Becky Lyon
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Becky Lyon's MPhil/PhD Art research project
Touch As Method: The Artist as Ecologist & Feeling-For Other(ed) Conservation Cultures In England
This research adventure investigates touch-informed artistic research as an insurgent practice and method of intervening within an English conservation culture that has both inherited and continues to reproduce, classist, colonial and capitalist logics.
I make coordinates between England’s chronic nature crisis, ongoing enclosures of land and a sustained Othering of knowledges held by those who would be ecologists, and the relationship to touch - often a lack or excess of.
Touch is understood in its most expansive sense inferring a coming-into-contact with places, beings and people. This contact encompasses multiple sensory phenomena where the body reciprocates with the world: distinguishing texture, inhaling aromas, responding to atmospheric pressure, the processing of sound waves, and physically encountering when you wouldn’t otherwise - are all forms of touch.
This project takes the position that the stakes for intervening in the current techno-managerial conservation culture that privileges a pure objectivity are considerable - for the conservationists, for the ecologies being managed, for who is allowed to access ecology and for who is allowed access to steward ecology, and contributes to a much broader decolonial project.
Becky Lyon, 'A Wet Fiction' (2023)
My research questions are:
- How might touch-based methods reimagine ecological management in England?
- What might a touch-informed conservation culture, led by artists, feel like?
- How might the introduction of touch contribute to a more inclusive conservation culture in England that has traditionally other(ed) particular ways of knowing and knowers, feeling and feelers? How can the tactile offer tactics for practicing conservation otherwise?
- In which instances could artists be considered ‘ecologists’ and why is it important?
Working with a range of audiences within government advisory, independent charities, grassroots caretakers, marginalised wisdom keepers, artists working within conservation and more-than-human interlocutors, touch as method manifests in practice as a series of case studies documenting possible tactile tactics that re-sensitise the practice of conservation; gives body to data and contaminates the distance-from; re-inserts structurally- suppressed feeling into fieldwork; wields sensing to come to one's senses; exercises experiential thought and makes science more sticky-fingered; textures the imagination and otherwise re-legitimises the haptic as an essential event for a co-flourishing ecology England.
Companions for this work include: Moten & Harney, Laura U. Marks, Anna Tsing, Astrida Neimanis, Tim Ingold, Linda Tuawai Smith, Manning & Massumi, Stephanie Springgay, Dr. Suzanne Pierre, Natasha Myers, Dr. Irma King Allen, Robin Wall Kimmerer and David Abram.
Supervisors
Researcher biography
Becky Lyon is a London born and based English-Jamaican artist using art to connect with and generate insights about ecology. She is interested in how we build relationships with our environments close to home from our neighbourhoods to our domestic spaces to our guts.
She uses art practices to elicit insights from nature about how to live well alongside each other and explore how our socio-political worlds are and could be shaped. These ideas manifest in diverse, often easily portable formats as installations, sculpture, photographic objects, sensory artifacts, handmade moving images and text. Her physical work is activated by conversations and events that bring the audience closer into dialogue with the topics and sites of the work.
She runs Ground Provisions, an artist-led ‘schooled-by-the-forest’ for grown ups; the Squishy Sessions research collective (since April 2021) and The Department of Artecology - a peer-to-peer research club imagining new types of ecological stewardship practice. She is a volunteer Ranger for London National Park City (LNPC), reconnecting Londoners with the ecology of the city, amplifying grass roots activities and hands-on caretaking sites across North West London.
She has an MA Art & Science from Central Saint Martins, an MA Art & Ecology from Goldsmiths University of London and side-hustles as a consultant and trends researcher for global brands.