Hi, I’m Chloë Uden.
I’m an artist, creative facilitator and cultural strategist working at the intersection of energy, ecology, participation and imagination.
For nearly two decades I have worked across the worlds of art, climate engagement and the energy transition, exploring how creativity can help people connect more deeply with each other, with place, and with the systems that shape our lives.
My work sits between disciplines. I collaborate with communities, artists, engineers, policymakers, cultural organisations and energy practitioners to create participatory experiences that open up conversation, reflection and collective imagination around climate, power, energy and the future.
I was the founder and Artistic Director of The Art and Energy Collective, a collaborative practice exploring the relationship between art, energy and social change through participatory artworks, public engagement projects and creative climate initiatives. Through this work I helped develop projects, partnerships and conversations that brought together creativity, climate engagement and energy transition work across cultural and community contexts.
Alongside my independent practice, I have worked extensively within the UK energy sector, including as Arts and Culture Lead at Regen, where I have helped explore how creativity, participation and cultural engagement can support public conversation and systems change around the energy transition.
I am currently co-editing On a Day Like Today We Just Need to Look Forward with art.earth Books, a collaborative publication exploring how artists, communities and cultural practitioners are responding to energy transition, ecological breakdown and the search for more life-centred futures.
My Practice
My work explores:
How do we feel our relationship to energy, rather than only measure it?
What kinds of stories and cultural experiences help people engage with changes in our energy systems?
What happens when artists, communities and energy systems begin to learn from one another?
How might creativity help us imagine more just, connected and life-centred futures?
I’m interested in how we respond to the energy transition and ecological crisis without losing our sense of play, tenderness, imagination and aliveness. Much of my work explores how creativity can help people remain connected - to themselves, to each other and to the living world, especially during times of uncertainty and transformation.
Over the years I’ve developed and supported projects ranging from large-scale participatory artworks and community engagement processes to exhibitions, workshops, publications and cross-sector collaborations. These projects often invite people to contribute directly - through making, conversation, reflection or shared acts of creativity - creating spaces where climate and energy questions become personal, collective and emotionally tangible.
I’m particularly interested in participation as a form of cultural power: not simply asking people to observe, but inviting them to shape, question and contribute.
Nature is central to my practice. Despite not being an ecologist or scientist, I’m drawn to the intelligence held within living systems - cycles of growth and decay, interdependence, adaptation and renewal - and I often look to the natural world as both collaborator and teacher. My work explores how ecological thinking might reshape not only our technologies and infrastructures, but also our relationships, values and imaginations.
Alongside artistic work, I speak, facilitate and collaborate with organisations exploring how creativity can support climate engagement, systems change and public participation. I’m especially interested in building bridges between sectors that do not often work together, and in creating conditions where different forms of knowledge can meet.
At the heart of my practice is a belief that imagination matters.
That cultural change matters.
And that in times of transition, artists and creative practitioners have an important role to play in helping people make meaning, build connection and imagine new possibilities for collective life.
Selected Areas of Work
Participatory art and collective making
Art and energy collaborations
Developing creative practice as climate response
Creative climate engagement
Community co-creation and public participation
Cross-sector cultural collaboration
Creativity, imagination and systems change
Workshops, talks and facilitated conversations
Cultural responses to climate transition - Creativity and eco-anxiety
Creativity, resilience and collective agency - The Inner development goals
Socially and environmentally engaged practice
Some of the organisations, communities and collaborators I’ve worked alongside
The Art and Energy Collective | Regen | Plymouth Energy Community | TRESOC | Plymouth Culture | art.earth Books | University of Exeter ESI | University of Plymouth SEI | Green Fields Glastonbury | mudac
As well as collaborations with hundreds of energy organisations, cultural institutions, community groups, artists, local authorities and climate-focused initiatives across the UK and internationally.
If you would like to discuss a collaboration, commission, workshop, speaking invitation or conversation, please get in touch.