Artist In Residence- 'Here Today: Moving Images of Climate Change'

Most existing media images of climate change deal with and document its visible impacts to landscapes in ways that can lead people to feel disempowered and disengaged. In this context, Here Today – Moving Images of Climate Change aimed to find new images for communicating climate change; images which seek to provoke different kinds of engagements and action than those generated by popular media imagery.

Through this Leverhulme Trust funded artist in residence project (2009-2011), media studies scholar Julie Doyle and artist David Harradine explored how a creative dialogue between art and media studies could lead to new visualisations of climate change.

A cross-disciplinary project, the residency explored some of the different ways of seeing and ways of making meaning that occur in media and the arts, and examined how art and media representations differently deal with levels of abstraction, how they are affected by context, and how they address the relationships between the visual, the poetic and the political.

Drawing upon Doyle’s existing research into the visual and cultural communication of climate change (Mediating Climate Change, 2011), and through conversations with Harradine about the role of the visual, the poetic and the political within arts engagements with climate change, the artist and academic developed a manifesto as a way of capturing early ideas about what the artwork should be about.

The manifesto drew specifically upon the themes of the residency – embodiment, time, and place/space/landscape. Doyle and Harradine found the manifesto format a playful and useful tool to capture ideas without being bound to a specific idea or vision. In the end, the manifesto was a perfect way of distilling what they wanted the artwork to achieve as well as identifying some of the challenges of visualizing climate change in ways that make it more meaningful to people’s everyday lives.

The multi-format film, It's the Skin You're Living In, was the culmination of Doyle and Harradine’s collaboration. It’s the Skin You’re Living In (co-created with Fevered Sleep) is an attempt to make images of climate change that remind us of how profoundly we’re connected to both nature and culture, how we’re all undergoing change, on a journey, searching for home. It’s language is one of broken images, repeated actions and walking, walking, walking; a strange, sad and funny meditation on being human and being animal, lost in a changing world.