Bleak Plateaus, 2022-ongoing

Bleak Plateaus is an ongoing artistic-research project that engages with the peatlands of the Peak District and the wider Pennines region. Drawing on posthuman aesthetics, new materialisms, philosophies of elemental mediation and discourses of social justice, and employing a mixed media approach, including photography, sound, moving image, oral histories, writing and peat itself, the project explores these historically, culturally, and ecologically important sites as zones of productive ambiguity, where, for example, multispecies subsistence, joy, the violence of marginalisation and anguish at impending planetary devastation all intersect. 

On, in, under, over, beyond, across and beneath the region’s squelchy reaches, a multitude of shifting assemblages of humans and non-humans can be found. Ancient settlements, commoners’ subsistence, mass trespass in the struggle for access, occult teachings and interplanetary parliaments, sphagnum mosses, sundews and bog lilies, labour, leisure, environmental devastation, social injustice, carbon capture, ring ouzels and a unique mountain hare population are but some of the actors that energise these mental, social and environmental ecologies. Building on recent thinking in the posthumanities, concerning the inadequacy of current language to address the contemporary eco-cultural condition,¹ and engaging with thinking around artistic research in terms of ‘performing process’ and notions of ‘thinking in action,’² Bleak Plateaus seeks to develop experimental and expanded modes of representation and aesthetic activations for exploring and reimagining the lively multiplicities of these important sites, against the backdrop of climate breakdown and the urgent need for ethico-aesthetic repair.³ 

The first phase of the project focusses on Kinder Scout, the most famous of the north Derbyshire moorland plateaus. It pays close attention to the polyphonic composition and varying scales of the multiple human-non-human entanglements that crisscross Kinder’s slopes and plateaus, seeking to develop artistic methods of responding to and synthesizing scientific and cultural reflection on this important site. In reaching for and anticipating worlds to come,⁴ this phase of the research addresses and explores how theory, image-making, performance, sound and writing can be employed to negotiate the affective anguish associated with ecological crisis without falling into reductive traps, unsettling what Isabelle Stengers calls ‘faithful communication,’ in favour of misunderstanding and indeterminacy, opening onto an ecology of practices that refuses the potent allure of Truth and the theoretical disentanglement of something from its milieu and materiality.⁵ In enacting a transversal cutting across, it searches for new ways of speaking about that which we do not yet have the proper words to express, encouraging us to listen without privileging the voice, and directing us towards politics and ethics that hum in a minor key.