Climate House Presents
A new series exploring how socially and culturally engaged artistic practice can uncover pathways to a regenerative climate.
Emma Nicolson, then Head of Creative Programmes, had developed a collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries to reinvent historic Inverleith House into climate crisis venue - Climate House. Supporting the artistic commissions, I led on the development, and inaugural program delivery, of Climate House Presents.
The program provides a platform for artists, researchers, community members, and audiences to engage with the climate emergency and biodiversity loss through exhibitions, workshops, talks, and participatory events. It situates creative practice within ecological systems and cultural spaces, foregrounding dialogue, experimentation, and collective learning.
The program draws on RBGE’s mission to explore, conserve, and explain the world of plants for a better future and positions Inverleith House as a hub where ecological inquiry, art, and public engagement converge. The Climate House presents program included participants who explore material, cultural, and affective dimensions of climate change through using creative practice to interrogate complex ecological questions and co-generate knowledge. By blending artistic practice with scientific and community perspectives, the program created hybrid spaces where audiences, artists, and researchers can learn from each other, experiment, and build collective insights. As such, it aimed to approach climate not as a distant issue, but as a lived, relational, and socially embedded challenge, prompting reflection on both personal and systemic action.
Delivered online during the COVID-19 pandemic, I led the strategic development and delivery of Climate House Presents, shaping the program’s structure and thematic focus. This included mentoring two emerging creative program assistants and working with departments across RBGE to source contributors, liaise and collate content, schedule and deliver the programme. Through a combination of strategic program design, facilitation, mentoring, and network-building, I ensured that Climate House Presents was not only operationally effective but also capable of fostering long-term collaborations, building capacity across the arts and ecological sectors, and creating meaningful spaces for knowledge exchange and creative inquiry.
As a companion initiative, I collaborated with Jen Wong (Science Gallery London) to design and deliver a workshop that harnessed collective knowledge production. This workshop surfaced shared insights across art, ecology, and research practice, producing a report that situates Climate House Presents within a wider network of activity at the intersection of art and ecological knowledge creation. It provided practical recommendations for developing Climate House as a node in Serpentine Galleries' General Ecology Network (GEN) and highlighted opportunities for networked collaboration, resource-sharing, and capacity-building.