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Now that it's over what next

On the day of the presentation I finished writing my slides in the morning before heading over to the studio space.

It was nice to watch all the other groups present their artefacts because I had not interacted with the other groups much. I had no idea what they would be presenting.

When discussing the presentation of the artefact with the group the majority wanted to speak only once. Louie wanted to go first so we agreed that for coherence his slide should contain the research and development of our idea as well as his contribution to the artefact. While the rest of us just talked about our contribution.

What I noticed from the presentations before ours, that I responded to the most, was that they would go back and forth between the group members. They would each talk a bit about the development of the idea and the research and their contribution.

I feel like adopting that method would have given our presentation more depth. I had researched biodiversity and other topics that I didn’t include because it wasn’t exactly relevant to my role in creating the artefact so I had left them out. If we had each added our research to the slide show and presented under the ‘everyone speaks once’ method I think it would have felt less organised.

I felt like I didn’t speak for very long and when looking at all the things my other group members had put into the project it made me felt like I had done the least. I only managed to create two drawings when my original idea had been full-page comic strips.

But when I really thought about it I realised that although I hadn’t produced a lot of the end product, many aspects of the artefact had been my ideas.

The whole concept of making a physical book had been one I had expressed to Louie when he had first mentioned he had already written a story on deforestation that he thought was relevant. This is because I had always wanted to try book-binding. 

I have always struggled with following through with my ideas. I’m always full of energy in the beginning but by the time I’m halfway through I’m bored with the idea or have no motivation to continue.

This is why working in a group has been so valuable. I had others to hold me somewhat accountable. I was very to have been in a group that collaborated so well. Although if I could do this module again I'd like to be involved in a different part of making the artefact like writing or something with textiles.

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Actually getting your hands dirty

Our final idea is essentially a guidebook on activism. Encouraging the practice of tree spiking in young people. This is the act of hammering metal nails into trees so they can't be cut down. The book will be a mixed media scrapbook type thing.

The making of the artefact was quite individual. Louie’s task was to rewrite his short story to fit within the context of the brief and changing the setting to Portsmouth. Emma was to make the character sheets and Charmaine was going to make the cover and the pop-up page to go in the centre. My self-appointed role in the project was to create comic book pages the most important scenes in Louie’s story. These were the opening scene at a dinner table and the birth of a lamb. For the opening scene I had the layout in my mind. A large establishing shot of the kitchen and dining room showing all the characters sitting around the table at the top of the page and then smaller images of the characters with their dialogue further down the page.

I started with a rough sketch of the establishing shot and through the use of reference images added detail to the furniture and characters. Unfortunately, the drawing was taking much longer than I expected. I asked Louie if he thought full comic pages were still a good idea. He thought that it would be better to just do illustrations of to go along with those scenes because the dialogue was quite extensive and wouldn’t fit on the page. This was way easier for me to accomplish.

A little later in the project Charmaine had the idea of making a book stand, her idea was a tree like hand. She made the base on her own from scrap material but I offered to help with the process of the since she wanted to make it out of clay but had never worked with it before. We ended spending about 3 hours moulding the clay. Then once we had something that resembled a hand we went outside to get pieces of bark to add texture the model. It was once we had finished  the hand that it fell on the floor. It was flat on one side when I picked it up so we spent another hour remoulding it until it could hold up the book prototype.

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Listening and learning

Over the last three weeks in class we’ve had a series of guest lecturers come in and share their creative processes. The first session was from Abigail Burt who talked about the varying ways that she uses creativity to respond to biodiversity. One comment that Abigail made during her presentation really stuck with me and that was ‘textured, handmade items lend themselves to biodiversity which is something I’ll definitely consider in my artefact.

The second session was around the time where I was trying lots of techniques to try and help me to pay attention during lectures which I had been finding increasingly difficult. My method for that day was sketch note taking to stay engaged and retain more information. Below is the page I produced during the presentation.

 The speaker that day was Nigel George from Artecology, an organisation that focuses on crafting handmade ‘intentional habitats’ for building biodiversity and bio-abundance. Nigel’s presentation introduced me to the concept of bio-receptivity which is when something encourages the growth of plants and plant-like organisms like mosses or lichens. The idea of a surface being bioreceptive is essentially the same thing that Abigail was talking about when she was referring to texture. Later in the day we were given the opportunity look at and touch some of the Nigel’s examples of bio-receptive sculpture that he and his colleagues had made.

Then we made our own. When making my sculpture I focused on the texture and creating something enclosed for potential organisms to reside in.

I was most interested in the third speaker so it was unfortunate that this was the session I was late to. This session was on storytelling and led by Tom Sykes a professional creative writer. Tom’s presentation was focused on non-fiction writing which is creative writing route that I hadn’t yet considered. He mentioned that the first step in writing non-fiction is whittling down the chaos of life into a narrative. Writers are to be selective when deciding on what to add to their story, if it gives you an emotional reaction it will likely give your reader an emotional reaction. Tom also recommended the book The sense of style written by Steven Pinker on developing a writing style will be helpful for my personal projects.

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Picking the important bits

Based on the research on biodiversity I’ve done so far I’ve concluded that the overexploitation of natural resources is the most significant threat to biodiversity. This includes overfishing, deforestation and the

How does deforestation affect biodiversity?

Forests provide shelter, food and water.

Many species coexist within and beneath the canopy of the trees

Forests contain some of the richest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet

420 million hectares of mainly tropical forest was lost between 1990 and 2020.

10 million hectares in being lost per year.

17% of the Amazon rainforest has been deforested

The 2 main causes of destruction of habitats are logging for timber, clearing forests for agriculture and grazing.

Tropical and subtropical forests are fragmented. This affects species that require large territories and increases isolation in animals and plants, limiting the gene pool.

In summary forest loss often results in a significant change in the mix of species that live there as some will thrive and others will be lost.

Overfishing and biodiversity

Biodivesity allows nature to be productive, resilient and adaptable to the environmental changes.

Resilient ecosystems keep functioning even when population of species declines or a species becomes extinct.

An ecosystem is considered to be functioning when natural processes such as storing carbon and filtering water still occur.

Marine ecosystems that are resilient and biodiverse are one with a wide variety of species with each playing an essential role. For example krill provide food for whale while bluefin tuna prey on small fish to keep populations in check.

Overfishing impacts both the fish targeted and the marine life it interacts with.

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Starting out

The purpose of this blog is to document the research and development of a group response to the issue of biodiversity. The brief for this project states that our objective is to increase the biodiversity in a particular environment or setting. The response can be literal or focus on influencing people’s behaviour, particularly the demographic of 18-25 year olds. We are required to produce and dynamic, creative response that takes on influences from existing eco artists and not only tackles biodiversity but also models positive ways to make ecological art.

According to the WWF, biodiversity is the variety of animals plants, fungi and microorganisms like bacteria that make up our world. Each organism in an ecosystem works together to maintain balance and support life. Humans rely on biodiversity just as all organisms do.

The main causes of biodiversity loss are:

Land use change

Exploitation of wildlife (fishing, logging and hunting)

Overexploiting Earth’s natural resources and converting natural habitats into farms, factories, roads and cities. In the ocean, we overfishing drilling and mining.

Cities and towns have a smoothing effect on biodiversity, tending to favour generalist species like feral pigeons.

Since the purpose of this module is to get involved with other disciplines I hope that will get the opportunity to do some creative writing. Making books and writing has always been at the back of my mind although my course of study is unrelated. I had done some research on bookbinding in the past and some examples that inspired me were the wedding guest books from The Eloise Bindery. These books were handmade and I love the way that the spines look.

It was quite lucky that the first member of my group that I met was a creative writing student. He had also already written a story on deforestation (relevant to the brief) that he wanted to use for the project. Naturally, I immediately explained my idea for creating a book. In my mind it was going be this huge tome with a hard cover maybe made from a sustainable leather substitute. He had something more like a zine in mind and he suggested creating a model or sculpture to go along with it. Of course, we can’t be sure that the other members of the group will be receptive to the idea but it was just the two of us today so we’ll have to see.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/268143139/bespoke-wedding-guest-book-hand-bound?click_key=f13fd93f87856c6797620545aa152c84b1bee4bb%3A268143139&click_sum=b39a7515&ref=shop_home_active_33&frs=1

https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/what-is-biodiversity

Image reference

https://forestryandland.gov.scot/what-we-do/biodiversity-and-conservation/biodiversity