I am about to spend three days in London at a series of invitation-only workshops looking at: “the potential for the arts to enter into partnerships with scientists and flood risk and environmental management communities, social science and cultural geography communities, local, regional and national government organisations towards the development of both sustainable policy and practical application”.  This event is organised in part by my old friend Simon Read, along with Ralf Nuhn, Sue Tapsell and Simon McCarthy from Middlesex University and Chris Wainwright at Chelsea School of Art. There are overlaps in core concerns with the Polar Cap conference in Edinburgh where I gave a keynote recently and it will be interesting to see how this London event compares. I have the greatest respect for Simon as an artist and environmental campaigner and an innate suspicion of the London art education world, so will be trying to see past my own presuppositions and see whether there are any real possibilities for ‘transversality’ to develop.

My own short presentation is deliberately slightly provocative – a shorter and less nuanced version of the ‘ecosophical collaboration’ presentation I did in Edinburgh – and begins by picking up on Pauline O’Connell’s wonderful description of herself as a “composite cur”. Given that the original seems to have been very well received it will be interesting to see how the same approach goes down in the South East.

I am going out to walk along part of the Severn estuary with Antony Lyons today to look at potential material for a film we are making on transgression (in the geological sense). This fits into Antony’s on-going work around water, climate change and sea levels, and the whole issue of time and change, ecologically speaking. Walking and talking is also always a good means of reflecting on, sifting through, and generally sharing and digesting thinking material. Today’s trip has a particular feel to it because my friend the artist David Walker-Barker has just agreed to send me a clip of something that provided perhaps the most extraordinary experience of the complexity of geological time I’ve every had. While we were talking in his studio in Yorkshire one evening, David handed me a very large quartz crystal and told me to watch it carefully as I tipped it from side to side. Almost miraculously, as I did so I saw a small bubble of gas move in its liquid heart, much like the bubble in a spirit level. The paradoxical tension between the age and solidity of the crystal and that movement has always remained with me, as mysterious as the viral matter – inert but with the latent potential for life – that makes up part of the DNA of every human being.