On the 23 May 2024 we held our second Extractivist Landscapes workshop, again pairing an academic and artist to analyse the entangled relations between the extractivist processes of mining and how artists and activists work to reimagine the potential futures of post-excavated landscapes. The workshop began with an interactive climate science talk by Dr Conor Sweeney (School of Mathematics and Statistics, UCD) on ‘Visualising Climate Modelling’. Reflecting on questions about how to build public trust by translating climate change science using artistic methods, Dr Sweeney’s presentation drew on a wide range of types of images – from well-known science visualisations like the ‘hocky stick’ and ‘climate stripes’, to affective journalistic photography that captures the impact of environmental climate change on a human scale.
The second part of the workshop, ‘Making Impressions’, was led by Dublin-based artist Sarah Bracken Soper. In this radical clay workshop, Sarah reflected on the public response and community impact of two of her feminist, environmental art projects and prompted participants to think about the Sperrins and sites of extraction through a sculptural mode. Drawing on examples from her portfolio, Sarah emphasised the importance of materials, timing, location, and relationships in engaged community art projects. Participants were invited to create a piece of work in clay inspired by what we had learned so far about the Sperrins. Sarah led us through how to use hand building, additive, subtractive, and stop frame animation techniques in working with air-drying clay. A stiff, sticky, and fine-grained natural substance, clay was an ideal material to explore as another way of thinking through extractivism.
Sarah Bracken Soper presenting on her work and participants doing mark-making and hand-building in clay
Image Credits: All photographs taken by Anthony Assad
Extractivist Landscapes 
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