GROUNDWORK-ARTIST ANNOUNCEMENT
Over the past ten years, a groundswell of artists within our membership have been dedicating their attention and practice to environmental and ecological concerns; climate emergency and activism. Not just in concept or content, but by explicitly interrogating, and altering, ‘the how, the way, the why’ of dancing and making work.
Ground Work brings together a working group of six artist members who have been exploring such ecological practice within their artistic work. The selected artists responded to an open call to join the working group in December 2023. They will come together at several points throughout early 2024 for a series of group meetings and practical research trips to explore the following questions from the perspective of independent dance artists, their practice and as members of The Work Room:
- What does ‘an environmental policy’ mean for independent dance artists in Scotland today and tomorrow?
- What does careful resource management look like for us?
- What’s unique and/or particular to our needs? How can we make change through acts of reciprocity?
- What and how can this be shared across our membership; Glasgow, Scotland and beyond?
- What can we do, together, that is tangible, timebound and relevant?
The artists involved in Ground Work are:
Amy Dakin Harris (she/her)
Amy is an interdisciplinary artist and land worker, who facilitates multiple community growing projects around Glasgow. Her movement practice currently investigates how embodiment can help create a more expansive and integrated view of regenerative [growing/life-sustaining] principles. Central to this research are ideas and practices around mutual aid, rest, interoception and conversation with land.
Drawing on a recent course in degrowth economics with The Centre for Human Ecology, and research into embodied grief practices, Amy will share tools for situating our collective experience of ecological destruction in our growth-oriented society and propose rituals for moving through difficult emotions that arise from this, together.
Emily Nicholl (she/they)
Emily is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and producer, creating in the places between. With a background in environmental education, and circus arts, she hopes to collaborate in ways which consider our varying sensory and political relationships with the outdoors and the overlapping roles of artist, neighbour, citizen, and friend.
Informed by circus arts and the way they consider how we trust, support, carry, hold and are responsible to each other, and reciprocal, solidarity focused frameworks, Emily will share approaches to nurturing our embodied relationships with our natural surroundings and centring ecological justice into the ‘how’ of the practicalities of producing, touring and sharing practice and performance.
Hamshya Rajkumar (they/them)
Hamshya is an interdisciplinary artist who navigates through embodied movement, intention, and ritual. By situating the body outside the constraints of binary structures, they explore our human place in a world where ‘Nature’ is separate, dominated and objectified. They enter long-term relationships with sites, ‘researching’ slowly and seasonally, in hopes of creating works which embody an intra-species alliance.
Combining a site-specific movement and visual arts practice; currently they focus on highly ‘disturbed’ places: ranging from post-industrial landscapes to gardens. They draw experience from their part time MSc in Wildlife Biology (& Conservation), working in the conservation sector and community engagement for the Glasgow Seed Library. Hamshya brings to the group a rich knowledge and keen interest to continue learning about how we can consciously participate in the movement Ecology of Glasgow.
Hannah Deus Draper (they/she)
Hannah is a dance artist, facilitator, community arts worker and dance writer with a background in visual arts and curation. Their research focuses on the body's relationship to land and finding new ways of being with the non-human world, relating to deep time, finding and making kin-making practices and developing long-term thinking.
With an increasing focus on climate and environmental issues and land-based research in their practice over the last few years, Hannah is interested in investigating embodied approaches to the climate crisis and how issues of place-based practice can be embedded through sensory and embodied engagement with histories and sites. They will bring research around movement scores, tools and practices that consider how to balance representation and imaginary futures in creative practice and how these approaches could be a means for considering wider environmental policies for art making at this time.
Melissa Heywood (she/her)
Melissa is a contemporary dance artist from Scotland and a founding member of The Grounding Project; a multinational dance collective working within the environmental arts sector, to share the stories of our planet and its people. The collective aims to encourage wellbeing through dancing and reconnecting with nature whilst galvanising support for climate activism through their art.
Recognising a lot of inaccessibility in the language we use when talking about sustainable practices, climate change and other environmental topics, Melissa is motivated to contribute to the creation of accessible resources that address the implementation of sustainable and environmentally conscious practices in the dance industry. She will share the movement practices that she has developed through her research which focus on understanding ecology through an embodied practice that draws on our innate human responses to nature.
Penny Chivas (she/her)
Penny is a Glasgow-based dance artist, originally from Ngunnawal Country, Australia, who has a long-standing practice in performing, teaching and sharing varying improvisational practices in a broad range of community, professional and inclusive dance settings.
Drawing on her Masters research into how arts practices in the UK have been responding since the Declaration of a Climate Emergency in 2019, Penny is interested in the role the arts can play in considering our outlook and mental health as it relates to climate change. Having recently delivered a sustainable approach to touring her work Burnt Out, and completing Climate Literacy training with Climate NI, Penny proposes sharing practical and policy level thinking around funding sources, materials and how we treat and work with collaborators as a microcosm of how we need to address climate justice. She’s excited to stir up trouble, in a collaborative and caring way, to push for further change in the dance sector in Scotland.
This working group and research are part of our commitment to foregrounding the needs and perspectives of practicing independent artists - via mutual learning and sharing diverse embodied approaches to addressing these issues and concerns - as we continue to question, explore and evolve The Work Room’s organisational approach to the Climate Crisis.
We look forward to working with Amy, Emily, Hamshya, Hannah, Mellissa and Penny on Ground Work and thank all members who applied for the working group for their interest in supporting this work and their time and consideration in applying.
Ground Work is supported by the Glasgow Life Arts Development Fund
