Respond, Represent, Repair

Eco-anxiety has become a common term used to describe emotional responses to the climate crisis, and yet doesn’t fully capture how people are experiencing different forms of ecological distress around the world. Artists have been using their work to respond, and attempt to represent eco-anxiety in creative ways, while working with natural and human-made substances to repurpose, and repair our material and emotional connections to our environments.

This event features research by Dr Bridget Bradley on ecological emotions, alongside two of her artistic collaborators, Liz Atkin and Jenny Pope. Combining research and practice, the discussion and workshop will explore the potential for artists and academics to respond, represent and repair the destruction, change and loss in a time of ecological crisis.

This event is supported by an event grant awarded by the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews.

Event Schedule

2:00 pm – Welcome
2:05 pm – Bridget Bradley
2:35 pm – Jenny Pope
2:50 pm – Liz Atkin
3:05 pm – Q&A
3:35 pm – Workshop with Liz Atkin
4:35 pm – Discussion and Reflection

About the Speakers

Bridget Bradley is an anthropologist who works on mental health, kinship and activism in Britain. Since 2021, she has been researching ecological emotions and climate action among families. More recently, this work has developed into an interest in the arts, focusing on charcoal and plastic as materials with unique properties that open up creative conversations surrounding care, harm and connection in times of crisis.

Liz Atkin is an artist and educator. She reimagines her Compulsive Skin Picking and anxiety into drawings, photographs and performances. Liz is a mental health advocate, exhibiting, teaching art and raising awareness for her disorder around the world. Her artwork and an archive of her advocacy for skin picking is held by the Wellcome Collection.

Jenny Pope is an artist who makes thoughtful, playful responses to contemporary issues enabling audiences to engage constructively with their emotions, creating space for reflection and positive changes. She uses recycled objects to focus her practice of making a difference to the climate crisis, experimenting with their limits and using the analogy of weathering of objects to suggest the uncertainty and changes we all face.