⵜⴰⵖⵓⵔⴰⵔⵜ – the project’s title – means ‘desertification’ in the Tamazight language. The project was awarded the Emerald Publishing ‘Real Impact Interdisciplinary Fund Award’. This funding allowed the project team to run participatory photography workshops with local Amazigh women in a rural village in Aoufous in November 2022.
Tom Martin says: The images created illustrate the far-reaching consequences of climate change on these women’s daily lives.  This project aims to show how climate change – and specifically the process of “desertification” – is threatening the survival of traditional Amazigh livelihoods and is disproportionately impacting women and girls. The Amazigh flag holds a strong meaning for the people – a symbol uniting the indigenous groups and challenging colonial boundaries. 
As we approach COP29, with the theme “Solidarity for a Green World,” it is critical that the voices of those most affected by climate change—particularly women and indigenous communities in the global south—are heard and included in decision making. Their lived experiences and locally-informed solutions offer invaluable insights for policymakers shaping the future of climate action.
A co-produced book has been published by Emerald, summarising this project. This book is timed to be released during COP29, aiming to inform policymakers about the challenges facing indigenous people, and advocate for their cause. This project aligns with Sustainable Development Goals, SDG5, Gender Equality, and SDG13 Climate Action.“

Participatory Action Research Team:
Tom Martin – a Humanitarian photographer and lecturer at the University of Lincoln.
Michelle Walsh – senior lecturer and photovoice practitioner at the University of Lincoln
Dr Kaya Davies Hayon – lecturer in Francophone Maghrebi Culture at the Open University
Dr Fadma Aït-Mous – assistant professor of sociology University Hassan II, Morocco and UK mentor.
Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald – professor at University of Lincoln

John is a landscape gardener and a self taught photographer. He lives in the heart of the Lincolnshire Fens and captures the natural world that surrounds him.

“I’m a naturalist. I was brought up by my grandparents in a cottage in a little village on the Fens and I spent hours watching and learning about wildlife and insects. They helped me understand what I saw. I continue to have a passion for the natural world, its conservation and the education of those who know less or want to know more.
In between work, early in the mornings or late at night I go out with my camera. Sitting often for hours waiting for the right light, waiting for the deer, hare, birds to make the shot perfect. I lay still and also enjoy what I see around me.
I share my photos on instagram under the name SnipSnaps

Georgina Barney is an artist based at Primary, a contemporary art complex in Nottingham where she oversees a dye garden, growing plants to make dyes, inks and paints. Georgina shares these skills through her workshop enterprise Plant Dye Studio.
Georgina says: Weld (Nottingham Ring Road) is what it says it is. The plant is exhibited in the noticeboard, and the silk dyed with it is the flag. Weld is an historic dye plant, used for centuries in Britain for yellow and to make the famous ‘Lincoln Green’ associated with Robin Hood (first dyed blue with woad). As weld grows in the most inhospitable of places including roadside verges, it feels like a post-apocalyptic plant. A plant for the future and the past. It’s also a very urban one. It’s a wave from a roadside in Nottingham to one in Uffington…
When people ask me what I make, I say I make colours from plants. I make dyes, inks and paints. When people ask me what I make with those, it gets harder to explain. Often, the point is purely the process: of seeing what colours emerge and living with those for a while. It teaches me to let go and live with the imperfect; that in fact, the imperfect is beautiful. Sometimes, as in the Noticeboard United project, there needs to be a resolution, a thing. I try to keep it as simple as possible. The colour is the artwork. All I try to do is resolve the material into a form that keeps the colour as the centrepiece.

Exhibition 75 by Poly-Technic is a type set poster and invite – Art is not doing enough. So what will we do about it? Poly-Technic aka Kate Genever and Steve Pool say: Kate and Steve say: We responded to the thinking of Victorian art critic John Ruskin. We aimed to show how some of his writings are useful now. He like us attempted to hold a mirror up to those in positions of power, be that curators,  arts organisations, artists or politicians. He used art, beauty and writing to demand change.
Our project was called “The simple stories they tell us don’t make sense anymore” We made art, large-scale projections, opportunities for other artists and young people with the aspiration to make a new type of arts education.
We commissioned this poster and its companion invite from a letterpress printer, who works from a studio in Batley. We thought Ruskin would be pleased – a crafted object, words with value, an inscription in gold ink.
The simple statement and proposition feel relevant today as the world that we recognise continues to slip away.  At the Notice Board, with it,  we ask you to all look at the impacts of climate collapse, and arts’ responsibility to take action .

Poly-Technic was an artist collaboration that ran between 2006 and 2017. It’s mantra was: With people in places, doing things. “We began the collaboration after we stepped back and asked ourselves What can we do that was worth doing – what can art do that’s worth doing? In response we decided to ask tough questions, critically think and open up active spaces.”

Exhibition 74 – To Continue Walking is by Selena Chandler and features a patchwork of plant dyed recycled cotton and builders bags
Selena Says: Looking from the window of the train I watch the world go by – these are spaces I have walked, cycled and travelled through for years. Big skies, the green and ragwort yellow, water laying in the dips, beans and grain, the hovering kestrel, pillboxes, horses, creeks and towns – change is a constant.
The appearance of oblong shapes in the fields, the black plastic membranes, the turning of clay, and the clear signal of the significant change in process; the enclosure by silver fencing.
This work, To Continue Walking, remembers paths across the Essex landscape; a county which in contrast to popular views is still, (holding on), largely rural, with much prime agricultural land.
This is space that has been shared; where feet can feel the soil as dust and squelch, can connect with warriors, farmers, gleaners, artists, ramblers. Land that has been walked for generations; to work, to play, to defend.
In making this work, informed by walking, I think about reduced horizons, the smooth and the ragged, the presence of water, the growing of food, solitude, quietness, wider nature, the loss of communities, what is a home, a sense of time and space.
I wonder how the feet of the future will access the knowledges being cemented underfoot.

Selena Chandler is an artist rooted in Essex; its land and river scapes, its social histories and knowledges. Her practice draws on heritage crafts and is concerned with the sharing of domestic and trade skills, the languages of making and consideration of connections between past and present.

Exhibition 73 is HOPES/FEARS by Christoer Jarratt uses local wind conditions as a barometer for the current socio-environmental climate. How it works:

1. The HOPES/FEARS flag gets raised.
2. A live feed from the flag’s nearest weather station is visually represented through the live HOPES/FEARS animation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the duration of the flag being raised.
3. This can be viewed through using your camera on your smartphone to scan the QR code or by going to www.christopherjarratt.com/hopes-fears-live
4. The faster the wind, the faster the animation. Watch for a while for changes in conditions. Use it to find out what conditions are like in other villages, towns and cities.
5. Every location that the flag is raised will be archived and continue to have a live feed animation so you can continue to check in on local socio-environmental conditions according to the wind.
6. If you would like to raise HOPES/FEARS and add your live conditions to the project email contact@christopherjarratt.com

Powered by the wind, HOPES/FEARS is in-conversation with itself and simultaneously projecting its voice to the viewer both in person and online.
Sitting between a tarot reading, a finger in the wind, true environmental change and doom-scrolling. Calm sunny days turning unexpectedly into a storm out of nowhere. Earth is unpredictable right now.
HOPES/FEARS looks to give a visual reading of the feelings and emotions we have been dealing with in recent years. In one moment everything seems possible, we have the ability to change, adapt, work together with the environment, communities, governments… and yet, in an instant, it all feels overwhelming, too far, out of reach. The yin and yang, opposite but interconnected forces. Hopes and Fears.

Christopher is based in Sheffield and creates artworks embedded with human stories and our relationship to the environment. Christopher’s work draws on play, sustainability, colour theory and contemporary folklore to create unique pieces that are imbued with soul & narrative. www.christopherjarratt.com / @abstract_land

To you, the Red Wriggler

you don’t have eyes but I see you
balmy and turning as you labour unseen

you are the red wiggler
a long pink taste bud
a chemoreceptor aerating tunnels
a networker

you taste and I stop to think about what I feed you
fronds of fennel grown too big
torn up letters and teabags
cardboard and bolted rhubarb
rose petals

modest, you deserve this banquet 
decomposing in and around you
chemical reactions phosphate
and from it, you give me humus.

Lauren says: The Noticeboard highlights things; bringing things to the attention of whoever stands in front of them. With the concept of ‘noticing’ in mind, To you, the Red Wriggler considers what processes are enacted constantly and consistently around us, but go unseen. 
The Red Wriggler is a variety of worm most commonly found in compost heaps. Highly evolved creatures, they are incredibly efficient at breaking down organic matter to generate humus; a rich organic material that forms in soil as plant and animal matter decays. Taking the worm’s vital work as a metaphor for undervalued acts of labour, often undertaken by those with marginalised identities, the photographs invite you to look beneath the surface, or more precisely: under the compost bin lid. Soil is fundamental to our planetary health and it is in noticing the work of the worm that we are reminded of all the other multispecies entanglements that we humans benefit from and should be thankful to be part of.

Lauren Wilson observe nature. Lauren’s creative practice encompasses curating, talking about and making art, growing and collaborative organising. She advocates for modes of practice that aren’t outcome focussed. Which challenge extractive ways of working and hyper-productivity and embrace the questioning ‘messy-ness’ of being a person. Lauren takes care to enact love-centric values of empathy, kindness, curiosity and openness.
IG: @lauren_emily_wilson

Of the photograph of ‘Hercules and Antaeus’ Jeremy Rye says: Our power lies in our connection to the land. It’s a universal truth that we have ignored. This universal truth is held within the stories and the legends of the land. These oracle traditions are the gifts of previous generations, born of wisdom and our relationship to the land. I propose if we know these stories better we might do better. One such story is the myth of Hercules and Antaeus. Which teaches us the importance of a strong and loving connection to the land and all who dwell on, beneath or above it.
The legend of Hercules and Antaeus features heavily in landscapes design with many famous sculptors embracing its symbolism. Antaeus was the son of Gaia (mother earth), who empowered him with all the positive power that the landscape has so he was invincible and the epitome of conscious connection to the land. He chose however to use this gifted power for destruction, conflict and warfare. He used the power for self-glory and for his own needs without regard to others.
Hercules, as part of his twelve labours, had to collect the golden apple of Hesperides. To get to the garden where the apples dwelt he had to get past Antaeus who needed to show his prowess against such a powerful hero. He would have over powered Hercules but for the fact that Hercules did not use his power and might but his heart. In moving to his heart he understood where the source of Antaeus power was. Instead of trying to meet power with power and force with force, Hercules recognised that Antaeus power lay in his connection to the earth. Once removed from this he would became powerless. By lifting him off the earth and holding him aloft he was weak and showed he could be defeated.
My image is of a sculpture which was created for Rousham landscape garden near Bicester. Presently it sits within a temple at the final stages of the landscape walk, just before you head into the area known as Paradise – a place where our connection to the divine is intended to be the most pronounced. The sculpture in its current state, taken back by the elements, invokes the current environmental crisis and the way we emulate Antaeus. We have been gifted this huge power, yet we have chosen to wield it for destruction, for selfish means rather than creation.

Jeremy is a multidisciplinary designer who focuses on historic, sustainable and wilding landscapes. He has 16 years of professional experience working with a variety of private and commercial clients in UK and Europe. His schemes have won awards including, the London Planning Award 2016, Best New Public Space. He was shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival 2021 award. Throughout his career Jeremy has spoken at events with an aim to increase people’s understanding of the importance landscapes play in our lives. He has worked for Low Carbon Design Institute, London Landscape, Gatekeeper Trust, St. Ethelburga’s Peace and Reconciliation Centre and Rudolf Steiner House. IG: @jeremy_rye

James Aldridge for his exhibition shares a new flag called Still a Badger Boy and fills the board with Alphabet.

Still a Badger Boy blends a photograph of James’s face with a drawing of a badger. The drawing developed out of a residency at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in Gloucestershire, where James explored his family’s links to the Cotswold hills. The title references stories James’s Dad told him of his childhood, when badgers would visit their garden from the woods behind, to knock over the dustbin and lick out James’s baby food jars.
Alphabet stitches together drawings and photographs of animal tracks, found by James on walks in Wiltshire, and during a residency with Spud in the New Forest, a written language left behind, to be discovered in the mud.

James Aldridge is a visual artist, based in Wiltshire, UK. James graduated in 1996 in Fine Art (Sculpture) from UCA. His practice uses walking, collecting and making, to research the value of embodied experiences of places, and the overlapping experiences of humans and other animals. He has a particular interest in Queer and Neurodivergent perspectives on ecosystems, and the opportunities these provide us to see beyond division and categorisation.

www.jamesadlridge-artist.co.uk and www.queerriver.com @JamesAldridgeArt

‘The Screen Edges’ show by www.virtualecologies.com /Virtual Ecologies will change five times over the coming month. Each display offeresa selection of work this Arts Council England funded intergenerational learning project, which aims to unlock memories of nature, and local ecological knowledge through creative response workshops, hands-on outdoor gatherings, skills development opportunities, mini-festivals, guided walks and more with artist-educators and natural scientists, for people of all ages across East Yorkshire.  www.virtualecologies.com

Virtual Ecologies say: “Almost – nearly relationships between living beings and an environment. The project is working towards a digital archive of responses – we are in a sense working towards a screen. We thought about The Notice Board as a screen. The idea of a screen allows us to show an ecology of outcomes. Many of these are fragments – notes from a conversation – quick drawings from descriptions – memories that are fuzzy around the edges. The process of fragmentation allows more edges to connect with. We set up spaces for memories to be shared – allowing things to re-emerge and strengthen in re-telling to someone else. They are unfinished thoughts that gently step towards a stronger connection with the ground beneath our feet.”