CLIMATE CHANGE
COMMISSION SHOWCASE
KATE CLAYTON
Performance Artist
Kate Clayton is primarily a queer performance artist based in Glasgow. Within her practice, she works collaboratively, collectively and individually. Her main focus is on the visibility of older women, in what is, in part, an attempt to claim agency for the over-60s and 70s. Her methodology often includes intergenerational friendship and involves artistic personas (Silver Swimmer, Art Scrubber, Bus Pass and Pearl Compost). Her practice exists under the overall banner of 'NOT DEAD YET’.
“My latest solo project, created in parallel with the Climate Change Cohort work at Stirling, involves Silver Swimmer protesting against a fish farm that has been proposed for an unspoilt stretch of coastline on the Isle of Bute.”
PROJECT SUMMARY
Scene Stirling has commissioned five creatives to lead the city’s artistic response to the climate crisis. Our creative cohort worked together on a joint Stirling-based project, combining their artistic talents to create a series of connected and collaborative artworks that inspire climate action as a response to COP26.
The Climate Change COP26 Commissions cohort is represented by filmmaker Sean Hall, performance artists Kate Clayton and David Sherry, musician Rory Green and poet Ojo Taiye.
Meet Kate
Kate Clayton is a Glasgow-based performance artist who practices under the banner of ‘Not Dead Yet.’ The main focus of her work is the visibility of older women, particularly the over-60s. In her experience, every collaboration presents different challenges and opportunities, a situation she embraces.
Who are you? What do you do?
I’m Kate. I’m 71. I worry about the state of the world, in particular the Climate Crisis and what farmers are doing to the earth and the ocean through over-intensive methods of agriculture. When I’m not angsting over this, I enjoy myself in the company of others. First and foremost, I’m a people person.
What is your project about? What is your involvement?
I just wanted to combine with the other members of the cohort in as productive as way as possible. Obviously, Climate Change has been the focus, but there is no problem there as all the artists are very aware of how important this is. David Sherry is a performance artist. So am I. It made sense that we tried out a few things together. Sean Hall and Rory Green have technical skills, thank goodness. So that meant that what I did, in performance, could be robustly yet sensitively recorded. As the months of the collaboration went on, we realised some of our collective potential. And every time we did, it was cause for celebration.
Where do you currently work from?
I currently work from Glasgow and Bute.
What challenges are you facing?
As stated above, I am 71. This means there are limits on what I can do. On the other hand, I know my positive qualities, and feel I have specific skills and perspectives to offer in the fight against Climate Change. In the fight to protect the planet.
If I see one more group of children dropping litter on the streets of Dennistoun, I will… calmly pick it up, tell them why I think they wrong in throwing it down, and place it in a 'Glasgow’s Miles Better' bin. Equally, I have to restrain myself from leaning into the open driver’s window of stationary vehicles on Duke Street and firmly turning off the ignition switch...
What have you learnt in the Climate Change commission so far?
What this commission has taught me is how important it is to meet and get to know the people you are scheduled to work with. It would have been easier to integrate Taiye’s poetry with our collective work if we had had a base/studio/hub in Stirling. On the other hand, Scene Stirling need to be congratulated for realising that choosing both performance artists and media-based artists would make for a productive liaison.
While the Scene Stirling commission has been in progress, I have been awarded funding from Creative Scotland so that my collaboration with Sophie Seita, Pearl and Theory Make Compost, can progress to the next phase. While filling in the application, I was drawing on the experience of working with the Stirling Climate Cohort. Sustainability in the realms of wisdom and humour are at the heart of both projects.
“At this time, when the emerging climate crisis is being urgently debated, it couldn’t be more important for artists’ voices and visions to be taken into account. Climate change is a terrible prospect. Collaboration can be a wonderful thing. I’m just so pleased to be given the chance to add my older woman’s voice to the mix.”
— Kate Clayton, Performance Artist
DISCOVER KATE CLAYTON’S
involvement in the Climate Change commissions
Five artists who didn’t know each other, chosen to work together during this time of Covid 19 in response to the hopes and fears of COP 26. Quite a challenge!
Initially, we met on Zoom, which was not ideal for developing a sense of group identity. When we did meet in person, once Covid restrictions allowed this, things began to fall into place. On the shore of a Stirlingshire loch, Sean filmed me meditating. Meditation is one of the life skills required to cope with the stress of the modern world. Remaining calm while the world burns may not be a sustainable solution to the Climate Crisis, but it is a start.
(Still: Sean Hall)
My thoughts behind the making of the ‘Meditation’ video (which Sean sensitively edited) are concerned with the fragility of our world. I wanted to draw attention to the beauty and richness of our environment. My ambition was to encourage us to concentrate and ground ourselves in order to become focussed and effective in our actions to address Climate Change.
On that same September afternoon, I read aloud one of Taiye’s poems while Sean filmed. As I was reading, a skein of geese could/can be heard overhead, as if honking in support of the poem’s message that the future of planet Earth is gravely threatened by climate catastrophe. Another of Taiye’s poems laments that koalas are burning in Australia. How could the geese in Scotland not be affected by that? This is ONE WORLD we live in, let’s ensure our one-and-only world remains liveable in.
(Still: Sean Hall)
Sean and I followed up our filming by the loch, with a visit to a wood. We were soon in agreement about what exactly we were going to be doing in contact with nature that day.
I was renewing my relationship with the trees, the grass and the earth; their textures, colours and fragrances. Thank-you, tree. Thank-you moss. Increasingly, I feel eco-sexual. Sean edited the footage with the same sensitive understanding as before, and Rory added music that further brought out the feelings and yearnings that my movements and Sean’s edits had established.
The four UK-based members of the group managed to meet for two days of talking and working together at the Tolbooth. David came with a lot of ideas that the rest of us participated in. I like to think I share David’s sense of absurdity, so when - in order to combat some aspect of climate change - he set up a scenario where we all had to agree to piss at the same time, several times per day, and on no occasion outwith the schedule of allotted piss times, I was totally on board. Though, in the short film documenting the performance, I do put deadpan questions to his deadpan proposal.
I was equally keen on contributing to David’s proposed Personal Protest. When everything seems futile, sometimes one has to embrace a sense of futility, and if one gets something positive from letting go of 'feeling in control', then that can be celebrated in a small way. Here you see four members of the Stirling Climate Cohort protesting, hopelessly, against the Climate Crisis.
Through working together in this way, and through talking together, we began to know each other and to trust each other as performers and personalities.
I organised a performance of a HEA(R)T PUMP for Stirling, inspired by technical drawings. I had in mind that we would build a HEA(R)T PUMP during the project, so this was a matter of trying out and discussing ideas. I felt that the process was made particularly productive by the simple act of documenting the performance on both video and audio. The separate audio recording of our collective HEA(R)T PUMP whooshing is one of the things that makes the video worth keeping.
We discussed a lot of possibilities in those two days. And documented it all. We also bonded as a group, a process helped by watching over the documentation a few days after the actual meeting.
The cohort presented a stall in the middle of Stirling, on a busy Saturday in October, invited by the Student Union of Stirling University to contribute to the Stirling Climate Festival. Our contribution was in some ways more challenging than the other stalls, in the approach we were exploring, but our stall turned out to be a magnet for passers-by. Conversation was stimulated around COP26 and the complicated changes that people will have to make to their lifestyles.
I presented a pineapple on a platter. The pineapple I’d come across in one of David Sherry’s drawings. That is, a fruit grown in the tropics, transported to the UK, and often left to rot in a UK kitchen. How does one justify the transport cost and the fossil fuel expended? I talked about how the pineapple had been greatly valued in Victorian times, that it had been so revered that families had been able to rent them out - not for eating, but to be admired - at a dinner. Whereas now pineapples can be bought for a pound at a supermarket. And I invited passers by to write a single word on a flag, and to stick the flag into the pineapple, nature’s bountiful gift from the tropics.
The above picture records the four of us, showing off our creativity on the streets of Stirling in the weeks before COP26. Those of us that are smiling do so in the knowledge that the underlying situation is Serious. Frightening. Urgent.
In the immediate run-up to COP 26, I took part in the last day of an inter-faith walk from Dunbar (near Edinburgh) to Glasgow ‘Pilgrimage for COP26’. The pilgrimage was organised by Jonathan Baxter, who was the Stirling Climate Cohort’s online mentor. I walked 13 miles in the rain from Kirkintilloch to Central Glasgow on October 29, and as far as I was concerned the rest of the cohort walked with me. What do I mean? We have succeeded in tapping into the one-for-all and all-for-one philosophy. We are in this together. All five of us.
"What do we want?
climate justice!
When do we want it?
now!”
Yes, we want Climate Justice and Climate Sanity NOW. Before we get washed away by the floods that are increasingly affecting daily life.
On November 13, I ran a HEA(R)T PUMP workshop at the Cowane Centre in Stirling, which six members of the public signed up for. Rory wasn’t there that day, having moved on to another residency, but he was there with us in spirit, as I think was Taiye. David and Sean were present to work collectively alongside me, and Sylvia and Kevin from Scene Stirling turned up as well. We began with an energy-building exercise to power the creativity that would be needed throughout the session. The first half of the workshop concentrated on the build…
...and the second half on a performance staged by the participants. In retrospect, one pleasing aspect was the range of art activities - installation / drawing / performance / critique - that the workshop involved. There are many ways of getting the public’s collective mind around the need to migrate from gas boilers to heat pumps. This is just one of them.
To summarise, what this commission has taught me is how important it is to meet and get to know the people you are scheduled to work with. In addition, Scene Stirling need to be congratulated for realising that choosing both performance artists and media-based artists would make for a productive liaison.
While the Scene Stirling commission has been in progress, I have been awarded funding from Creative Scotland so that my collaboration with Sophie Seita, Pearl and Theory Make Compost, can progress to the next phase. While filling in the application, I was drawing on the experience of working with the Stirling Climate Cohort. Sustainability in the realms of wisdom and humour are at the heart of both projects.