Walker & Bromwich / Searching for a Change of Consciousness

Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich’s projects bring together utopian, socialist and animist ideals to create festival-like spaces for communities to come together around issues related to climate change and social justice. Assembling a number of projects together for the first time, Searching for A Change of Consciousness draws together work made with different communities including working-class communities in Wales, anarchists in Denmark, environmental scholars and Indigenous representatives from the Columbian Amazon. Sometimes funny, sometimes sombre, and always hopeful, their projects are often built around unique giant inflatable works that fall between sculpture and processional objects: totems that manifest positive and negative forces and – reading across Walker & Bromwich’s practice in this exhibition – builds bridges and critical links between communities, labour movements, Indigenous struggles, capitalism, extractivism and people’s disconnection from nature.

Immediately confronted the with huge Serpent of Capitalism, the stage of this enveloping exhibition will be set for a story that runs from foundation myths – where serpents represent an umbilical connection to the earth – to the monstrous, destructive force of capitalism as it consumes itself and damages everything in its wake. Through the forest-like space of the Encampment of Eternal Hope members of The Minga Indigina* and the Organisation of Indigenous People of the Columbian Amazon – who gathered at the encampment when it was in Glasgow – can be heard talking about the pressures modern developments have placed upon their communities and the urgent need to draw together all beings to make positive change. Throughout, Searching for A Change of Consciousness raises questions about how nature can be represented in human affairs and joins calls for animals, rivers, mountains and trees to become agents for political gatherings. Then the ominous, jagged sculpture Llechi A Llafur // Slate or State symbolises Talcen Mawr, an iconic volcanic intrusion that, for a time, resisted the intensive quarrying at what was the largest slate quarry in the world, Penrhyn, North Wales. Encapsulating the way that both listening and activating communities is at the root of Walker & Bromwich’s work, the accompanying video shows the Penrhyn Choir carry the sculpture from the town of Bethesda, where a deep rift still runs through a community once divided by the quarryman’s strike over their rights and earnings in the longest industrial action in British history (1900 to 1903), to Penrhyn Castle. This was the former home of the quarry’s owner, Lord Penrhyn, and built from the profits of the transatlantic slave trade. With some of the community setting foot in the castle for the first time, the video captures how the work can bring new situations into being – Walker & Bromwich’s work having the ritual, carnival and disarming ability to shift attitudes and make surprising things seem possible.

Showing works on paper, costumes and preparatory sketches, Searching for A Change of Consciousness brings together the broader practice of a duo who have for decades have been trailblazers of socially engaged practice. Searching for A Change of Consciousness will be the platform for events and other unexpected happenings and be a catalyst for vibrant engagement around the national conversation.

*Minga Indígena are a collective of groups, organizations and communities from Indigenous nations throughout Abya Yala, Central and South America, who have called a Minga (The coming together of a community in collective action in the face of the climate emergency).

Walker & Bromwich have presented work at documenta-fifteen Germany, SEA + Triennale Jakarta, Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece, MCA Sydney; Tate Britain; V&A London; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art UK, Glasgow International; Edinburgh Art Festival, ACCA, Melbourne; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. As well as expansive public commissions such as Encampment of Eternal Hope at COP26 and The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Serpent of Capitalism Roskilder Festival Denmark, Celestial Radio 2002-13 and the Workers Maypole for Great Exhibition of the North 2018.