Remember the Future

How can we transform our relationship with nature?  

This group exhibition and artist-led research project unearths and interrogates our connection with our habitats and ecosystems, both global and local.   

Artists including Ackroyd & Harvey, Nestor Pestana, Bryony Ella, Eloise Moody and Vicky Long, and more to be announced, will present work that invites us to question established notions of our place as part of the natural world.

Alongside the exhibition, the galleries and grounds at Orleans House Gallery will become an ecocentric artistic research laboratory. Through engaging with all-comers, community groups, scientists and our ecosystem, artists will lead investigations into how we renew our connection with the natural world.

From collaborating with a protected Cedar of Lebanon tree in the grounds of Orleans House Gallery to embracing First Nation cosmologies and seeking where wild sits within all of us, you can read more about the Artist Research Projects and the work they will be doing here: Artist Research Projects    

We invite all to step into our vibrant ecosystem and help tell this story, that even in a most urban of environments we can affect change in the ecological crises of our time. Join the conversation about the issues highlighted in the exhibition on twitter using #RememberTheFuture

Remember the Future is the opening chapter of our story of Cultural Reforesting, the beginning of our new collaborative multi-year programme investigating ways we might renew our relationship with nature. 

Artist Bios 

Ackroyd & Harvey  

Multi award winning artist duo Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are internationally acclaimed for creating multi-disciplinary works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history. Referencing memory and time, nature and culture, urban political ecologies, climate emergency and degradation of the living planet, their time-based practice reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event.  Processes of germination, growth and decay (organic and inorganic), erosion and deposition, feature in artworks that often evolve through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their profound interest in local ecologies and planetary concerns with socio-political paradigms.  In 2019, the artists co-founded Culture Declares Emergency in response to the climate and ecological emergency.  

Nestor Pestana

Nestor Pestana is a Venezuelan/Portuguese educator, artist and digital designer. His work is research based, focusing on the necessity for critical engagement with contemporary and emerging issues related to technology, ecology and politics. He uses worldbuilding through design fiction and speculation, combined with storytelling methodologies. Narratives are expressed through moving image, sculpture and installation, to immerse visitors actively and critically with the narrative and issue presented. Nestor has a background in Design and received an MA in Design Interactions from the RCA in 2015.

Exhibition highlights include: The Museum of Lost and Found Potential – Supported by the Wellcome Trust, London 2019; Authentic Fictions: Speculative Futures for 2.5D Printing – DLab Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo 2019; Night School on Anarres: Imaginings of an Anarchist Utopia – Somerset House, London 2016; and Economics of Uncertainty, Future of Labor – Venice Biennale 2014. In 2020 his work Plumial Space received a finalist award by YouFab Global Creative Awards.

Bryony Ella

Bryony Ella is a British-Trinidadian artist, curator and producer working at intersection of art and science, with a particular focus on nature connection. Her practice spans street art to oil paintings, textile design to drawing, playing with pattern, scale and composition, and moving between symbolism, abstraction and expressionism in the search for immersive encounters with nature. She also brings a strong community engagement and participatory focus to her public realm based work. Alongside her artist practice, Bryony has 15 years experience of curating and producing social history and science exhibitions, most recently leading the inaugural public engagement strategy for exhibitions at the UK’s largest lab, The Francis Crick Institute. She has a BA Hons in Fine Art Painting from Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology with a Curatorial Fellowship at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.  

Vicky Long and Eloise Moody  

Vicky Long works across a range of media. She has a keen interest in people and place, and the dynamic of that relationship over time.

She has worked as a maker, designer and performer in theatre and collaborated internationally with theatre/dance directors Wan Tik Lun, Douglas Rintoul and Vikram Iyengar. Ongoing collaboration with Vikram Iyengar, on a performance research project focussed on the ecology of the Sundarbans, continues to lead to a variety of outcomes in multiple locations. Vicky has also created sound and site-specific work for Cape Farewell, the Eden Project, Stories of Change, TfL and the boroughs of Lambeth and Wandsworth, Southbank Centre, Art Night and York St. Mary’s.

Eloise Moody is a multi-disciplinary artist/maker.  Her work investigates subjects of memory, absence and belonging through socially engaged practice. Working with specific groups of people; from security guards and nuns to those who are the last in their family line, she helps to uncover and document moments of beauty, translating them into finely made artworks that often go back into the public realm.

She has worked with Museum of London, Kettles Yard, Metal, London Wetland Centre, the Art Lending Library and BMAG amongst others.

Vicky and Eloise first collaborated together on Colourfield, a Shrinking Space commission and part of the Wonder Project at Kew Wakehurst, 2018.