Alison Grant

Changing Ideas Award
This work is created as part of a body of work to explore how we might respond to the climate crisis fully including all peoples and the more than human world.
Partnering with Lichen and referencing Scott Gilbert, and his paper A Symbiotic View of Life : We have never been individuals 2012, who proposed that we are not autonomous individuals, but complex, symbiotic, and multi species entities, ideas he then extends to the society’s we live in and our structures of governance. Ideas that have since been take up by our contemporary environmental philosophers.
Lichen as a metaphor for recognising our necessary, co-constitution with our environment, and all other living beings, to survive our current climate crisis.
Delicate structures, able to dissolve rock, untouched by the destructive forces of storms, drought, frosts and floods and coexisting in extremes of temperature through collaborative survival. Seemingly vulnerable structures thriving among potentially destructive forces by symbiosis and adaption. Beacons of Hope.
The triptych format serving as a challenge to western notions of the self- contained, sovereign individual, continuing along the path forged by artists including Hieronymus Bosch who in 1482 replaced the traditional sacred subjects of the central panel with warning scenes of hell and damnation in his Last Judgement and in 1950 Oskar Kokoschka' who in his apocalyptic triptych The Myth of Prometheus offered a warning of western men's “intellectual arrogance” expressing his fears for humanity after the second world war and who’s words echo today; “Strengthen our ties to the past…...lest we reach the point every individual in his intellectual arrogance makes it his business to push the engines of destruction to the limit” Awareness of climate justice recognising loss of compassion and humanity in the pursuit of advancement which has lead to this point. Looking to the past to inform our future.
This triptych where lichens not humans take centre stage is offered to allay my climate fears and by partnering with lichen express my hope to move into our future in conscious symbiosis. The delicacy of the work, almost floating, the balance of the choices we hold.