Earlier this month, KARST was one of 16 partners taking part in the nationwide Remember Nature 2025 day of action. As part of the project, each partner commissioned a lead artist to work with the local community, creating artistic and public interventions to “remember nature”. KARST’s selected artist, Laura Hopes, has been working with local children from High Street Primary Academy to explore Plymouth’s recent troubled relationship with trees. Check out our interview with Laura below to find out more about her project…
Please introduce yourself and your practice.
I am an artist, writer, and researcher, focussing upon the implicit relationship between climate change and colonisation, especially in agricultural land practices. I am invested in the methodologies and ethics of friendship and vulnerability, seeing this as an approachable mode of relationships to place.
Tell us about what you have been doing in response to Remember Nature.
Over a series of workshops, I have been working with students from High Street Primary Academy to build sculptures using scaffolding poles made out of wood and traditional scaffolding clamps reclaimed from industry. Riffing off tree preservation diagrams, they designed sculptures that would both draw attention to a tree while defending it from encroaching development. The children also had the opportunity to work collaboratively on scale models of their dream sculptures, where gravity posed less of an issue. These miniature scaffolding structures used recycled materials and allowed the students to spatially imagine structures to remind the trees passersby to REMEMBER NATURE.
I wanted to use the Remember Nature call for action to think about how we value and notice nature all around us. A lot of my practice seems to be about nature being in the ‘wrong’ place, being a byproduct or changing in some way. I wanted to use the language of scaffolding as a signifier of human engagement, access, control or protection and to create sculptural shapes that snag our attention and make us see the nature all around us.
Your work for the Remember Nature project responds to Plymouth’s recent troubled relationship to its trees. Can you tell us more about that?
In 2023 Plymouth’s Armada Way saw the mass felling, under the cover of darkness, of beautiful trees that soften the concrete lines of the city, despite vociferous protests before this action. A huge outpouring of civic grief followed this episode and since then, I have felt hypervigilant about the encroaching developments towards the city’s trees wherever I see it – on the road north out of the city, around the Brickfields development site. When I saw the scaffolding across from the college, I worried that yet another space was having its trees removed.
Anything else you would like to say about Remember Nature?
Remember Nature is a potent moment to draw attention to nature and how we experience or value it, often how we forget that we are part of it. Remember Nature 2025 is timely in its proximity to the latest COP talks, and the seeming inability of rich nations to ‘Remember Nature’
What is next for you in your practice?
I am currently artist in residence with the Southwest Peatland Partnership on Dartmoor, who are restoring peatland and bogs damaged by centuries of peat-cutting and tin streaming. My sculptural, site-specific work complements the ecological rebalancing they are engaged with, and I am focusing upon Molinia (purple moor grass), inedible to stock during the traditional grazing period and extremely vulnerable to fire, using it as a sculpture material, whereby working with it transforms it into biomass.
