Hugh Nicholson (UCL) - 2022-23 Students

BRIGHTWATER: Green Solutions and New Artistic Forms

BRIGHTWATER is an interdisciplinary practice-led investigation of ‘green solutions’: carbon-offset and natural-capital frameworks, phytoremediation, and green finance. Masked by corporate rhetoric of ecological techno-fixes, sustainability and stewardship, these mythic ‘solutions’ conceal and enact strategies of privatisation, commodification and financialisation. Brightwater will examine the diverse modes, impacts and aesthetic regimes of this industry. By generating innovative methods and forms of post-conceptual art production, this research will both demystify green solutions and reflect how artworks are themselves shaped by environmentally embedded processes of commodification. Through this, Brightwater will develop a critical artistic praxis that considers ecology at the level of artistic form.

Primary supervisor: Kristen Kreider, UCL
Secondary supervisor: Carey Young, UCL