Air makes art
Make it matter
Although we data-heads might not want to admit it, sometimes it’s art which does the heavy lifting to raise awareness and change mindsets.
So this week, we’re very excited to be able to preview the What’s the Matter festival, organised by friends of this blog, Marina Walker and Ruaraidh Dobson. Timed around Clean Air Day on 19 June, it will involve art, data and installations in healthcare and educational settings around London. Marina explains: “After ten years in East London, I’ve developed severe hayfever. Just like the Air Pollution Canary in Julia Godsiff’s artwork, I’ve become acutely sensitive to what’s in the air. The festival aims to make the link between how we feel and the air we breathe clearer — and show what we can do, individually and together, to breathe easier.”
It will feature works by artists we’ve showcased here over the past few years including Julia Godsiff and Miriam Quick and Stefanie Posavec, as well as Kirsty Pringle and Jim McQuaid’s famous stripes and installations from Jingrong Zhang and Fabio Duarte (we’ll have to feature them soon too!) And you don’t have to wait till June - some events start later this month, including an exciting workshop by another friend of this blog, Kayla Schulte. Sign up on the website for updates!
And if one is not enough, we have updates from the amazing Knitting the Air project, run by Caroline Murray, whom we have featured regularly here. Over two and a half years, 132 people from Poplar, Bow and east London spent thousands of hours knitting air pollution data about the air they breathe. The team is planning an exhibition in September to present the result of their efforts: a 13-metre textile that visualises air quality across a whole year.
The data comes from two Breathe London Community sensors located in Poplar, near the A12 and Blackwall Tunnel approach. By translating scientific data into something tangible and handmade, created by the communities this data affects, it invites people to explore abstract numbers as something lived, breathed and felt.
Caroline says: “This exhibition is also about voices. A new film shines a spotlight on the knitters themselves, the residents who gave thousands of hours of their time to make this work, sharing what it meant to knit data about the air in their own neighbourhood, and what that process revealed about the place they call home. Their reflections sit alongside more than 400 responses gathered from the wider community, capturing what air quality means to people across east London. They bring everyday experiences of air pollution into focus, highlighting their concerns for their health, hopes for change and a deep appreciation that clean air is fundamental to life.”
Canvas and cream
We managed to get to this amazing exhibition in Forest Hill before it closed in February, celebrating the life of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah and making the case for the Clean Air (Human Rights) Act (Ella’s Law). We completely failed over winter to get to this exhibition - See the Unseen, which looked great too. In a way though, if there are so many events just in South London on air pollution that we can’t keep up, something must be going right in raising awareness.
With today’s local council vote, we were quite taken with this quote on BBC News about young people’s concerns in Lambeth: “I’m really worried about stuff like air pollution and coal emission rates and how that’s going to impact us - how am I going to live in the world and study and grow in a world where I can’t even breathe?” Kermarley Danclair. If it’s top of Kermarley’s agenda then it should be top of everyone’s.