Old Cray’s Almanack: artists, writers and climate scientists gather at the Met Office for a spot of future forecasting

Back in February I received a really intriguing email from an old tutor of mine at Falmouth. It was an invitation to take part in a project that would bring together six artists, twelve writers and six climate scientists from the Met Office to create a speculative almanack. The project would include a visit to the Met Office to meet everyone involved in person, to explore the almanacks in the Met Office’s archives, and to generate ideas.

Excited and very curious, I said “yes” immediately and awaited further news. Within a few email exchanges, I’d received more information about the project concept and the trip to Exeter to visit the Met Office had been arranged. The 13th of May came around and myself and the other artists and writers met at the Rougemont Hotel in central Exeter before travelling to the Met Office’s Collaboration Building in the city’s outskirts. There the fun began!

Over the course of a day and a half, we learnt about the history of almanacks and their multifarious forms and audiences; heard from the climate scientists about the immense complexity of weather forecasting; toured the Met Office headquarters and discovered the huge breadth of work done there; explored the eerie rooms where Cray – the Met Office’s former supercomputer (and the eponymous prognosticator of our almanack) – used to live; developed ideas for new symbols that might help us navigate our changing climate; quizzed the scientists about their specialisms (fire, flooding, agriculture, climate communication) to start generating ideas for the content of the almanack; played with writing poetry in beeswax; attempted to summon the ghost of Cray with the help of a Ouija board; ate more cake than is acceptable; and bonded over our shared enthusiasm for the richness of the almanack form and the importance of the subject at its heart.

Now, we have a few months to develop our contributions to the almanack, collaborating and/or working independently as we choose. I’m keen to draw upon my interest in the role of the fossil fuel lobby in spreading climate disinformation; what would an almanack published or sponsored by BP or Exxon Mobil look like? While much of the content of historical almanacks might be described as misinformation rather than disinformation, there were some seemingly unscrupulous authors who took advantage of their influence to further their own aims. Take William Salmon, for example, who in his 1684 almanack predicted an outbreak of the plague and then advertised his homemade plague cures on the very next page (thank you to Ben Smith, the project lead, for this specific insight). I am also, predictably (…), very interested in making work about the impact of the climate crisis on our food systems, and would like to explore how the almanack form could be used to support community food sovereignty and resilience. Let’s see!

Project details:

  • The project was initiated by Dr Ben Smith, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, specialising in environmental and speculative literature. It is part of a two year, AHRC-funded fellowship, A History of Storms: New Approaches to Climate Fiction and Climate Literacy.

  • The project’s point of contact at the Met Office is Professor Peter Stott, Science Fellow in Climate Attribution at the Met Office and author of Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial

  • The production of the almanack is being directed by Luke Thompson, Editor at Guillemot Press, and Phyllida Bluemel, artist, designer and lecturer at Falmouth University.

"... the comics world as an ecosystem": Tinta Plural / Plural Ink residency, Colombia, summer 2025

Last summer, I was incredibly lucky to be selected for Tinta Plural / Plural Ink – a cross-cultural comics residency focused on the sustainability questions facing the industry. It involved two weeks of travelling around Colombia, alongside the Colombian artist also selected for the residency – Paula Carvajal – to have conversations with people across the comics industry about environmental sustainability, with a view to creating a comic based on the learnings. The residency was set up by Entreviñetas, an organisation dedicated to supporting the comics community across Colombia, in collaboration with Thought Bubble, a Harrogate-based comics festival, with funding from the British Council’s Circular Culture programme.

The two weeks began with six days in Bogotá, participating in Festival Entreviñetas – hosting a roundtable conversation on comics and sustainability, attending workshops, and speaking to as many artists, writers and publishers as we could about the significance of environmental sustainability to their work. We then travelled to Buenaventura, on the Pacific coast of Colombia, with a handful of other comics artists to take part in another comics festival there and learn about the differing meanings of comics and sustainability to communities that have been particularly harmed by the combined forces of capitalism and colonialism. Finally, Paula and I travelled to Cali, where we met a group of people working in comics for a sustainability-focused discussion, and learnt about some of the city’s rich art and design culture through a tour with Patricia Prado, creative director of design studio Casa Ternario.

After the fortnight of travel and conversations, Paula and I set to work on creating a 16 page comic inspired by what we experienced. Part way through this process, I also attended Thought Bubble festival to share a preview of the comic and have further conversations with exhibitors and visitors there about comics and sustainability. The comic is now finished and will be launched via an online event before the end of this year.

The whole experience was incredibly enriching. I had never visited Colombia before (nor anywhere else in South America), and it was brilliant to have the opportunity to do so through the lens of two of my great passions: comics and sustainability (once I’d recovered from the irony of flying halfway across the world for that purpose). I met so many brilliant people, including many other artists with an interest in the cross-over between comics and agroecology – such as Diego Zhaken, who has made a beautiful comic about a community growing project in Bogotá that he’s part of, and Azul de Bolsillo, a publishing studio dedicated to art and comics that explore people’s relationships with plants and their environments.

The opportunity to befriend and collaborate with Paula was really special too. There’s something really remarkable about meeting someone from such a different context with whom you have so much in common. From the get-go we were aligned about how we wanted to approach the subject – exploring the relational problems at the heart of the sustainability crisis and, correspondingly, emphasising the importance of the role that connection and community (between humans and other living beings) plays in any potential ‘solutions’. This really helped to make the challenge of condensing a complex subject into just 16 pages a little lighter and more joyful. And, while our drawing styles are quite different, with deep mutual respect for one another’s work and a commitment to fluidity, we were able – we believe – to create a coherent visual narrative.

I’m not going to say anymore about the content of the comic or the conversations that we had on this subject as I would like the work to speak for itself when it is eventually published. So for now, please see the sample pages below and watch out for an announcement on my instagram about the launch. You can also check out a few more photos and thoughts (in English and Spanish) about the experience in this post.

With immense thanks to the whole team at Entreviñetas – particularly Daniel Jiménez Quiroz, Director of Entreviñetas – the whole team at Thought Bubble, and the British Council.

Two sample pages from the comic

"It's always been more about the people than the fishing": a fortnight as artist-in-residence within the fishing community of Arbroath, Scotland

This summer, I spent two weeks as an artist-in-residence at the New Scriptorium – a dedicated artists and writers’ bothy in the grounds of Arbroath Abbey. The residency was organised by the Arbroath 2020+4 Festival Committee, in collaboration with the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival and Hospitalfield, and called for an artist to create comics in response to the theme ‘Power & Word’, alongside optional subjects with particular relevance to Arbroath. Having a special interest in social and environmental stories around food, I chose to focus on the significance of the fishing industry to Arbroath’s identity – exploring the perspectives of those whose own identities are tangled up with it.

Everyone I spoke to during those two weeks was incredibly generous with their knowledge and experience, sharing much more material than I could surface in the work. And so the five postcard comics I produced are just snapshots of the wealth of tales that were gifted to me. Largely in the words of the storytellers themselves (reflected back by a curious outsider), the comics touch on a spectrum of experiences connected to fishing – looking at the industry’s rich history, its vibrant but challenged present, and the vulnerabilities and possibilities of its future.

To view all five postcards and read about the content of each in more detail, please see the following posts on my Work page:

Keep reading for a few further reflections on how I approached the creation of the comics.

“All things fishing” is how I began the residency. As I don’t have any particular connection to the fishing industry or to the area, I decided that I should start by (forgive me) casting the net wide around the fishing community, with the hope of catching the stories that felt most important to community members. Other than that, the only decision I made in advance was (following on from the approach I took to my Loveland’s Weeds project) that the comics would be published as postcards.*

I spent the two weeks speaking to as many people as I could with some kind of affiliation to the fishing industry: people working as fishers, a former fisherman turned boat tour guide, fishmongers and smokie makers, a journalist who covered Arbroath’s fishing industry in its heyday, a boatyard owner, a local geologist with a fishing family, a pub landlady, smokie tourists, a librarian, a restauranteur specialising in seafood, people fishing for fun off the harbour, community heritage groups and more. Instead of recording the conversations with a dictaphone, I feverishly took notes (during and after). Note-taking seemed like a less intrusive approach; I wanted to ensure that everyone I spoke to felt as comfortable as possible sharing their stories with me. I also thought that note-taking would allow me to more actively listen to each person, and create the conditions for the most memorable parts of each conversation to shine through. Finally, my choice of the postcard format was also a contributing factor; I knew I was only going to be able to capture a slither of each conversation within such a small space, and so I did not want to overwhelm myself with too much material to work from. (As I already mentioned, of course I did still end up with much, much more than I could share within the time and resources I had available — more on that in a moment.)

During each conversation, particularly the longer ones, I aimed to ask the person I was speaking to about which point they felt was the most important; the thought or idea or provocation that they would really like to share with their fellow community members, and people outside of Arbroath. This was a further measure to help contain the potential content of each comic, and — I hoped — one way to ensure that the comics reflected the community members’ stories as they wanted them to be told (not how I, an illustrator from London without any Scottish or fishing heritage, thought they should be told). Further to this, I took the contact details of everyone I spoke to so I could send them the comic drafts to get their input. This process meant that the comics were at least partly co-developed, and all developed with the full consent of those represented in them.

L-R: studies for the project; the desk in the New Scriptorium; dressed up as a fishwife with Heritage Arts Auchmithie Residents; Arbroath harbour stacked up with creel pots; fresh smokies made by the team at The Fish Hoose; sketching around the harbour

The three conversation-based comics and the two with snippets of multiple conversations represent perhaps 10% of the stories I heard during those two weeks. I wish I had had more time to create more comics, to share the story of how the fishers of Auchmithie were condemned to the class of “serf” by the local Earl when they first tried to migrate from Auchmithie to Arbroath; to document the conversation I had with local restauranteur Marco Macari about how he felt the future of Arbroath harbour should be in food; to relay the strong feelings of the working fishers about Brexit and its impact (or lack thereof) on their trade; to capture the experiences of former fisherman and Chair of the Arbroath Fisherman’s Association, Alex Smith, from Arbroath’s fishing heyday in the 1970s and 80s, and his daughter Morag’s stories about growing up within the fisher community in the Fit O’ the Toon (the historical area around the harbour where Arbroath’s fishers lived), and all the fishing and maritime tales woven into her expert geological knowledge of the local coastline. Further to these, I would have wanted to create space to imaginatively engage with the perspectives of the marine creatures who have a quiet but pivotal role in each and every one of the stories: what of the experience of the lobsters in the pots?

The volume of material I had to leave on the cutting room floor, so to speak, has lead me (and this isn’t the first time) to question the value of the detail of my drawing style. Could I — should I — work on a more efficient style, which will allow me to create more in less time? What would be gained and what would be lost by streamlining my approach? This isn’t something I can answer very well in theory — only more practice will tell. I hope I am given, or can create, another comics journalism opportunity soon: to try to answer these questions, but also because this experience was the highlight of my illustration career so far. My gratitude towards everyone who made this experience so interesting, exciting and eye-opening is as deep and rich as the flavour of an Arbroath smokie. Particular thanks are due to the following wonderful folks and organisations, who each actively shaped and supported this project in various ways:

Kristina Aburrow - Cicely Farrer - Lucy Byatt and the team at Hospitalfield - Morag, Alex and Christine Smith - Violet Thompson, Ann and Rikki Craig, and all of the Heritage Arts Auchmithie Residents - Jo Moore and the team at The Fish Hoose - Tommy and Benji Yule - Harry Simpson - Bob and Sharon Teviotdale - Ian Lamb - Alastair Sutherland - Marco Macari - Historic Environment Scotland and the staff of Arbroath Abbey - The Lakes International Comic Art Festival Team - and my fellow residents at Hospitalfield.

*Why postcards? Two brief notes:

  • Postcards are usually associated with idealised representations of places for the consumption of tourists. There is something interesting and powerful about defying that association by using postcards to represent personal, local perspectives on a place.

  • Postcards are also affordable. Printing the comics on postcards — instead of, say, A4 or A3 prints — will mean that more people in the community can access them.

Looking for a visual "grammar of animacy": can comics bring us into better relation with other living beings?

This is an edited extract from the dissertation I wrote as part of my MA in authorial practice illustration at Falmouth. Although the thought of anyone reading my slightly clumsy academic writing makes me cringe, I have decided to share this — and the full dissertation (linked below) — because I am interested in connecting with people over the ideas and questions contained within it. If any part resonates with you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Zoom out: a go at one of Aidan Koch’s environmental comics exercises

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, biologist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) is a passionate, lyrical call for a restoration of Indigenous ecological knowledge; knowledge guided by the fundamental understanding that all life is connected in a web of kinship, sustained by a ‘moral covenant of reciprocity’. It stands in defiant contrast with the dominant human culture that, as Peruvian scholar Aníbal Quijano has argued, has been shaped by a colonial epistemology, which separates ‘Man’ (read: the white, male European elite) from ‘Nature’ (all other life) so that ‘Man’ may exploit ‘Nature’ at will (Quijano 1991/2007). Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer points to the role language plays in shaping human relationships with all other life. She notes that there is a fundamental difference between western languages — particularly English — and Indigenous languages: that the latter have a ‘grammar of animacy’. Grammar, Kimmerer states, is how we ‘chart relationships in language’, and the grammar of animacy reminds the speaker of their ‘kinship with all of the animate world’. Unlike English, which generally reserves personhood for humans, most Indigenous languages speak of all living beings as people, as family. This not only renders it impossible to perceive of other living beings as exploitable — they are kin, not “natural resources” — but reflects how all living beings have unique perspectives on the world, from which human beings might learn. This — maple, beaver, bear as teacher — is a core tenet of Indigenous ecological knowledge that Kimmerer gifts the reader with stories of throughout Braiding Sweetgrass.

Meanwhile, Aidan Koch is an artist based in Landers, California — the unceded ancestral land of the Serrano people. Koch’s practice is multifaceted — blurring the borders between fine art, illustration and literature — and comics run like a river throughout. A prominent facet of her work with comics is environmental comics, an ongoing project exploring the powers of comics to sensitise people to the interconnectedness of the living world, at a time when rife insensitivity to this is driving climate and ecological crises. Koch emphasises that comics are ‘activated by relationality’, with first the comic’s creator, and then the comic’s reader, asked to create meaningful relationships between multifarious elements. This, Koch suggests, means that comics have particular potential to draw out the ‘interconnectivity between objects, materials, time, and living beings’. So with environmental comics, Koch proposes a set of comics-generative starting points for consciously cultivating this sense of interconnectivity. There is great resonance between this and Kimmerer’s discussion of the grammar of animacy: if comics are intrinsically relational, and the grammar of animacy is an expression of the relationships between all living beings, then can comics evoke a grammar of animacy — in both verbal and visual language?

In the dissertation, I explore this question by discussing the significance of animacy in more detail — within Kimmerer’s writing, other Indigenous scholarship and linguistics, particularly Mel Y Chen’s Animacies (2012) — and reflecting on my experience of trying Aidan Koch’s environmental comics prompts, in dialogue with observations from comics theory about how the art form brings worlds to life.

Click the link to open a PDF of the dissertation: ‘The life that pulses through all things: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Grammar of Animacy’ and Aidan Koch’s Environmental Comics practice’

Terra Incognita – the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice graduate show at Falmouth University

A selection of photographs of my space in the MA graduate show this summer. The display focused on my final project - Loveland’s Weeds - a collection of postcard comics, accompanied by a weed “map”, documenting conversations held at a local community agro-ecology project (Loveland) about weeds and what we can learn from them. For more details about the project, please see this overview post here.

While developing the show space, I had three priorities: to display the work in an accessible way; to speak to how weeds trespass across the fences between domesticity and wilderness; and to centre Loveland’s primary purpose - providing the community with locally and regeneratively-grown produce. Please see the image captions for details about each element in the space.

The full Loveland’s Weeds display.

The original postcard comic artwork was displayed alongside hand-drawn portraits of Lovelanders - people and plants alike - and handwritten thoughts and observations about weeds. The background is a weed “map” - the outline of the leaves, flowers, and roots of a sample of weeds from Loveland.

A makeshift table from Loveland palettes, used to display the set of Loveland Weeds postcard comics, flyers about the Falmouth Food Coop - of which Loveland is a part - a potted “pigweed” (callaloo/amaranth) from Falmouth University’s own little kitchen garden, and blank postcards and drawing materials for visitors to use as they wished.

The fridge contained produce from Loveland, available for visitors to the show to buy on a pay-as-you-feel basis.

Postcards written and drawn by visitors to both Loveland and to the show.

A bouquet of weeds from Loveland, and a few weedy reference books for visitors to flick through.

Chatting to visitors - including a few Loveland volunteers - during the show’s opening.

Loveland’s Weeds: an overview

There is a field that rolls, lush and green, down a hillside to a forested riverbank just outside the town of Penryn, Cornwall. The field is called Loveland, and it is home to a community agro-ecology project. Since autumn 2020, volunteers have gathered at Loveland to grow food and flowers in accordance with practices that balance give-and-take between people and the land, to the benefit of both.

The path leading from the riverbank up to Loveland, photographed in July 2022

I started volunteering at Loveland in February 2022, a few months into my MA at Falmouth University. I very quickly fell in love with the field, and sought to spend as much time there as I could, learning about agro-ecology in action and enjoying becoming a part of the vibrant and caring community. This experience inspired me to turn the focus of my MA practice towards exploring the relationships between human beings and other living beings, particularly within food-growing contexts — the relationships on which all our lives depends, but which for many of us are marginalised or distorted, allowing for neglect and abuse.

This exploration has led (and continues to lead) me far and wide: through channels of colonial theory and Indigenous scholarship on animacy - the pulsing, interconnected sentience of all living beings; towards outposts of comic studies that consider the medium’s capacity to tap into the bends of time and space, and envision more-than-human perspectives; and along growing branches of anthropology that are probing through the artificial barriers that wall in the “human” from everything else. (I hope to make time to write here about these wanderings and encounters in more detail soon.)

A compound drawing of weeds at Loveland - bitter dock, dandelion, scarlet pimpernel, common plantain (or ‘white man’s footstep’), willow herb, ragwort, buddleia, creeping buttercup…

Weeds are one gathering point for this exploration. Born of the human-made (Western, Colonial, Christian) division between “Man” and “Nature”, “Domesticated” and “Wild” and now forever trespassing - sometimes quietly, sometimes violently - across it, weeds have a lot to say about relationships between living beings. Particularly within agricultural settings, weeds present a reminder that no interaction between human beings and other living beings is ever one-way or self-contained. Attempts to control or eradicate one plant, insect, fungus, or ‘pest’ of any other form, will always have consequences for another life or lives, often including our own. Disregarding or forgetting this sows trouble.

Loveland’s Weeds was my final MA project, with which I just dipped my toe into this vast subject. The project comprises six postcard comics - each presenting an excerpt of a conversation had at Loveland about weeds - and a “map” charting the field of questions and tentative responses I explored both during and in the lead up to the project.

The decision to work with the comic form had been made before I got going with Loveland’s Weeds, as part of the research I had started into comics’ potential to embody a visual ‘grammar of animacy’ (I’m hoping to write a separate post on this soon), but I also detected a sympathy between comics and weeds - both are marginalised yet ubiquitous, and activated by the imposition of borders. Then, I chose the postcard format for a number of reasons: having limited space helped to contain what is quite an unwieldy theme, while also leaning on the association between the postcard form and a sense of brevity, summary, snapshot - this project was not aspiring to be comprehensive; postcards are representative of travel, and travel and migration are essential to the discussion of weeds; and, finally, the entangled history of postcards and empire - postcards, a relatively new medium at the time, were popular souvenirs at the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “world fairs”. Meanwhile, the landscape of the map is lifted from the traced outline of some of Loveland’s actual weeds - leaves, flowers and roots of dandelion, dock, ragwort, and others.

The six Loveland’s Weeds postcards. You can see three of the postcard comics in detail, with accompanying discussion, on the Work page.

Leaves, roots and flowers of dandelion, buddleia, ragwort, dock, plantain, and more - traced to create the weed map (below)

The map of themes, questions, and tentative responses that contained the Loveland’s Weeds project.

The postcards and map were displayed in the final MA exhibition alongside multiple portraits of Lovelanders - both people and plants alike - written questions and ideas about weeds, and a fridge on a plinth, containing produce grown at Loveland. For pictures and more details about the show, please see the dedicated post.

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I don’t think I’m finished with weeds yet, and I’m certainly not finished with researching - through traditional and practice-based methods - the potential of comics as a visual ‘grammar of animacy’. I am also, despite being in the process of moving back to London, never going to be finished with community agro-ecology projects. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into learning about and experiencing urban food growing projects.

None of this would have happened if it weren’t for Loveland - the brilliance of the people, in collaboration with the abundant plants and pollinators and soil microbes and more, who have cultivated it, and whose generosity fed this project. I have planted a little piece of myself there, and I can’t wait to return soon to see how it has grown.

To everyone at Loveland, I say “thank you” with my heart and belly full.

———

Loveland is part of the Falmouth Food Coop (FFC), along with the Grocery and the Kitchen. The Grocery supplies the community with the opportunity to buy local, organic produce at affordable prices, and the Kitchen cook up free meals once a week for people in the community who need extra support. To learn more about Loveland, and the FFC on the whole, visit the FFC’s website.

If you have any thoughts or questions about anything I’ve written here, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or get in touch with me via the contact form.