Beaconsfield and The Wild Escape: Phoebe Collings-James and Kathryn Yussoff
Phoebe Collings-James in conversation with Professor Kathryn Yussoff about their book 'A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None' (2019): a text that proposes a nuanced and radical reading of our environmental crisis and our understandings of the geological age of the ‘Anthropocene’.
"Kathryn Yusoff examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery." University of Minnesota Press
Phoebe Collings-James and The Wild Escape
This Spring, we are delighted to be collaborating with Phoebe Collings James as Beaconsfield’s Environmental Artist in Residence. Joining the nationwide museum project The Wild Escape, she will be working with ceramics, sound, poetry and collective gathering to explore the multifaceted meanings of the term ‘sustainability’.
The Wild Escape campaign, highlights the importance of re-wilding our greenspaces with indigenous plants and animals and we have focussed on connecting the earth through clay. Children and their families have been helping to propogate vital pollinater plant species in Beaconsfield’s garden-yard with horticulturalist Lucy Gregory, as well as learning how to make a ceramic plant pot, with Phoebe Collings-James and Mudgang Pottery, to nurture plants at home.
The more academic aspects of Collings-James’ wider project are not suitable for young children, but our aim is not separate ‘dark’ subject matter from the birds and the bees, but to better understand how we are all bound into one ecology and to trigger that understanding from a young age.
