On a Day Like Today We Just Need to Look Forward
A collaborative publishing project exploring art, energy, ecology and cultural transition
Co-edited with art.earth Books
Overview
Why this project matters
On a Day Like Today We Just Need to Look Forward is a collaborative publishing project developed with art.earth Books exploring the relationship between art, energy, ecology and cultural transformation during a time of climate and ecological uncertainty.
Bringing together artists, writers, activists, cultural practitioners, researchers and interdisciplinary thinkers, the publication creates space for reflection on how creative practice might help people navigate the emotional, cultural and political complexities of ecological transition.
The project emerged from a growing recognition that responses to climate and energy transition cannot be shaped through technology and policy alone.
They are also questions of culture, imagination, relationship, participation and meaning.
Project partners include: Centre for Sustainable Practice in The Arts | Regen | Climate Cultures | Community Energy England | The Art and Energy Collective | Culture Declares Emergency | Climate Museum UK | Middlesex University
At a time of ecological breakdown, rising anxiety and accelerating transition, many people are asking:
How do we continue to live meaningfully during uncertain times?
What role does creativity play in responding to crisis?
How do artists help shape cultural responses to ecological change?
What forms of imagination might help us move beyond paralysis or despair?
This project explores the idea that creative practice is not peripheral to these questions, but deeply connected to how societies process change, build resilience and imagine different futures.
The publication seeks to hold space for complexity, acknowledging grief, uncertainty and loss while also exploring participation, beauty, imagination, connection and collective possibility.
A cartography of practice
Rather than presenting a single narrative or ideological position, the publication acts as a kind of evolving cartography.
It brings together diverse voices and practices that explore the intersections between:
art and ecology
energy and culture
participation and collective agency
restoration and repair
climate anxiety and creative resilience
imagination and systems change
community practice and ecological futures
The project recognises that many artists and cultural practitioners are already developing important responses to ecological transition — often quietly, experimentally and across disciplinary boundaries.
The publication seeks to make some of these practices more visible while creating connections between people working across different contexts and geographies.
Art, energy and cultural transformation
A central thread running through the project is the belief that the climate crisis is not only an environmental or technological challenge, but also a cultural one.
The publication explores how dominant ideas about progress, extraction, consumption and separation from the living world shape ecological crisis, and how creative practice might help open different ways of thinking, relating and imagining.
It asks:
What kinds of cultural transformation might be necessary for more life-centred futures to emerge?
The project also explores the role of participation, storytelling, ritual, collective making and artistic experimentation in helping people engage with difficult questions surrounding ecological transition.
Editorial approach
The editorial process has been intentionally collaborative and open.
Contributors have been invited to share reflections, essays, visual work, conversations, experiments, provocations and documentation of practice.
The project values multiple forms of knowledge and expression — recognising that ecological understanding can emerge through artistic process, lived experience, community practice, emotional reflection and interdisciplinary collaboration as much as through formal analysis.
Rather than seeking polished certainty, the publication creates space for inquiry, experimentation and unfinished thinking.
Themes within the publication
Themes explored through the project may include:
creativity during ecological crisis
participation and collective imagination
art and energy systems
ecological restoration and repair
climate emotions and eco-anxiety
slowness, attention and relationship
community and collective care
grief, beauty and resilience
interdisciplinary collaboration
nature as teacher
imagination as cultural infrastructure
Why publishing matters
Alongside participatory and public-facing projects, I am increasingly interested in publishing and editorial practice as forms of cultural infrastructure.
Books and collaborative publications can create slower spaces for reflection, connection and knowledge-sharing across communities and disciplines.
They can hold complexity in ways that fast-moving public discourse often struggles to sustain.
This project explores publishing not simply as documentation, but as a form of gathering - creating connections between people, practices and ideas that might help shape more imaginative and relational responses to ecological transition.
Reflections
On a Day Like Today We Just Need to Look Forward continues an ongoing exploration within my practice around creativity, participation and ecological transition.
The project asks how we might respond to climate and ecological uncertainty without losing our capacity for imagination, tenderness, playfulness and collective agency.
It explores the possibility that creativity may be essential not only for communicating change, but for helping people remain emotionally connected, culturally engaged and capable of imagining different ways of living together within a changing world.