Introduction
This 2025 edition of The Journal of Art & Ecology presents artistic research by MA Art & Ecology graduating artists Orla Forrest, Jayson Fowler, Adriana Gallo, Megan Willow Hack, Sohyn Kim, Kalika Kulukundis, Renata Minoldo, Jooyeong Moon, Grace O’Leary, Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu, Fajrina Razak, Shama Sahzayasin, Yasmin Smith, Amanda Simon, Lili Süper, Delphine Tomes and Ella Yolande Porter. The sounds, images and writings gathered here provide a glimpse into their creative process and the curiosities and concerns of artists who confront what it means to make work in the context of ongoing ecocides and an emboldened far right. Rather than slipping into despondency, the work is propositional, relational and critical. It delves into folk horror; resistant acts of shitting in the woods; the magic of wheat metabolisms and surplus value; ghostly animations of fine particulate matter; a practice of tree grieving that extends across and beyond institutional space; sculptural ephemerality; mineral and sensorial intimacies; poetics and ethics of salt; the liminality of capitalist ruins; shapeshifting and reclaiming as tactics against hyper-development; island longings and more-than-human ancestry; interspecies solidarity; the daylighting of buried rivers; deep time chemistry; the Second Body; arboreal electronics; and lichen protocols.
Throughout these last fifteen months, this cohort have prompted me to rethink foraging and gleaning as modes of artistic research. Foraging and gleaning are embodied practices that persist at the margins of colonial modernity, subject to regimes of surveillance and policing and sometimes mounting a challenge to private property and consumer society. If foraging is a practice premised on a logic of abundance and an ethics of mutuality, it offers an alternative to a logic of competition and scarcity. To be a forager is to inhabit a mode of ecological belonging and reciprocity grounded in practice rather than inheritance. A foraging gaze is one attuned to seasonal and cosmic cycles, to subtle changes in the weather, to local knowledge and skills in reading whether the more-than-human world is willing to offer you a gift.
Gleaning, by contrast, seems to offer a way of inhabiting a society organised around the fear of never having enough, which ironically involves producing huge amounts of waste – wasted materials, wasted food, wasted people, wasted environments – from lands, waterways and communities decimating by environmental and social harms to the thousands of tabs and images and junk emails stored in your phone. Beyond the ethically laudable repurposing of debris in the pursuit of a more sustainable approach to materials, for some of the artists included here gleaning is a process of summoning witnesses to toxic transmission – the often invisible and slow violence of pollution that circulates through bodies and planetary systems. Gleaning might then be understood as a practice of sorting through the wreckage, of looking for signs of other cosmologies, more-than-human ancestors and resurgent futures that persist in the ruins.
Crucially, this cohort has engaged critically with the ecological weight of the computational, tackling the contradictions of virtual economies that seem to promise a liberation from the physical world, but increasingly make an unsustainable demand on planetary resources while amplifying techno-fascism. Some of the artists presented here have embraced the aesthetics of low carbon digital making, though not to distract from the responsibility of corporations and governments. Rather, in a world of instant gratification and the propinquity of excessive consumption with sacrifice zones, foraging, gleaning and permacomputing involve a willingness to live with contingency, embrace collaboration, to linger in the fermented juices of in-betweenness while we decide what it is we wish to preserve.
Dr Ros Gray
Programme Director, MA Art & Ecology