Cop26 Mural
Take The Time | Photographer Ewelina Ruminska | 2021
Take The Time
Earlier this year I was commissioned by the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London to work with ecologists and secondary school pupils in Richmond to create a mural across a railway bridge in Twickenham. The mural focused on the oak, an icon of the Borough of Richmond, and in collaboration with Orleans House Gallery and researchers Dr Will Pearse, Dr Tilly Collins and Hollie Folkard-Tapp, I delivered a series of workshops with students at Orleans Park and Waldegrave School to explore the intricacies and fragility of urban woodland ecosystems.
Much of our time was spent in the beautiful woodlands at Orleans House Gallery, exploring the life of a single oak and how it is interconnected with the wider human and non-human community. While the scientists revealed the invisible communications all around us, above and below ground, and highlighted the importance of roots and fungi networks beneath our feet, I supported the students to reflect upon these new insights through sketching, painting and poetry. The resulting mural, Take the Time, is their response to the biodiversity and climate emergency.
“Expanding from the face of the bridge into the tunnel with bold imagery and intimate poetry about the legendary oak and our relationship to it, asking us to consider the knowledge entangled in its roots that it wants to share. How might we begin to listen?”
Through messages interwoven in the design, the mural urges the local community to look closer at the natural world. The design of the face of the tunnel was inspired by the ‘eyes’ found in the bark of oak trees and calls on us to acknowledge our non-human community, to notice all that we are losing. The inside of the tunnel has been transformed into an underground network of roots and mycorrhiza, within which we find a poem spilling from walls to floor:
The highway of life travels under the eye,
We humans don’t care if we take they will die.
We’re giants to them and to us they’re just resources,
But in fact they have the power for their roots are our core.
Take the Time is one of 8 murals across the UK that form a set of responses by young people to the UN Climate Change Conference (Cop26). The project was developed by the Grantham Institute and UK Youth for Nature in collaboration with Orleans House Gallery as part of its Cultural Reforesting programme, and was sponsored by Octopus Energy to run as a pilot alongside the Grantham’s 2021 Climate Art Prize. Students who had been particularly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns were invited to participate in the Richmond project, joining a UK-wide initiative to encourage young people to engage with Cop26 through street art.
The mural took a week to paint with the fantastic support of Orleans House Gallery volunteers, Discover Twickenham and Percy Chapman and Sons. While on site, I had many fascinating conversations with people who watched the mural grow, and were moved by the observations and call to action of the students. There was an overwhelming sense from passers-by that there is a desire for more space in the public realm to platform marginalised voices like young people, who have such a stake in current and urgent climate conversations.
“The power of art, combined with science, to reach a depth of experience for the participant as well as the audience is richly realised through this project. We hope the students had a fascinating experience and the mural is testament to their ideas and power of their voices... This project gets to the core of what Cultural Reforesting is about and how urban areas can be a thrilling place for considering the future of biodiversity, our relationship with nature, what might we imagine?”
Visit the mural on the Heath Road railway bridge foot tunnel in Twickenham and please do tag #takethetime @orleanshousegallery @bryonybengeabbott @ImperialCollege in any images or responses, we’d love to hear what messages you found in the oak.
Images by Ewelina Ruminska, 2021