Earlier this year, we ran a poster competition for the Energy-in-Motion Conference. This was open to all students of the organising Universities – St Andrews, Dundee and the University of Otago. The brief was to create a promotional poster which represented the artist’s interpretations of one or more of the main conference themes which included: care, climate futures, time, activism and emotion.
We are very excited to be able to name the Energy-in-Motion Conference Poster competition winner: Rowan Munnery (St Andrews).
“The inspiration for my design comes from the Cubo-Futurist and Vorticist movements of the early 1900s.” said Rowan, “Looking to portray a new future through a stylistic portrayal of reality that emphasised the dynamic representation of motion and energy and highlighting an optimistic vision for a transformed society, I felt that the bold abstraction of these movements perfectly encapsulated the ethos embodied by the Energy in Motion conference. The poster thus portrays the dynamic changes of the living world, emphasising a diversity of environments and the importance of natural activity, while also portraying the fractures in our views of the global environment and the ecological distress that we must increasingly grapple with.”
Judges’ Comments
Susan Wardell (University of Otago)
This poster stood out to me initially because of the saturated colours, which are so suited to a conference where we aim to open an unapologetic space for all the vividness and intensity of climate emotion. The longer I sat with it, the more it became the integration of shapes, lines, and colour that affected me; creating a wholeness of parts, that speaks in itself to an optimistic vision of the relationships between humans and the environment, in an era where this is most fraught. It shows us a literal and metaphorical path towards something, that makes me want to follow, through light and dark, and find out what the possibilities are.
Bridget Bradley (University of St Andrews)
I absolutely love this poster and feel it perfectly represents our vision for this conference: a space of bold, daring creativity, that pushes us beyond the boundaries of what we expect a traditional conference to be. This poster also speaks to the conference themes of energy and emotions but with a vital focus on hope and imagining landscapes full of joy, possibility and colour. For me it symbolises the kind of radical world-making that is necessary to live well in the face of ecological crisis.
