Why do you work with multiple artistic genres?
That’s a great question. I started off as a sculptor and though my practice has evolved into often a multi-media, installation-based approach, the pulse of materiality remains central. I currently create what you might call immersive video and audio environments that explore climate change through a sensorial and experiential approach, questioning how we engage with planetary crisis beyond data and despair.
My work often assembles ecologies of human and non-human actors, machine learning systems, and AI, to grasp something of the multi-temporalities and scales, cross-species contaminations and alliances, necessary to confront the environmental challenges ahead.
Textuality is a living material in my work—words treated as objects, algorithmic dance, concrete poetry, AI-generated absurdities—within a posthuman, eco-feminist, decolonial discourse, that emphasises the plasticity of gender.
Are there aesthetic or experiential advantages using this approach?
I take an experimental and playful, critical approach across sculpture, sound, video, VR, and experimental publishing, with an emphasis on process based ways of working.
How did you become involved in the project about Lough Neagh (Loch nEathach)?
I’ve had a chance to deepen my ‘more-than-human’ inquiry through talking with Friends of the Earth over the past two years with some of the most amazing folks I’ve ever met, in association with this. I’ve learnt a great deal whilst in conversation about the terrible situation that befell Loch nEathach in 2023 and am still learning today.
To briefly summarise, Loch nEathach is the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland. It’s vast, like a small sea, and an extraordinarily beautiful place. In the long hot summer of 2023, it became eutrophic, and overwhelmed with algae blooms to such a degree this powerful imagery made the headlines. I joined Friends of the Earth in discussion that year, which lead in turn to the emphasis of ‘Meeting The Lough On Its Own Terms’.
They have an incredibly creative take on activism, holding a wake for the lough, early on, to express something of the terrible sense of grief that many feel about losing something so integral to their lives where once they swam and fished.
The complexity of how the lough became eutrophic presents a text book case in converging dynamics of power, influence, and conflict of interests, that have developed over decades, if not centuries, around Loch nEathach and the watershed.
Today, the situation has new and emerging dynamics that have moved on from the return of Stormont (which simply wasn’t there in 2023) with the increasing adoption of the Rights of Nature by community groups and many others. But, not all rights are granted equally – more on this later.
Previous works of mine have tried to grasp something of the complexity of environmental concerns, and after listening to all the stories that converge at the lough I drew a first diagram (2023), which you can see in the exhibition, that starts to map out who is putting something of value into the lough, and who is just taking from it, without giving back. It’s very simple. It speaks of how undernourished our relationship with nature is.
I think it was my emphasis on the materiality of microbial life and nutrients, combined with a deconstructed systems approach that appealed to them perhaps. In the sense it brought both the vulnerable ecosystem at Loch nEathach, that includes microbes, eels, chironomid flies, diatoms, silica and us humans, to name but a few, together with the financial systems, the apparatus of neoliberalism, that afford such narrow channels of choice for everyone involved (including many farmers).
The Northern Ireland Environment Agency, within the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, has shown that during the governments “Going for Growth” initiative between 2012-2021 there has been a 52% increase in Soluble Reactive Phosphorous in Loch nEathach, with 62% coming from agriculture, 24% from wastewater, and 12% from Septic tanks.
You mention evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis as an underlying theoretical underpinning. What is useful in Margulis theory for this project?
Interestingly, to me, cyanobacteria (algae blooms) were central to the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’ research, whose life traces the trajectory of both neo-Darwinism, and neoliberalism, both of which choose to emphasise the individual above the collective.
Cyanobacteria are fascinating, in that they brought oxygen to the atmosphere, and hence mass-speciation, and eventually, us. Margulis’ work on symbiogenesis was rejected by the Neo-Darwinists 17 times. This is research which we now consider as completely obvious.
To learn more about the work of artist Ami Clarke’s work see the links below.
