“Minecraft my home” is an ongoing activity as part of my “Working with Gold” programme of public art in St Loyes. It is a re-creation of St Loyes as a world in the Minecraft game. During Art Week Exeter, I held a meetup to explore the world together, share what we have been creating, and build more stuff.
In which I was a creative lead at a MozFest Fringe hack day, and also tinkered with Javascript to create some generative weather forecast poetry in motion.
Further to yesterday’s post about my five-minute talk “Working with gold, weaving with data” at Exeter City Futures, I thought I’d share more of the talk content.
Exeter City Futures’ Connect events are an opportunity to share ideas on the big problems that they believe Exeter needs to solve as it transitions towards becoming energy independent and congestion free. At the Autumn Connect, I presented my developing vision for a programme of art in St Loyes, aimed at nurturing a sense of place and building community.
I’ve been playfully exploring my local area for a number of years, its history, geography, biodiversity, archaeology, and myth – some invented! This Kaleider Lunchtime Talk was a shout-out to anyone with an interest in any aspect of place-based art and/or who lives in St Loyes.
Today, my “Little colouring books of climate mindfulness” popped up in the Exeter University Forum alongside “Green|Blue: Exe”. I was doing a colour-by-numbers activity as part of “Think…Art”, a day of free fun artistic activities linked to the University’s research themes.
This was my second trip to Pint of Science. In 2015, I took “Particulart” into The Ship Inn. In 2017, it was the turn of both “Green|Blue” and “Little Colouring Books” in the Exeter Phoenix workshop room. With a small bar in the corner, pints were assured.
I introduced my new work and together we explored “GreenlBlue”, which uses flood risk data from the Environment Agency to question our knowledge and power in the face of uncertainty and the force of nature.
For the second time, I was at Greenbelt giving a PechaKucha about my artwork. Last year it was about “Particulart”. This year I was showing “Particulart” in the Allotment Shed gallery on Sunday, and my PechaKucha on Saturday was about my work and motivations more generally.
Finally on the Saturday we could get down to the real painting. It was brilliant to see most of the Freefall group join us for a session outside their regular Thursday evening slot.
Making the stencils was a big job, literally. We are going to build up the images from a base layer of the main colour, and add the other colours as layers on top. It means we can be canny re what stencils we need.
While the Freefall youth group took it in turns to bluewash the Phoenix graffiti wall… the Met Office knitting group gave the others a crash course in crafting, and much crochet and more pompoms were created.
This week and the next two weeks Cleo Heard and I are running workshops with the Freefall youth group in preparation for painting the Phoenix graffiti wall with the UK Climate Projections during Art Week Exeter. As well as climate science and street art, Workshop 1 also covered design for colour blindness.
Abingdon is my home town, so I took the opportunity to be a visiting speaker at the Carbon Cutters monthly meeting.
Exeter Pound is the city’s own currency, aimed at supporting independent enterprises and promoting a more flourishing local economy. From 2015-16 I served on the Board of the Exeter Pound Community Interest Company.
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts,
or given understanding to the mind?
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?
Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
— Job 38:36-37
Drawing on my work at the Met Office, on the Shrinking the Footprint campaign in the Diocese of Exeter, as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, as a member of Transition Exeter, and while living in the eco-monastery at Mucknell Abbey.
PechaKucha is a new way of doing Powerpoint presentations. There are 20 slides, which must be images only, and they change automatically every 20 seconds, so the talk is only 6 minutes 40 seconds in total. It becomes more of a performance than a presentation.
As part of the Particulart: Up in the Air exhibition, Diana Moore of Particulart and Knit-Stop ran a knit-your-own carbon dioxide workshop.
On Monday 18th May, I took “Particulart” into the unfamiliar territory – The Ship Inn in the middle of Exeter – as part of the annual worldwide Pint of Science festival.
Last night, at somewhat short notice, I stepped into a breach and gave a St Michael’s Lecture. I liked the title so much, I adopted it for the work.
On the 3rd Sunday of each month, Holy Trinity Church Exmouth runs a Hard Questions Café, where tough life questions can be explored in a frank and non-judgemental way. Here are the stories and questions I used.
During 2009/10 I worked as a consultant on the Shrinking the Footprint campaign in the Diocese of Exeter, and the following year lived in the eco-monastery at Mucknell Abbey.
This evening, I’ve been asked to talk about Prayer, I suppose because I have a practice of contemplative prayer and am about to go and live alongside a monastic community. Trouble is, how do I express the inexpressible? Here is roughly what I want to say.
Talks and conference papers given as part of my work at the Met Office during 2005-07 on health forecasting and anticipatory care.
