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Towards multispecies justice: non-anthropocentric ecocritical methods and practices
Full text linkThis article examines contemporary artistic practices that challenge entrenched Western binaries such as nature/culture and human/animal, proposing new frameworks for perceiving and engaging with the more-than-human world in the context of the Anthropocene. Through four case studies—The Embassy of the North Sea, Gustafsson & Haapoja’s Museum of Nonhumanity, Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind, and Kyriaki Goni’s Data Garden—the article explores how interdisciplinary, research-based art practices reconfigures human-nonhuman relations, critiques extractivist logics and present alternative ways of engaging with ecological crises.
Drawing on frameworks from eco-criticism, aesthetic theory, and Indigenous cosmologies, the article introduces the concepts of non-anthropocentric institutionalism and plant-human entanglement as theoretical tools to rethink environmental agency, legal representation, and techno-ecological coexistence. Haraway’s notion of natureculture helps articulate entangled ontologies, while Rancière’s distribution of the sensible and T.J. Demos’s ecocritical aesthetics frame artistic practices as political acts of ontological intervention that challenge what is seen, heard, and valued.
These works do not merely represent environmental crises — they intervene in political structures by advocating for the rights of nonhuman entities, envisioning speculative futures, and fostering multi-species justice. Biemann integrates shamanic knowledge and Indigenous epistemologies; Goni speculates on symbiotic data systems between plants and machines. The Embassy of the North Sea pioneers sensory-based advocacy for marine legal personhood, while the Museum of Nonhumanity deconstructs species hierarchies rooted in colonial scientific taxonomies. Through their aesthetic strategies, these practices create spaces for critical reflection and action, particularly concerning ecological justice and the environmental impacts of human activities
Creative Dilemmas: Balancing Open Access and Integrity
Full text linkThis article reflects on two research enabling practitioners’ (REPs) experiences related to making creative research outputs open. The REPs operate within a small specialist institution that is a research organisation (RO) focusing on the creative arts where open research is an embedded part of the RO’s research culture. Many of the RO’s academics are practice-based researchers whose research is disseminated through non-traditional output types such as artefacts, exhibitions, designs and videos.
However, there are tensions when making creative outputs open that can lead to ethical dilemmas faced by REPs and researchers, including issues related to informed consent, intellectual property and reuse of the research. These tensions are illustrated by examining three examples of creative outputs where issues have arisen where the inter-relationships of open research, ethics and integrity are explored through vignettes.
The findings of this article recommend continued training for researchers about the use of licences for creative works. Another recommendation calls for inclusive and transparent processes that support researchers in gaining justice when the intellectual property from their open access research outputs has been reused in a manner which contradicts the principles of research integrity
Paula Chambers: Still. Stray. Stowaway.
Full text linkPaula Chambers: Still. Stray. Stowaway. is a solo exhibition by British artist and academic Paula Chambers, held at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University from 23 May to 27 September 2025. Curated by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Marianna Tsionki, the exhibition presents a constellation of sculptural assemblages, interventions, and installations that interrogate the domestic sphere as a contested site of feminist resistance, material transformation, and personal negotiation. The exhibition brings together new works and previously exhibited pieces, many of which were developed through Chambers’ nomadic method of transporting her sculptures in a suitcase. This mobile approach enables site-responsive configurations and challenges the assumption that artworks must exist within stable, institutional settings to be recognised or valued.
The title Still. Stray. Stowaway. encapsulates the exhibition’s central themes—embodied acts of defiance, transgression, and survival—while highlighting the precariousness of domestic life and the porous boundaries between private and public space. A key focus of the exhibition is the relationship between feminist material practices and the sculptural object as both a vessel of memory and a mode of resistance. The works on view blur distinctions between care and containment, protection and control, visibility and marginalisation
Learning Returns: The limitations and benefits of ‘snowballing recruitment’ as a process when researching the learning journeys of adults returning to education
Full text linkAn arts-based research project, Learning Returns, was designed to capture the learning journeys of mature learners. The participants had all returned to study the arts after being away from education and training. They undertook many routes back into education. Arts-based methods incorporating film-making were the means employed to record their stories (Broadhead and Hooper, 2024). Recruitment of the participants was continuous throughout the project and adopted a ‘snowballing’ approach. This involved the nomination by the participants of other potentially eligible people who could also make valuable contributions.
Snowballing is not unproblematic as it is reliant on the social capital of the participants, and this could inadvertently exclude possible candidates from the research investigation. On the other hand, recruiting participants through data from institutions depends on who is identified as a legitimate learner, and this can also lead to exclusions of those learning in informal settings.
This chapter reflects on how the snowballing strategy allowed for new insights to be gained about how mature learners become part of cultural ecologies, keeping in mind that only people who are part of these networks are identified as possible participants. It also shows how adult learners can play an important role in widening access to arts education
Embodied Dreaming
Full text linkThe output is an exhibition consisting of 53 pieces of Gaffney’s sculpture, drawing, lens media and moving image work from 1979-2024 alongside written text.
Research process: The space of the gallery was a key knowledge instrument in the curatorial process and integral to the decisions regarding selection of artefacts and their installation. To explore this, Gaffney employed collage as a non-vocal iterative method (de Rijke, 2024). The collaging method enabled mutually agreed visual and spatial decisions for effective visitor experience, acting as vehicles to hold the conceptualisation of ideas of play in the research. These visualisations enabled an exhibition infrastructure designed to amplify the desired tacit dissemination of artefacts and mediation of exhibition content.
Research insights: The exhibition highlighted the material outcomes of processes and considerations at the core of Gaffney’s feminist writing about making sculpture. The concept of time in psychoanalysis is an important part of Gaffney’s research inquiry; particularly the timelessness of the unconscious, where past, present, and future are intertwined. These concepts were made manifest in the exhibition by displaying individual artefacts dating from 1979 and the 1980s alongside works made in 2024. Several pieces that had been formerly been exhibited singly were now curated alongside works hitherto unseen. The exhibition presented a proposition for how time functions in artistic research. It challenged the display norm of time, which is typically represented by the date a work is created, as a linear indicator of the development of an artist’s research.
Dissemination: First made available to the public at Blenheim Walk Galley, 4 October 2024 - 11 January 2025, accompanied by a publication. Exhibition at Blenheim Walk was included as part of Light Night 2024, 24-25 October 2024. There was a recorded public “in conversation” event at Leeds Arts University on 20 November 2024, now available on YouTube
Unseen Narratives: Data Visualisation through the Looking-Glass
Full text linkThis practical investigation considers how data-visualisation can map Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the theme of ‘choice’ and how the characters traverse throughout Carroll’s text. Data collection and visualisation are illustrative methods used to analyse the language in the text through Distant Reading, a method that seeks to map the text as data as opposed to a complete piece of prose. I am interested in this chapter in data as a means to illuminate the unseen or to quote computational media artist George Legrady “make visible the invisible” (Gil, I. 2010). Utilising simple geometry as part of a “data-drawing vocabulary” (Lupi G. 2017) to visualise the possibilities embedded in the narrative and subsequently the alternative hidden narratives. As such, this investigation proffers the following question: can geometry be used to visualise data from the text in unforeseen ways to explore the infinite probabilities and possibilities?
The mirror, as both a material object and a conduit for reflection and multiplicities, can be understood as a portal to parallel happenings between Dodgson’s life and the narrative within the text. If we are to believe that an atom can exist in an infinite number of places at any one time, up until the point that it is seen, then potentially all possibilities exist until a choice is made. Can Dodgson’s mirror allow us to view the infinite? Are the choices made by Alice, a manifestation of the unseen choices that could, should, were and are made by Dodgson in a different moral universe?
Utilising mathematical and systematic methods, via data-visualisation, allows for illuminating the text and its themes in unforeseen ways. Therefore, through studying the looking-glass as a manifestation of ‘choice’, this paper seeks to examine Dodgson’s multiverse, where familiarity becomes uncanny, possibilities infinite and ‘a world in which things go every way except the way they are supposed to’ (Gardener, M. 1965)
Three Countries, one Method: A Comparativistic Study of how SDG Awareness is Developed in Adult Education in the UK, Germany, and Spain
Full text linkThis qualitative paper utilises an international-comparativistic approach. It considers the similarities and differences between three case studies set in adult learning and education (ALE) centres in the UK, Germany and Spain. It illustrates how, using an arts-based workshop, Connected Art, could aid in developing ALE awareness of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, (SDGs). It compares the social, cultural and political contexts of ALE in art across the case studies. There will be discussions on the weaknesses and strengths whether there are some good practices worth ‘borrowing’ around art pedagogy and what might the consequences of SDG led art practice for adult learners might be
How can arts-based methods support narrative inquiry into adult learning in the arts?
Full text linkThis article considers an arts-based project, Learning Returns (2023), that seeks to capture the experiences of adults who have returned to arts study after some time away from formal education. The aims of the project are twofold: firstly, to evaluate the combination of narrative inquiry and digital film-making hosted on YouTube as a method of investigating adult learning and secondly, through an analysis of the Learning Returns content, to discover what themes the participants considered important to communicate to an imagined, virtual audience. The findings suggested that the aesthetics of the videos/films interconnect with the lived experiences of the participants. The participants were able to give an account of their experiences spontaneously, and at the same time communicate messages of hope to prospective adult returners. It was also discovered that the editing process offers a means of analysing the content of the films that is analogous to the approaches associated with qualitative research
Sheila Gaffney: Embodied Dreaming
Full text linkEmbodied Dreaming accompanies the exhibition of the same name by British artist and academic Prof. Sheila Gaffney, held at the Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University from 4 October 2024 to 11 January 2025. Edited by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Marianna Tsionki it features a curatorial introduction by Tsionki, and a new essay by the acclaimed feminist postcolonial and social art historian Prof. Griselda Pollock, which situates Gaffney’s practice and Pollock’s own relationship to it in a history of women artists and their practices of making, from the 1860s to the 1970s until today. The texts are accompanied by full colour images of Gaffney’s work.
Sheila Gaffney’s Embodied Dreaming is a comprehensive exhibition that highlights the artist’s diverse body of work, including sculptures, drawings, video installations, and unseen process-based models. Curated to reflect Gaffney’s interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition emphasizes the importance of materiality and process in her practice, drawing connections between the physical act of making and theoretical exploration. Inspired by Gaffney’s doctoral thesis, the show integrates psychoanalytic theory and feminist aesthetics, offering a nuanced examination of identity, memory, and embodiment. The curatorial focus is on the evolution of Gaffney’s sculptural language, balancing tradition with innovation and offering insight into her creative journey.
Sheila Gaffney: Embodied Dreaming is an Open Access publication published by RSS Press, which can be downloaded from the LAU repository and RSS website
Oops, I Did It Again! The Humour of Incongruity, Risk-Taking and Creativity in Art Practice and Everyday Life
Full text linkThis article explores the incongruous results of creativity and risk-taking within art practice and everyday life as encountered through the photographic image. The impetus for this study was a humorous experience that took place during health and safety training that raised questions about the role of humour within everyday life. Research was conducted into two forms of visual media, including pamphlets and guides from the British Safety Council (BSC) archives and viral images that demonstrate accidents (tagged with an ‘epic fail’ hashtag). This led to a practice-based approach to research involving the production of photographic works for an exhibition that tested the role of risk-taking and improvisation within the creative process. This article uses humour theory including superiority, incongruity and relief theory in relation to Louise Peacock’s model for the analysis of slapstick, to analyse these different types of photographs and draws comparisons between the risk-taking creative behaviours of both employees and artists. These creative approaches are considered in relation to Michel de Certeau’s notion of tactics within everyday life. Ordinary thinking and improvisational tactics are present within both art and work, and improvisation heightens the potential for risk-taking. This may lead to incongruities represented through a photograph which can impact the viewer’s engagement through humour, fascination or self-reflexivity. It is proposed that the viewer response to images containing risk is made up of a balance between an embodied understanding of the dangers and an awareness of the artifice, which can shift depending on the conditions of the photograph’s production and display. The peculiarities of the photograph are seen as conducive to a humour response because of the photograph’s ambiguous relationship with the reality that it represents