Collaboration between humans, sectors and species
Artist, Composer and Creative Producer Kat Pegler shares her experiences and developing practice that collaborates with and responds to the environment and harnesses the power of culture for change.
On Collaboration
Hi I’m Kat, I’m an interdisciplinary artist, composer and writer specialising in creative response within the climate emergency. I am one half of Kerbside Collective, an organisation that combines artistic outputs and sustainability research through an international lens. I am also currently artist in residence for Hydrogen Research at Brunel University, where I am working with scientists, philosophers and sustainability experts to create work around imagined futures and more-than-human perspectives. I believe passionately in documenting the climate emergency as it unveils, urging for collaboration and the need to think differently.
For me, collaboration between humans, sectors and species is the key to addressing the climate emergency. To forge networks between the micro and the macro, the new with the old, the top-down with the bottom-up to create an eagle eye approach that can lead to greater change and accountability. I also feel that neurodivergence can play a really strong role in this, with my own ADHD, as hard as it can often be, giving me a restlessness to push for change, an ability to question the status quo, and to not want to conform to a system that’s failing. Embracing brains of all kinds should be welcomed on a top-level, creating spaces for minds to be able to flourish in different ways, rather than the continued exclusion towards difference. Providing this space would encourage perspectives to entangle until they grow organically into new thinking, new possibilities, and new ideas that could make greater impact.
Brunel Hydrogen Residency
As part of my residency with Brunel, I have been exploring ideas of reintegrating folklore and storytelling into nature as a means of reconnection. Being able to ponder over hydrogen for the last few months, leaning into neurodivergence to explore the possibilities of it as a key player in the green energy transition has been eye-opening. There is a need to have a critical eye, to foster transparency but to also embrace attempts to change the status quo. It has led me to believe that with innovation, in order for it to change a system that relies on destructive practice, there must be a shift from anthropocentric design to also consider the wider context and stakeholders. That includes non-humans. I am therefore eager to push the reframing of the environment as a collaborator, rather than a resource to exploit.
Whilst at Brunel, I have been working with hydrogen to create music, using the drone sounds of hydrogen being tested, in a traditional folkloric sense as a way to embody hydrogen and enter my own flow state. This all culminates in the project: ‘A Hydrogen Daydream’ which is an interdisciplinary book and immersive experience, centred around neurodivergence and non-human thinking in sustainable innovation.
For more information on this project, please see this webpage where the work will be added.
Other Work
I am really excited to be working on a new platform that aims to showcase and cultivate interdisciplinary collaboration around the climate emergency. It is early days and so I am looking for people to get involved with the development / if you want to showcase your work or be part of a bigger hive mind. You might be an artist, a scientist, a clown, a website developer or someone who has something to say. If you would like to be involved in the platform or in the upcoming event, do reach out to me via email or Instagram.
If you want to see more work, I currently have some sound work on show as part of an exhibition in London at The Gallery in The London Interdisciplinary School. This exhibition, curated by Mary Pedicini as part of SEADS, an international collective of researchers, artists and scientists exploring space, ecology, art and design delves into the non-human, centred around the ancestral cell from which all life descends.
Culture Declares Emergency
Culture is such a powerful part of the climate emergency, in both addressing it and in it being lost. I think Culture Declares is such an important initiative because it fosters a collective energy at a time when it can feel so isolating. It centres around the need for collaboration which not only inspires advocacy, but also can really help people to see through the smog and look for tangible ways to act. The power of collective action can be seen in my research undertaken with Greenpeace at Glastonbury Festival, which explored, in part, how collaboration through the arts can help to address eco-anxiety.
I believe that the arts have incredible power at this moment in time. In spreading awareness, in changing perceptions, in reconnecting people with natural spaces, and in creating agency towards issues such as the injustice to water happening so blatantly in the UK. The arts & culture can ultimately create pathways to action, which if harnessed and collaborated on with other sectors, can create informed, tangible pathways to more positive futures.
Kat Pegler is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and creative producer specialising in creative response within the climate emergency. Read more about Kat’s work, practice and declaration on her declarer profile and follow her work on Instagram.
Brunel Hydrogen comprises researchers in social, digital & physical science who, together, are developing critical contributions to UK Hydrogen, the green transition, and a net zero world.