Clare Nattress

Clare Nattress

Postgraduate researcher

Clare is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer in the at York St John University and is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Leeds Beckett University. Her work embraces interconnectedness across ecosystems, attuning to the environment and new ways of perceiving the world around us.

Clare Nattress
Clare Nattress

About

Working within the intersection of art and science, the artist considers collaborations with scientists and other researchers to be a key element in her work. She has recently been published in a book; Mountain Biking Culture and Society (2024) which represents the first critical examination of the social, cultural, and political significance of mountain biking in contemporary societies.

Moreover she is a part of Cultures of Mountain Biking who are an interdisciplinary, culturally diverse, and global group of researchers who's aim is to understand the social, cultural, and political significance of mountain biking in contemporary societies.

In 2018 Clare sold all of her possessions and cycled in parts of the globe for a year, mainly living in a tent and carrying everything she needed on her bike. Having lived a minimalist lifestyle over the past few years, this year-long project raised further significant questions regarding the environment and air pollution. Cycling and air pollution have now become a basis for her art-making and practice-led research.

Clare became a recognised Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in 2016. She has been lecturing in Art & Design and Graphic Design for the past ten years. With strong interests in curation, Clare has also worked as a co-curator and writer for art galleries in the North of England. She has exhibited a large number of shows with artists sourced from all over the world including USA, Australia, Lithuania, Sweden, Spain and South America.

Ask Me About

Art Design Performance

Project Description

How can cycling be a performative methodology to investigate, reveal and disseminate the problem of air pollution.

This study challenges traditional representationalism, (the idea that the human is a distinct individual outside the world as an observer), when investigating, revealing, and disseminating the threat of air pollution. Scientific methods have historically neglected the embodied and sensory experience of human bodies to which I demonstrate how an interdisciplinary, inclusive, and aesthetic understanding has revealed new insights. Feminist theorist and physicist, Karen Barad posits a performative approach as an alternative, where the body is entangled in the world and its tools, and the researcher is conceived as entangled in phenomena (2003, 2007). While scientific approaches have value, by adopting performative cycling as a methodology, the research positions the body at the forefront of knowledge production whilst also recognising new materialist agencies. Cycling is fundamental in order to amplify embodied attunement and to access interconnectivity with the non-human world.

This research is in part a collaboration with atmospheric chemist Dr Daniel Bryant from the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories (WACL), University of York. This arts-science collaboration has called attention to, and advocated for a more holistic approach to scientific research that considers aesthetic, embodied and qualitative research methods. This has included aspects of lived experiences that artistic methods can successfully engineer, as well as the significance of embodiment and sensory perception in shaping our understanding of non-human matter and attuning to the environment.

Research Team

  • External Advisor:

    Professional Lisa Stansbie