Conference Contributors

Contributers Biographies

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is an artist who constantly challenges the traditional boundaries of art, known for her groundbreaking conceptual and performance pieces, films and music. Yoko’s creative influence and prolific artistic output continues to inspire new generations.

Speakers Biographies

Technology & Resources

Prof. Peter Head

Peter is a civil and structural engineer who specialised in major bridges, advanced composite technology and now in sustainable development in cities and regions. He won the Award of Merit of IABSE and in 2009 the RAE Sir Frank Whittle medal. In 2008 he was named by the Guardian Newspaper as one of 50 people that could ‘save the planet’, and in the same year Time magazine cited him as one of 30 global eco-heroes.

Dr. Joe Ravetz

Joe Ravetz is Co-Director of the Centre for Urban & Regional Ecology at the University of Manchester. His books include ‘City-Region 2020′, and ‘Urban 3.0: creative synergy and social intelligence’ (Earthscan, forthcoming). A former community architect / planner, he is also a graphic facilitator, foresight trainer, and keen advocate of visual thinking.

Prof. Martin Charter

Martin has worked at director level on business sustainability issues in consultancy, leisure, publishing, training, events and research for over 22 years. Prior to this he held in a range of management positions in strategy, research and marketing in gardening, building products, trade exhibitions, financial services and consultancy including Save & Prosper Group, Reed International, Creative Marketing Group and Kiveton Park (Holdings) Ltd. Martin was the launch Director of Greenleaf Publishing, Marketing Director at the Earth Centre, former director of business networks focused on sustainable business, green electronics and eco-innovation. Martin was the founding editor of the Journal of Sustainable Product Design, The Green Management Letter and Greener Management International (GMI) and is presently a member of the Editorial Boards of GMI, International Journals of Sustainable Engineering and Sustainable Design. Martin has been a member of international/national/regional advisory boards covering green electronics, environmental technology, sustainability reporting & sustainable innovation (e.g. for P&G and InterfaceFlor in Europe.) Presently, he sits on the expert boards of the EC Eco-Innovation Observatory and the World Resources Forum. Martin is presently convenor of ISO 14006 (eco-design management systems) and was the previous UK expert to both ISO and BSI groups on ISO TR 14062 (eco-design). Martin is the producer and organiser of the ‘Sustainable Innovation’ international conference series that is its 16th year. He is a regular international conference speaker and author and editor of various books and publications including Greener Marketing (1992 and 1999), The Green Management Gurus [e-book] (1996), Managing Eco-design (1997), Sustainable Solutions (2001) and System Innovation for Sustainability (2008). Martin has an MBA from Aston Business School (UK) and postgraduate diploma in marketing. Martin attended The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.

Global Systems: Food and Water Speakers

Magnus Irvin.

Magnus Irvin is a traditional British artist living and working in London. His work reflects an interest in institutions such as the seaside, music halls, pub culture, street furniture, ectoplasm and fish. He works in a wide variety of media including film, printmaking, cardboard sculpture, and cake. He is interested in marine conservation and is a keen diver and fisherman.

Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger is a London-based artist, born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents. From 1945 to 1953, Metzger studied at various art schools in Cambridge, London, Antwerp and Oxford. In 1959, he developed the concept of auto-destructive art, proposing works that could self-destruct, to reflect the similarly destructive nature of political and social systems. At the heart of his practice, which has spanned over 65 years, are a series of constantly opposing yet interdependent forces such as destruction and creation.

Michael Pawlyn

Michael Pawlyn established Exploration Architecture in 2007 to focus on the emerging discipline of biomimicry. Prior to this he worked with Grimshaw and was central to the team that designed the Eden Project. He has lectured widely and, in 2011, became one of only a small handful of architects to have a talk posted on TED.com.

Maria Jose Arceo

Maria Jose is a London based artist that was born in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She graduated from both Camberwell School of Art with a BA honors in Fine Art and from Goldsmith University with a Postgraduate in Art & Design Education. Recently she has taken part in various group shows and events in London and Dubai, where she collaborated with group of architects from the AA on a Biomimicry-based project titled “ecoMachines _World Dubai Marine Life Incubators”. The aim of the collaboration was to explore the potential of designing purpose-built underwater structures that followed natural patterns of growth and occupation, in order to aid the restoration of damaged marine ecosystems and encourage the growth and expansion of coral reefs. She has also taken part in Edinburgh Festival and “Loop” and “Screen” film Festivals in Barcelona.

Working with installation, sculpture, photography and film, she aims to explore points of contact between human interaction with the natural world and vice versa. Her main interest resides in looking at the effects that the ‘Human Footprint’ has on the environment as a whole, and Water in particular: exploring concepts like time, substance and chance as sculpting forces. Often working with man-made objects that have been subjected to randomly altering circumstances, her work questions our ability to identify and project knowledge backwards and forwards through time.

 

Performance Artists

Ellie Harrison

Ellie Harrison was born in London in 1979 and now lives and works in Glasgow, where she sees herself as a ‘political refugee’ escaped from the Tory strongholds of Southern England. She describes her practice as emerging from an ongoing attempt to strike-a-balance between the roles of ‘artist’, ‘activist’ and ‘administrator’. As well as making playful, politically engaged works for gallery contexts, she is also the coordinator of the national Bring Back British Rail campaign, which strives to popularise the idea of renationalising of our public transport system, and is the agent for The Artists’ Bond – a long-term speculative funding scheme for artists, now with 120 members across the UK.

Anti-Capitalist Aerobics was originally commissioned by Invisible Dust for the Ways of Seeing Climate Change conference in Manchester in October 2013.

Carl Gent

Born in Bexhill-on-sea in England and currently based in London and Sussex, Carl is an artist working in installation, print, performance and sculpture. Having completed a BA in Fine Art at UCA Farnham and currently undergoing the MFA programme at Goldsmiths, his work tries to inhabit or expose the experiential distance between everyday human existence and other physical territories revealed by contemporary cosmology, theology, physics and environmental breakdown.

Simon Watt

Simon Watt is a biologist, writer, science communicator and TV presenter. He runs “Ready Steady Science”, a science communication company committed to making information interesting and takes science based performances into schools, museums, theatres and festivals.  He is MC/president for life of the “Ugly Animal Preservation Society” which is a comedy night with a conservation twist.  As a writer he has written dozens of articles for national newspapers and websites including The Times, The Sunday Times, the Sun and the Daily Mirror. He is perhaps best known as a presenter on the BAFTA winning documentary series Inside Nature’s Giants and the Channel 4 special The Elephant: Life After Death.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in London. He works across sculpture, drawing, writing, video and performance. He is a current Associate of Open School East and in collaboration with Ben Jeans Houghton, makes film and installation work with under the name of the ARKA group. Recent exhibitions include Mud formed a finger, pointed at Sutton House, London; a performance for the exhibition Bricoleurze at Space in Between, London; and Rapid Eye Movement (Paradoxical Sleep) at Baltic 39, Newcastle.

Peter Kennard & Cat Phillipps

kennardphillipps is a collaboration between Cat Phillipps and Peter Kennard working together since 2002 to produce art in response to the invasion of Iraq. It has evolved to confront power and war across the globe. The work is made for the street, the gallery, the web, newspapers & magazines, and to lead workshops that develop peoples’ skills and help them express their thoughts on what’s happening in the world through visual means. The work is made as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change. We don’t see the work as separate to social and political movements that are confronting established political and economic systems. We see it as part of those movements, the visual arm of protest.

Climate Change Speakers

Jonathan Rosenhead

Jonathan Rosenhead became Professor of Operational Research at the London School of Economics in 1987. His jointly edited book Rational Analysis for a Problematic World Revisited introduced a family of participative methods for structuring problems. He has been Chair of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, and is currently Chair of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine.

London Fieldworks

London Fieldworks is an arts practice formed in 2000 by artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson for creative research and collaboration at the art, science and technology intersection. We create artworks, performative architectures, films, publications, exploring our engagement with environment (from remote rural landscapes to urban green spaces) and our relationship to matter through the capture and translation of data. Seminal projects interrogated ideas around the authenticity of mediated experience, especially experience of place, while exploring poetic applications of technology. These include ‘Syzygy’ (a telematic artwork sited on the Southern Hebridean island of Sanda that transmitted data to a responsive sculpture at the ICA, London, 1999-2000) and ‘Polaria’ (translation of data from fieldwork in NE Greenland to create an interactive installation, at Wapping Project, London, CCA, Glasgow, NGCA, Sunderland, 2001-2).

Artworks commissioned for the public realm have explored human and animal relationships to landscape; the enfolding of human and animal habitat; animal population crash and dwindling species biodiversity and include: “Super Kingdom” (Kings Wood, Kent, 2008); “Outlandia”, (artist field station, Glen Nevis, 2010); “The Leopard” (National Trust, 2012); “Spontaneous City” (Up Projects, Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Clerkenwell Design Week, 2010-12); “Parallel development”, (Future City, Cambridge, 2014-15). Recent exhibitions include “Null Object: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing” (WORK Gallery, London, 2012 & Anglia Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge 2013), The Negligent Eye (Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2014); Like a Bird Avian Ecologies in Contemporary Art, (Gallery Trafo, Budapest, 2014). Awards include: Best Experimental Short Film (London Short Film Festival, 2014), Architects Journal Small Projects shortlist (2009 and 2011), Prix Ars Electronica (Honorary Mention, 2007), Vida 10, Madrid (Special Mention, 2007).

Dr. Daro Montag

Dr. Daro Montagis Associate Professor of Art & Environment at Falmouth University. He practices at the intersection between art and ecology with particular emphasis on climate and environmental change, process thinking and organic philosophies. He is also co-director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, and in 2009 joined the Cape Farewell expedition to Peruvian Andes and Amazon.

Biodiversity Speakers

Polly Higgins

Polly Higgins speaks on all aspects of Ecocide law, Earth law and is connected to a wider team of lawyers, parliamentarians and members of the public throughout the world who support her work. Polly is a leading advocate for the law of Ecocide and the author of the award-winning books ‘Eradicating Ecocide: laws and governance to prevent the destruction of our planet‘ and ‘Earth is our Business ; changing the rules of the game’ (May 2012). She was voted one of the World’s Top 10 Visionary Thinkers by the Ecologist and celebrated as The Planet’s Lawyer by the 2010 Change Awards. She was the Overall Champion of the 2012 People and Environment Awards. Polly delivered the 2012 Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture.

Charlotte Couch

Over 10 years experience working in the tropics conducting botanical research focussed in West Africa, Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands. She has been conducting research in Guinea since 2004 on various projects and is working with the National Herbarium of Guinea to develop local botanical capacity and a Red Data Book for the plants of Guinea.

Ackroyd & Harvey

Sculpture, photography, architecture, ecology and biology are some of the disciplines that intersect in their artwork, revealing an intrinsic bias towards process and event. For over 24 years their work has been exhibited in contemporary art galleries, museums and public spaces worldwide; they are acclaimed for large-scale art/architectural interventions, and for their unique photographic work utilizing the pigment chlorophyll in making complex images in seedling grass.

Currently they are completing History Trees, a major commission for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, initiating new work for the University of Cambridge with the Department and Museum of Zoology and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, and showing at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London.

 

Dr. John Fanshawe

John Fanshawe is a conservationist with BirdLife International and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI).  An ornithologist with a research background based in East Africa, he studied forest bird communities for his doctorate, and has an MA in Art and Environment from Falmouth University.  Currently advising CCI on arts and science collaborations, he is also a founder member of the UK forum, New Networks for Nature.

Sarah JacobS

 

Sarah Jacobs was born in 1944 and lives and works in London. More information about After Nature: Bestiary and the accompanying book (After Nature: Highlights) can be found at the website of Colebrooke Publications at http://www.songofthedatastream.net/.

 

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