LOOK Climate Lab 2024 was a six-week-long exploratory project, where researchers, artists, and academics took over the Open Eye Gallery, showing work in progress and talking through ideas to tackle climate change. The artists and researchers who took part in the Lab later expanded on their works in the gallery zine Tilt.
One of the essays is Intervention and Renewal by Johannes Pretorius. His work is on display at Abbot Hall until 19 April 2025, and at Royal Photographic Society (Bristol) from 3 April – 22 June (part of We Feed The UK: The Complete Collection). The exhibition included photographs by students from Queen Katherine School, who had visited Strickley farm in response to the project. We publish full essay here.
Intervention and Renewal
Agriculture started when humans began changing the land by cultivating crops. This interventionist impulse eventually led to the current situation where yields are maximised with intensive animal farming, monoculture, pesticides, and inorganic fertilisers (1). These methods also impoverish soil, lead to biodiversity loss, increase pollution, and contribute to climate change. Ironically, this environmental damage is now a risk to food security. Every year, for example, 2.9 million tonnes of UK topsoil is lost to erosion (2).
A commission for We Feed the UK, a Gaia Foundation campaign that highlights the positive outcomes of regenerative agriculture, compelled me to think again about the relationship between humans and nature. I found it hard to imagine an existence where we do not alter the environment and concluded that the point is not whether we intervene, but how and to what extent. My intuition was corroborated when, as part of my research, I came across Wendell Berry’s essays. He writes (3),
People cannot live apart from nature; that is the first principle of the conservationist. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it… If they choose to make too great a difference, they diminish nature, and narrow their subsequent choices; ultimately, they diminish or destroy themselves.
My commission took me to Strickley, the Robinson family’s organic dairy farm in Cumbria. While observing and photographing them as they tended the farm, I recognised an attitude towards farming that differs from the mainstream perception. I realised that forward-thinking farmers understand the risks of environmental degradation and work with nature to produce food and to improve ecological resilience.
I photographed three generations of Robinsons managing long stretches of hedgerow and rewilding woodland and wetland. These habitats dramatically boost biodiversity by supporting interdependent communities of microorganisms, plants, and animals. No pesticides or inorganic fertilisers are used, so the soil is healthy and rich in organic matter, and the water in the stream that cuts through the farm is clean and full of life.
It was important to also photograph Strickley as a working farm. I strove to say something about the tension inherent to what the Robinsons do, balancing ecological and economic incentives. This is important because it mirrors the challenge we all face. Framed in this way, I believe the photographs attest to an attitude to the environment that can be generalised and applied to situations beyond agriculture.
Photographs from Intervention and Renewal, the series I made at Strickley, were exhibited at Open Eye Gallery’s LOOK Climate Lab in 2024, but I still visit and photograph on the farm. I am proud of my enduring relationship with the Robinsons and expect more meaningful work to come from it.
Recently, I accompanied a group of GSCE students from Queen Katherine School, Kendal, on a photowalk at the farm and found it encouraging to see their positive response to the land. As part of the LOOK Photo Biennial 2024, Open Eye Gallery is partnering with Lakeland Arts to exhibit the young people’s photographs next to mine at Abbot Hall art gallery, Cumbria. The students and I are excited to show the work and, in particular, to have it accessible to the community where it was made.
References
Image by Johannes Pretorius.
Tilt is available in Open Eye Gallery’s bookstore.
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