Rachel Duckhouse was Associate Artist engaging staff at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art around issues of climate change, in response to Ellie Harrison’s Early Warning Sign that the gallery has been hosting.
The image above, part of a suite of images in SYSTEMS BREAKDOWN is the result of conversations with staff about their relationships with each other and with the institution. She says,
I became aware of patterns, relationships, connections, disconnections, motivations, hierarchies, agendas, preoccupations and passions that shaped each individual’s perception of the institution and how it related to wider environmental and social issues inside and outside its walls.
I attempted to map out and draw the infinitely dynamic, multi layered and intangible relationships between people and the systems they work, live and think within.
In the process of making the drawings, I better understood the difficulties in addressing a community of individuals each with their own relationship to that community and ultimately to climate change; and I’m beginning to understand how they act as a metaphor for the challenges we all face as a global community.
It’s worth looking at these drawings and this process in relation to the irational.org project The Status Project. That also used visual methods to explore individual’s relations with bureaucracies in a social context.