2. Why permaculture?

There have been lots of ways in which permaculture has threaded its way into my life but it took a workshop with Anne-Marie Culhane at the Slung Low WILD conference for me to connect up how it could shape my practice as an artist. 

Permaculture is a design process, rooted in systems thinking, and originally applied to food growing and land management. Codified in the 1970s by two Australian men, it was not a new creation, it draws together the processes and practices of many indigenous cultures throughout human history, with new understandings in technology, science, ecology and other disciplines and spiritual practices.

I make theatre and performance, often with people who aren't professional artists. I work in community arts, or socially engaged practice, or participatory arts or co-creation or collaborative arts. All those terms carry different expectations and ideas about working. I often struggle to define, or identify, my work using these labels.  I work in and with processes, there is often a performance at the end of a project but that is often not the main objective of the work. 

There are lots of well intentioned individuals and organisations making work in this way. There is some excellent work, with care and a consideration for quality embedded throughout. And there is other work that doesn’t prioritise these things. All of this work is being made within a series of interconnected systems. In the UK, that’s a neo-liberal, capitalist economy, a society that is structurally racist, patriarchal and ableist. Funded arts and culture activity is often supported by philanthropic foundations, commercial organisations, the Arts Councils - arms length government bodies that receive money from the treasury and the national lottery, and less and less frequently local government. Over twenty years of making work my awareness of the intended, and unintended, impacts of these systems on the creative process and the people engaged in it has grown. It’s created increasing discomfort between the way in which I want to make work, and the broader ‘how’ work is commissioned and made. It’s increasingly at odds with the intention and content of the projects I work on.

Ethics are defined as the principles that govern behaviour or shape activity. As I’ve tried to consider how my work can advance social and climate justice, in a time of climate and ecological emergency and deep inequality, I’ve interrogated my practice more deeply. The ethical basis of work, expressed through systems, tools and organisational cultures deeply affect the work and the people engaged in it. Finding a way to work in alignment with my ethics has become more and more important to me.

For a lot of my professional life I’ve been a jobbing artist, working for other organisations. Partly because I’ve needed the certainty of an income, something less assured when initiating your own projects and relying on piecing together or finding funding. This is a process that relies on unpaid labour, something that often hasn’t been available to me. Also because of a lack of confidence in my own voice and right to make work.  

Working for others means fitting into existing systems, something I’ve found increasingly challenging when those systems and processes don’t align with my ethics and values. Through my career I’ve become more discerning about who I work with, and about challenging working practices. I have some privileges but the challenges I make come from a position of precarity. I also notice a disconnect, often created by the funding structures, or organisational hierarchies, where a project's stated aims are not realised in the way that a project happens, even if the the theme or content successfully interrogates that theme. 

This is increasingly present in projects exploring the climate emergency - where a project may be made about this topic but there is not a whole systems approach. So people working on the project end up buying take out food and generating waste, or the funding and project planning is not regenerative but models an extractive approach. This is also present in the unwritten expectation of free labour, by artists working more than they are contracted for.

My Developing Your Creative Practice Grant is about giving me the time, support and money to explore if and how I could use the permaculture design process to shape my creative practice so that it aligns more with my ethics and values. I want to shift so that I’m not working from a place, and mindset of precarity and find more sustainable and regenerative ways of working, for myself, the sector and the wider world.