KARST studio holder Laura Hopes has been selected as one of 17 international visual artists taking part in Remember Nature 2025 – an ambitious new staging of the visionary art project initiated in 2015 by the celebrated artist Gustav Metzger (1926-2017).
Remember Nature 2025 is curated by Andrea Gregson and Jo Joelson with Serpentine who are leading a Day of Action on 4 November 2025 with a programme of new artistic commissions and special events. Remember Nature 2025 marks the 10-year anniversary of Metzger’s project in partnership with 16 regional arts partners across England, including KARST. It will bring people together through a programme of cultural and artistic public interventions, to ‘remember nature’ and act collectively to adapt to the nature crisis.
Laura has been developing a project for Remember Nature 2025 that responds to Plymouth’s recent troubled relationship to its trees. Noting protective scaffolding around trees in KARST’s neighbourhood, Laura chose to make sculptural interventions that explore the strange balance between preservation, development and access to green spaces.
She has begun a series of workshops with the children of High Street primary school, exploring the sculptural qualities of scaffolding clamps and wood to uncover what it means to protect, surround and draw attention to trees.
Laura says, “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 recognise nature all around us.”
Remember Nature 2025 builds upon the initial Remember Nature in 2015 and Metzger’s call to action, which urged arts professionals and students from all disciplines “to make a stand against the ongoing erasure of species” and create new work to ‘remember nature’. The artistic acts and interventions on the Day of Action will be live streamed, recorded and shared via a new project website: remembernature.art
Artists include A Man Called Adam, Youngsook Choi, Patricia Domínguez Claro, Hamish Fulton, Anya Gallacio, Laura Hopes, Uta Kögelsberger, Harun Morrison, Eduardo Navarro, Maddi Nicholson, Nancy Odufona, Studio Lab (Ria Bagley, Tom Doubtfire, Bernadette McBride) and Yu-Chen Wang.
