Art galleries across England joined forces this week to encourage people to recognise the crisis facing the natural world.
Under the banner of Remember Nature 2025, the initiative centred on a day of action on 4 November that was based on a project created 10 years ago by the artist Gustav Metzger. Metzger’s 2015 initiative urged arts professionals and students to make a stand against the ongoing erasure of species and create new artworks related to nature.
Remember Nature 2025, which was curated by Andrea Gregson and Jo Joelson with 17 regional gallery partners, featured a range of public interventions designed to help people act collectively to face the climate and nature crisis.
The Remember Nature day of action came on the eve of the Cop30 climate summit, which is taking place on 6-21 November in the Brazilian city of Belém.
The Remember Nature partner organisations:
- Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness
- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
- Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
- De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea
- Fact, Liverpool
- Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
- Hauser & Wirth, London
- Homotopia, Liverpool
- Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
- Karst, Plymouth
- Kestle Barton and Cast, Cornwall
- Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
- Mima, Middlesbrough
- Serpentine, London
- Tate Modern, London
- Turner Contemporary, Margate
“I think that what's interesting and unique about the project is that we've got all these galleries working together,” Gregson said. “It’s interesting just seeing the momentum building and how, when we all work together on something, it actually has a bigger impact.
Advertisement
“All these organisations are doing really interesting work in this area of practice, but it makes us stronger when we work together, so it just builds and builds.”
Gregson said that as well as addressing global issues such as the climate crisis, the project was also designed to connect people to their local area, looking at topics including water quality, habitat loss, coastal erosion and species extinction.
“There’s lots of things that affect people in their day to day lives, so we are aiming to bring that messaging through the artworks, the artist films and the posters and the events that are happening in all the galleries.”
Remember Nature includes a collection of newly commissioned posters featuring original work by participating artists. A percentage of profits from the sale of each poster will be donated to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Remember Nature 2025 is supported by Arts Council England, Teiger Foundation, Hauser & Wirth, University for the Creative Arts, Gustav Metzger Foundation and the project partners.
Gregson is an artist, curator and senior lecturer in fine art at UCA Farnham, based in London and Lancashire.
Joelson, an interdisciplinary artist-curator, researcher and writer, is the co-founder and director of London Fieldworks, an interdisciplinary art partnership.
Metzger was born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents and was evacuated to Britain in 1939 aged 12 through the Refugee Children’s Movement. He went on to study art in Cambridge, London, Antwerp and Oxford. Metzger later became involved in anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist movements as well as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He died in 2017.