Session: 4c
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair: Jessica Ullrich
Laura Ouillon (Université Paris Cité), “Tree Yarnbombing Against the High Speed Two Project: Arboreal Craftivism as Interspecies, Community Solidarity”
Abstract: This paper examines the case of tree yarnbombing by local communities resisting the destruction of public trees caused by the construction of the new British high-speed railway, High Speed Two (HS2), whose ecological impact remains much debated. Yarnbombing, an international street phenomenon initiated by the Texan artist Magda Sayeg in 2005, consists in wrapping in knitting elements of public architecture – including trees. Described by Sayeg as an ‘empowering’ practice for communities, yarnbombing is a form of craftivism, a term coined by the US writer Betsy Greer for ‘crafting […] motivated by social or political activism.’
The craftivist strategy of tree yarnbombing was employed during HS2 protests around Euston Station in London in 2017 and 2018, following the passing of the High Speed Rail Act in February 2017, and the prompt beginning of site preparation works around London’s Euston Station. Such works entailed the felling of hundreds of mature trees in Euston Square Gardens and the streets in Camden, as well as the complete removal of St James Gardens. Collective yarnbombing was seen by protesters as a quick emergency measure to mark trees threatened to be cut down and raise collective awareness: their trunks were wrapped with colourful, hand-knitted scarves, evoking improvised bandages or shrouds, sometimes accompanied by hand-written messages (see enclosed pictures below). Making trees more visible invited passers-by to reflect on their emotional attachments to urban trees, as well as to imagine a future without them.
This contribution offers to consider these artistic forms of collective, political action as community solidarity beyond the human. This paper will, moreover, interrogate the ways in which these arboreal, craftivist interventions reappropriate the traditional folk tradition of tree dressing, weaving new, more careful cultural and emotional relationships to trees and highlighting the active role and value of trees in local communities, of which trees are valued members.
Bio: Laura Ouillon is a doctoral student in British art history at the Research Laboratory on English-Speaking Cultures (LARCA – CNRS UMR 8225), Université Paris Cité, France, where she co-founded and co-run the research group ‘Environmental Humanities’ between 2020 and 2025. Her thesis examines the tree motif in the work of contemporary British artists in the light of the contemporary crises of national identity and climate change from the 1980s onwards. She has published articles in Burlington Contemporary and Etudes britanniques contemporaines.
Alicja Kochanowicz (University of Nicolaus Copernicus), “Dripping, Flowing, Soaking – How to Dissolve Art into Reality”
Abstract: My doctoral artistic-research project explores watery relations and marginalized landscapes shaped by capitalocenic extractive logics. For this presentation, I focus on three interconnected threads that reveal how wetlands—critical climate-stabilizing ecosystems—are drained, built over, or transformed into monocultures.
The first is Opolno-Zdrój, a former spa village disappearing under the Turów lignite mine. Here groundwater is drained and community life dismantled, yet post-artistic practices open fragile spaces of collective resilience.
The second is Winnica in Toruń, a Natura 2000 wetland threatened by a high-rise project. This case exposes the clash between urban extractivism and ecological protection, where wetlands are misperceived as wastelands rather than spaces of retention and biodiversity.
The third emerges in my work Fever, developed in the riverside landscape of the Vistula. Its central metaphor is mistletoe, a semi-parasite that thrives on human-made monocultures under climate stress. While draining resources and placing additional stress on host trees, mistletoe simultaneously nourishes birds and soils, redistributing matter and destabilizing monocultural order. It embodies a liminal, ambivalent agency: both a symptom of capitalocenic disruption and an unexpected agent of biodiversity.
My presentation will take the form of a performative reading combining theoretical reflection with field recordings. Drawing on Jerzy Ludwiński’s post-art, Stephen Wright’s usership, and Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminist “thinking with water,” I ask how post-artistic practices can dissolve into reality, strengthen climate resilience, and open collective imaginaries that resist extractivist logics and redirect toward the symbiocene.
Bio: Alicja Kochanowicz is an interdisciplinary artist and doctoral researcher based in Poland. She holds a BA in Photography from the University of the Arts in Poznań and an MA in Intermedia and Multimedia from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, where she is currently pursuing her PhD at Academia Artium Humaniorum. Her research investigates the intersection of post-artistic practices and climate resilience, focusing on wetlands and marginalized landscapes shaped by extractivist logics.
Her projects span multimedia, intermedia, and ephemeral forms, including performative readings, field recordings, and site-specific collaborations. They have been presented in exhibitions, workshops, and discursive formats. She is co-founder of the duo KWKO and the collective Wilgoć, and collaborates with The Office for Postartistic
Angela Tait (University of Salford), “Holders of Soup and Meaning: Clay as Feral Material in Contemporary Ecological Art”
Abstract: Clay is so abundant in our lives it risks invisibility: the humble cup of daily ritual, the monumental structure of collective ceremony, the sticky plaything of childhood. Yet this most primal of substances carries within it millennia of accumulation, pressure, and transformation. It is the Earth itself, pummelled by ice and fire, laden with possibility. This paper reframes clay as a feral material: one that resists mastery, pushes back at the hand, and insists upon its own agency.
Taking the Hayward Gallery’s 2022 exhibition Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art as a point of departure, I speculate on how artists working in ceramic are answering the urgencies of our ecological moment via animistic practices. Jonathan Baldock’s towering Facecrime demands we look up in reverence to creatures that are other-than-human. Leilah Babirye reclaims detritus as kinship, queering Buganda clans into regal presences. Lindsey Mendick’s vermin reoccupy the home, a reminder of the fragility of our domestic privilege. Klara Kristalova conjures hybrid beings who wander freely across the porous borders of human, animal, and plant. Brie Ruais wrestles with clay as body-to-body encounter with the Earth itself. Liu Jianhua’s porcelain flotsam stages excess as prophecy of disaster.
Clay’s unique characteristics—its plasticity, its alchemical permanence, its capacity to endure long after other art forms perish—make it a material through which artists address the entangled questions of the Anthropocene. Echoing Val Plumwood’s call to undo the “standpoint of mastery,” and attuned to contemporary animist imaginaries, ceramic practice operates in the speculative folds between object and subject, human and nonhuman, the everyday and the mythic.
I propose that clay, feral and abundant, is not simply a medium but a collaborator: an animate substance through which artists reimagine our place in turbulent ecological times, offering new ways to live with the Earth rather than above it.
Bio: Angela Tait is a sculptor and writer, primarily working in the field of expanded ceramics practice, investigating issues of the domestic and creative practice via the universally understood form of the vessel. Angela holds a PhD from the University of Sunderland and contributes book chapters, journal papers and other research outputs. She is a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and lectures on the Fine Art programme at the University of Salford.
Christina Goestl, “The Universe Is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose, It Is Queerer Than We Can Suppose”
Abstract: An experiment in storytelling that interweaves theory, poetry, the personal and the political to create a fable about the rich legacy of discourses on complexity and transformative processes in the sciences (namely zoology/biology) and the arts. It is a radical, anti-binary story about water, air, and sound that embraces diversity and celebrates coexistence—an invitation to turn from knowledge to thought, affection and vision.
Bio: Christina Goestl is an artist. She works in the fields of audiovisual live performance and digital video, utilising series, sequences, modulations and loops, superpositions, cut-ups and electronic impulses. Central aspects of her artistic work are rhythm, dynamics, movement and temporality, communicative interfaces and semiotic systems. Goestl has accumulated an extensive dossier of projects at the intersections of art/tech/science, many of them linked to a comprehensive reflection of sexualities and gender. (www.cccggg.net)