- Venue
- Hypha Gallery 2
- Date
- Saturday, April 19, 2025
02:00 PM - Address
- Sugar House Island, 107 High Street, London E15 2RB
- Location
- South East England
- Organiser
- Shifting Grounds
Diagrams have power. They can show relationships, dynamics, mechanisms, compatibilities; they have the potential to dehierarchicalise information and help us grapple with complexity; they can upend our understanding of the world we live in. Right now we are breaching multiple ecological limits while the authoritarian right becomes ever more powerful. To paraphrase theorist and artist Simon O’Sullivan, what diagrams do we need to get us out of this impasse?
In her 2021 book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira describes modernity as a worlding story, one that presents itself “as a general project of civilisation that seeks to engineer society through humanism, reason, science, progress, and technology” but that rests on foundations of violent extraction, exploitation and ecocide that are leading to climate breakdown. We need to enable modernity to die a good death in order for something better – and liveable – to be born; but we will only be able to create something genuinely different if we can first become aware, and suspicious, of what modernity allows us to desire and imagine.
Drawing on de Oliveira’s idea of the diagram as entity, something that moves things in the world, artist Jane Lawson hosts a session in which we will ponder and draw our way through how diagrams can be a part of modernity’s end-of-life care, touching on core questions such as:
- Do we need to imagine the future before we can build it?
- In what ways can diagrams help us face our reality with humility and accountability?
- How can diagrams show multiple contradictory truths?
- Can new forms of diagram help us visualise a new kind of future?
Bring things that you enjoy drawing with and on!
Jane Lawson works with diagrams in order to understand the structures and processes that shape the world we live in, and with fungi to try and loosen the grip of capitalist realism on our collective imagination. She is influenced by the US Radical Mycology movement which posits that close contact with the resilient and interconnected lifeworlds of fungi can help us learn how to come into better relations to other beings and the world around us.
Before training as an artist, Jane was a climate activist and a writer-researcher for Ethical Consumer magazine. Jane was part of the ten-strong group that co-curated Manchester Art Gallery’s Climate Justice gallery in 2021/2, using the Gallery’s collection to highlight narratives around colonialism and extractivism. She is also Artist Environmental Lead at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, where she leads on the gallery’s environmental reporting and action plans, provide enviro data for our funders and stakeholders, feeds into various aspects of the gallery’s activities, and provides admin support for the SPARK network of artists wanting to intervene in the climate crisis.
Her badly-in-need-of-updating website is janelawson.co.uk and Insta is @msjanelawson
Tickets
Standard rate £8.00
Concessionary rate £4.00 (Please select this option if you think it’s appropriate – it’s broadly but not exclusively aimed at those on low incomes and/or disabled)
Book at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/diagrams-are-a-worlds-best-friend-workshop-tickets-1308711273649; tickets also available on the door
This workshop is part of the public programme for the exhibition Shifting Grounds https://www.a-n.co.uk/events/shifting-grounds/ by Unground Collective; all proceeds go towards exhibition costs.
Shifting Grounds is supported by HYPHA STUDIOS
Image
Design work for Soil Fungus Carbon Care (2021), part of publication Tender Order by Jade Montserrat and We Industria
