Elizabeth Tomos (2024) In Contact. [Perform//Print] Photograph: Joe Brown

Elizabeth Tomos (2024) Hiraeth [Perform//Print] Photograph: Marco Berardi

“Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.”

[Karen Barad]

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“We must strive to breathe, walk and sense towards more liveable worldings for all marginalised humans and other-than-humans”

[Donna Haraway]

We are facing an ecological crisis; which is really a human crisis; a crisis of how we live, how we operate, how we treat each other and our beautiful, but deeply hurt planet. It will take all our wisdom, creativity, solidarity, and care to navigate this and find new paths to tread or maybe just to rediscover old ones that we forgot, that got tangled with thorns, difficult to find, and virtually impassable. Art has a huge role in these uncertain and unstable times to help us create rituals and rites to process our experiences, grieve what we are losing, act as witness and advocate for the suffering and glory of the more-than-human world, imagine new futures (possible or not), and (re)birth ways of living, breathing, and being that are sustainable. Helping us seek out the paths less well travelled, or even forge new ones entirely. It can help re-orientate us away from our human-centric endeavours and find new ways to care for our world.

For me, tackling the ecological crisis is now the only thing that matters. It is everything. It is complex. It is political. Ecological justice is social justice. There is no environmental justice without gender and racial justice, for example. This is a mycelial network of interconnecting issues that need sensitive and intersectional solutions. This is the work art needs to do. As an artist, it is important to me to be “at work in the ruins” (Dougald Hine). To that end, I am an artist, arts educator, and climate activist working in the medium of Perform//Print, a hybrid method of making art that draws on the techniques, methods, and processes of printmaking and collides them with live and performance art practices. I believe that printmaking and performance art are the mediums for our times. They both have long histories of political dissent, they are both able to hybridise and layer multiple elements, they can be queered, they can be temporal and fragile, and speak to loss. So, they matter to me as a way to navigate and express my ecological concerns.

I am also a director and curator for Trans- States, which is a small community interest company dedicated to the scholarship of contemporary occulture and esotericism. As a result, this brings a spiritual dimension to my thinking about ecology and climate change. I am interested in the ways that esoteric thought can give us new ways to imagine and access our past, present, and future.

“We are part of the earth community. We are earth citizens. The earth has rights, and we have a duty of care for the earth, all her beings, and our fellow humans”

[Vandana Shiva]

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“Present the world as immeasurably fluid, while the porous boundaries of multispecies kinship are endlessly subversive”

[Alona Pardo]