Five ways to explore our relationship to our ‘Environments’ at RCA2022

For life to thrive it must exist in perfectly balanced conditions. For billions of years life on earth has maintained a symbiotic relationship with its habitat, but the effects of the Anthropocene’s climate crisis threaten this stability.

Students in this theme have found the perfect conditions to consider this balancing act. Whether looking to their immediate surroundings or further afield, they are thoughtfully contributing to the delicate ecology of creativity, asking: ‘How do we affect the environment and how in turn does it affect us?’

Elise Guillaume | MA Contemporary Art Practice

Location: Battersea South, Studio Building, Second floor

Elise Guillaume’s work explores our complex relationship with nature, with the body a key vessel for interpreting living and non-living beings that form our world. At RCA2022, she shows her latest film Where I Learn to Breathe alongside a body of multi-media works addressing themes at the intersection of feminism and ecology.

Working ecologically both on the conceptual and practical level, negative photographs taken while location scouting for Where I Learn to Breathe were developed with her own plant-based developer, using seaweed as an alternative to chemical substances.

Xiaoyi Lin | MA Textiles

Location: Battersea South, Studio Building, Third floor

Xiaoyi Lin’s project revolves around landscape and the perception of time. During walks along the River Thames, water samples were taken in different weather conditions and times of the day. By experimenting with dyeing and cyanotype using this water collected from the Thames, instead of more harmful chemical processes, Xiaoyi Lin's work invites nature itself to become a material.

Harry R. Masson | MA Print

Location: Battersea North, Dyson & Woo Buildings, First floor and mezzanine

Harry R. Masson’s work The Great Divide examines humanity’s relationship to nature and the endeavour to make sense of a world increasingly filled with both natural and man-made objects. His installation surrounds the observer in an excess of images and objects that question the materiality of our everyday environments through a variety of photographic approaches, including nature, still life and iPhone photography.

Amanda Dolgā | MA Architecture

Location: Kensington, Darwin Building, Upper ground floor

Discover a testing ground for alternative forms of living through the work of Amanda Dolgā who posits that a disused former corporate campus in Stuttgart, Germany can become a testing ground for a way of life that works in tandem with the local ecology. Campus in a Forest implements sustainable adaptation through strategies of maintenance and repair across three scales of intervention – building, landscape and territory. 

Collection: Ain't no Mountain High Enough

Discover new terrain in this collection of works focusing on landscapes and our relationship with nature. Image: 360 Degree Drawing by Phoebe Hayes (MA Visual Communication).