Becky Lyon
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Becky Lyon's MPhil/PhD Art research project
Performing objects, tactile data, sense-ative documents and feelwork: touch as method for critical ecological stewardship in England
This practice-led research explores how art can re-sensitise and address inequalities in the practice of ecological stewardship in England through a focus on touch.
Investigating the affective power of touch in relation to the labour of ecological stewardship, the research addresses how the pervasive condition of being 'out-of-touch' with nature has contributed to ecological decline and exacerbates social exclusions in terms of who is able to steward nature.
Becky Lyon, 'A Wet Fiction' (2023)
The research draws on and seeks to contribute to practices and discourses of land justice, decolonial environmentalism and the politics of sensory and embodied knowledge, engaging with diverse practitioners of ecological stewardship from governmental public bodies such as Natural England, land justice organisations (House of Annetta) and wildlife charities (CPRE), grassroots activists and other artist practitioners - all of whom have different physical, conceptual and affective relations to touch.
The practice research will develop novel forms of tactile installation, sensory workshops and transdisciplinary platforms involving diverse stakeholders to identify opportunities for intervention through touch and develop a set of resources for practice implementation. It will contribute to advancing and deepening theories of touch and sensory knowledge in relation to land justice and ecological repair.
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.