Groundswell on the Thames: 30 years of cultural activism with London’s riverside communities

Loraine Leeson’s life’s work has been devoted to exploring ways in which art can be used to support social change. Against the backdrop of East London’s riverside locations with their history of poverty, diversity and ongoing struggles between capital and labour, she traces an art practice that has developed through processes of collaboration and participation to add cultural dimensions to activism and bring community-based knowledge into the public domain. She describes how lessons learned from a decade’s work with the communities of London’s Docklands informed subsequent engagement with a range of groups, local organisations and individuals, drawing on new technologies as they emerged to enable their voices to be heard. Finally she returns to the river to describe some current projects. Active Energy is an arts and engineering collaboration driven by the ideas of the Geezers, a group of older men who will not rest until the Thames is re-instated as a source of power for London. Meanwhile Lambeth Floating Marsh is a new initiative with a biophysical chemist to ‘green’ the river’s shored-up banks through the creation of a prototype habitat and monitoring station for microorganisms, using visual projections along the embankment to bring the urgent issue of biodiversity conservation to public attention.

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Online journal focusing on women’s perspectives, collaborating internationally to further the field and understanding of ecological and social justice art.