Biodiversity Ring: A Million Small Acts (part of doing together 24)

Biodiversity Ring: A Million Small Acts

Workshop with Gemma Dunnell, Juliet Duckworth Hannah McDowall as part of doing together 24

Friday 5 April 2024

Artists, makers and thinkers of Forest of the Imagination brought their creative intervention ideas to doing together 24 to creatively provoke, play, and percolate. Artists brought with them a creative provocation on the themes they explored for Forest of Imagination. This provocation provided an invitation for participants to unearth the small acts they contribute to their local and cultural biodiversity. A method of exploring and expanding this provocation was through the act of play, such as story-telling, sound-creating, image-taking, idea-generating, and solution-making. Each artist acted as a guide for the participants through this journey of discovery. Like mycorrhizal fungi, provocation and play fed the roots of the ideas through percolation, and in turn fuelled the play and grew the provocation. In this sense, the artists gave participants all the nutrients they needed to flourish, helping them to grow their ideas together for Forest of Imagination. Attention and care were given through listening as ‘a mode of being-with’ and using ‘a full palette of senses’ (Emma Cocker, 2023). Activities were delivered by Juliet Duckworth and Gemma Dunnell, and Hannah McDowall.

Workshops delivered:

Gemma Dunnell and Juliet Duckworth
"Come and learn about the UK's temperate rainforests by making a woven Forest Floor using recycled materials. Explore this precious native biome by adding your own creation to this collaborative accumulative artwork."

Hannah McDowall ‘Being alive in time’
"In this workshop we will explore our sense of time, age and identity as humans and more than humans using our imaginations. The great news is that everyone will celebrate a birthday during our time together. By running into the different rhythms of time and becoming in a forest ecosystem we will gain new insights into our own identities and infinite value as a being of finite life."

Workshops, delivered by staff and postgraduate students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools.

Throughout the symposium, facilitators – alongside participants – test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.