Day of Action Feast prepared by Faye Matloub. Image: Rachael Barker

Remember Nature: Intra-actions, 2025 

 

‘One touch of nature may make the whole world kin, but usually, when we say nature, do we mean to include ourselves?’

Raymond Williams [1]

 

Remember Nature: Intra-actions, held in November and December 2025, brought together the work of artists Alistair Debling, Faye Matloub and Maddi Nicholson to explore how we might reconnect and re-root ourselves in ecology – the land, living systems, and one another – through practices of art, food, and care.[2]

The exhibition recognised that constructs such as colonialism, industrialisation, and class-based systems have led to a disconnection between people and their environments – reducing the land to a resource to be used, rather than a living environment that exists in mutual relationship with us.

 

Intra-actions was grounded in a wider England-wide call to action: Remember Nature, a project first initiated by artist, refugee and activist Gustav Metzger (1926–2017). In 2015, Metzger invited artists, students, and institutions across the world to respond to the urgent need to “remember nature” – not only as a source of beauty, but as something under threat, as something to protect, and as something of which we are inextricably a part.

 

Tuesday 4th November, 2025, marked the 10-year anniversary and new staging of the visionary art project Remember Nature. Delivered in partnership with 15 regional arts partners across England and curated by Andrea Gregson and Jo Joelson with the Serpentine, the programme brought people together through a series of cultural and artistic public interventions, encouraging collective action to ‘remember nature’ and respond to the climate and nature crisis. (Click here to read more about the Remember Nature project).

 

On the Day of Action, ahead of the public opening, Art Gene hosted a communal feast, prepared by Faye Matloub with produce from Art Gene’s own organic site Allotment Soup: the Isle of Walney Community Growing Space to celebrate and thank everyone who contributed to the development of the project throughout Spring 2025.

The meal was followed by artist talks held in the Art Gene Gallery featuring Alistair Debling, Faye Matloub, and Maddi Nicholson of Art Gene.

 

Metzger believed that art could help us remember our connection to the world around us and inspire action. He challenged systems that harm the land we depend on – land often seen to be beneath us by those who believe humans stand literally and metaphorically above it.

Metzger’s call to action felt especially relevant in Barrow-in-Furness, a remarkable town built on industrial extraction and social systems that have separated people from the land. As well as exploring this industrial past and the social constructs we have created to separate humans from the world around them, the exhibition explored how food and food growing could reconnect us to each other, to memory, and the environment to become a medium for care, knowledge, and potential ecological repair.

 

The works on show invited us to consider how we might re-root ourselves in this place, recognise the land’s agency, and reconnect with a deeper ecological and cultural life.

To ‘Remember Nature’ is therefore not just about nostalgia, but an urgent, political, ethical – and sometimes playful act.

 

 

Click here to view the complete list of works featured in the exhibition.

 

Click here to watch a film about the project and exhibition featuring artists Maddi Nicholson, Alistair Debling and Faye Matloub, curator Miranda Hill and volunteer and contributor Summera Jabbar.

 

The film was made by Colin Aldred.

Featuring Alistair Debling, Clinton Rimmer, Faye Matloub, Maddi Nicholson, Miranda Hill, Summera Jabbar. Including Maddi Nicholson’s film provocation, Mother Nature Mailed… she’s mad, 2025

15:05 minutes

 

Click here to read Root and Branch, an essay by curator Miranda Hill that brings together the exhibition’s main themes.

 

[1] Williams, Raymond. “Ideas of Nature.” In Problems of Materialism and Culture, 67-85. London: Verso, 1980.

[2] Intra-actions is a term that is borrowed from philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Unlike interaction, which assumes we are separate entities that engage with each other, Barad suggests that all beings emerge through their relationships and entanglements. We are not separate from the natural world but shaped with and through it.

 

Participating artists

 

In February and March 2025, Art Gene commissioned Alistair and Faye as REAL Barrow Artists in Residence with the projects What Can You Bring to the Table? (Alistair) and Sufra Dayma or its English translation Bless the Meal (Faye). During their residencies, they worked closely with local communities, including individuals who recently moved to Barrow from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Eritrea. The exhibition included contributions from Ahmed Elking, Emmanuel Papy Madro Singo, Saidi Khamis, Summera Jabbar, Yohanis Haile, and Milen Habton.

 

Maddi Nicholson 

 

Maddi Nicholson, artist and founder-Director of Art Gene. 

 

As an artist Maddi produces works, celebrating cultural and social distinctiveness. Her northern working-class upbringing is the root of her practice; vernacular structures, housing, small holdings, play and the natural environment. Cultural and social traditions and the female experience. Making works from the stuff of people’s lives, using stitching, signage, inflated, recycled, or rethought sculptures, cast iron, mobile apps, photography and video. Maddi’s inflated replica of a Barrow terraced house examined traditional northern workers housing in Going home from here, touring beauty spots in terrace on tour. 

 

Alistair Debling 

 

Alistair Debling is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cumbria, UK. He makes films, photographs, performances, meals and installations. His work investigates diverse fields, from queer nightlife and ecology to militarism, agriculture and architecture. Through sustained engagement with a particular community, he likes to discover unlikely connections between things: what does a nuclear power station have in common with a disco ball? A dairy cow with a canonised saint? A gay bar with a wild elephant? 

 

Recent projects have been commissioned and presented by Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness; Jwllrs, Morecambe; the Grundy Gallery, Blackpool; Grizedale Arts, Cumbria. Recent screenings include HOME, Manchester; Providenza, Corsica; Copenhagen Architecture Festival, Denmark; Atelier WG, Netherlands. 

 

Faye Matloub  

 

Faye Matloub is a British-born Iraqi artist and chef based in London. In 2023, she graduated from Central Saint Martins with a degree in Sculpture. Following her studies, her artistic practice gradually transitioned toward the medium of food. As her work moved beyond the confines of the studio and onto the plate, she began to define this evolving body of work as Edible Mediums. 

 

Edible Mediums encompasses a diverse range of formats, including workshops, community engagement projects, supper clubs, and written work. As a second-generation Iraqi, Faye uses food to engage with different communities, learn from them, and conduct research on the preservation of migrant identity – emphasising the importance of creating accessible language for first- and second- generation immigrants like herself in a creative context. 

 

 

Special thanks to:

 

Ahmed Asgey Ahmed, Bethan Imogen Pettitt, Clinton Rimmer, Colin Aldred, Daniel, Diana Merick, David (from World Food Shop, 193 Rawlinson Street, Barrow), Emmanuel Papy Mando Singo, Filmon, Fiori, Francis Lloyd Jones, Kim Farr, Haben, James Holcombe, Kate Davis, Lela Harris, Kemal, Merci, Middion, Milen Habton, Nabaz, Rut, Saidi Khamis, Summera Jabber, Thabo, Tsega, Yasmine, Yheys, Yohanis Haile.

 

The exhibition and the volunteers who help us sustain our work was kindly supported by:

 

Funded by UK Government, funded by Historic England, W&F Council, SJFF, NLCtyFund, Future Proof Cumbria, Arts Council England

 

 

 

A Menu to Remember Nature including Falafel, Hummus, Amba (Iraqi mango sauce), Arabic bread, dates and backlava, by Faye Matloub. Image: Miranda Hill