About Green Arts Oxfordshire Network

Green Arts Oxfordshire Network was set up in January 2021 to unite Oxfordshire’s artists and cultural organisations in their work to tackle the climate & ecological emergency.

We began as a small seed of an idea, planted by the Tandem Collective Community Action Group, and the network has since grown with the support of Fusion Arts and other Oxfordshire artists and cultural organisations.

We facilitate conversations and connections between Oxford’s creative community, and signpost to information, suppliers and organisations that can help to reduce the environmental impact of arts programming and practices.

Over 50 artists and individuals from Oxfordshire’s cultural organisations collaborated to design the Green Arts Charter, a set of 10 action points to help us, as a network, to create a greener city and county.

Join the Green Arts Oxfordshire Network by signing the Charter, to work towards climate justice and a zero-carbon future, together.

Our Story

By Nina Brown, Co-Founder of Tandem Collective

Since its inception in 2014, Tandem Collective has worked as an arts collective with sustainability at its core – the Collective was first and foremost a CAG (Community Action Group) and remains part of the pioneering CAG network.

One outcome of Tandem’s work, born in 2020, was the concept of a Green Arts Charter for Oxfordshire that would support Oxford’s cultural sector to become more sustainable. The concept was inspired by the inspiring work of the Manchester Arts Sustainability Team, the Green Arts Initiative of Creative Carbon Scotland and the Good Food Oxford Network and Charter. Tandem’s collaboration with Rosa Thomas and the team at Fusion Arts allowed the charter concept to develop and flourish.

On 14th January 2021, at the Green Arts Charter Soft Launch, over 50 artists and individuals from Oxfordshire’s cultural organisations came together to brainstorm how we, as a sector, can work to create a more ecological city and county.

We discussed how the collaborative creation of a Green Arts Charter might help us, as a network, achieve this. The Green Arts Oxfordshire Network was born.

The long term aim of the Green Arts project is to support and inspire organisations and artists to meet their ecological goals and work together to help create a more ecological sector and county. The network aims to act as a hub to link up artists and organisations who share these aims, and also to connect them with environmental movements, both locally and nationally.

Meet our Advisory Board

Ellie Monk

Project Leader, Green Arts Oxfordshire Network

Ellie has worked with several arts organisations in Oxford since graduating from Oxford Brookes University with a Fine Art BA in 2018, where her practice explored sustainability and decay. She has worked on several arts festivals in Oxford and London, aspiring to facilitate sustainable and inclusive spaces in the creative sector. Over the 2020 lockdown she set up Flatpack Creative, a project providing free art kits and guides to enable people to create for mental wellbeing from anywhere. Now, she coordinates Green Arts Oxfordshire Network part-time whilst working on other freelance projects, a social-enterprise programme, and fruit themed pottery in her shed.

What inspires you?
An artwork: Outside There Were Flowers, Eva Joy
A play:Atlantis by the Hidden Spire Collective
A book: Rebel Talk by Extinction Rebellion
A song: Europe Is Lost by Kae Tempest
A film: David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
A poem: When we get Old, Amy Deakin

Nina Molly Brown

Director, Tandem Collective

Nina co-founded Tandem in 2014 to creatively showcase the amazing work being done in Oxford to support sustainability. Alongside her voluntary role with Tandem and GAON, she is a film producer and writer focused on telling female and feminist stories. She has been part of the producing team on two female-led feature films (Born of War – Lionsgate 2015 and Close – Netflix 2019). Most recently she worked as Director’s Assistant on Netflix’s Witcher: Blood Origin and is currently part of the cutting-edge StoryTrails VR/AR project. Nina is committed to being part of the push to make the screen industries more sustainable.

What inspires you?
An artwork: Egon Schiele Seated Woman with Bent Knee
A play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A book: Hermann Hesse Fairy Tales
A song: Karine Polwart Follow the Heron
A film: The Matrix
A poem: Dante’s Commedia

Becca Vallins

Deputy Director, Old Fire Station

Becca started her environmental journey many years ago writing and performing a play about Global Warming which included dressing up as a chloroflurocarbon. Thanks to the success of that show (and the campaigning and inventive work of many many others) these gases, which attack the Ozone Layer, have been phased out in the making of refrigerators. Becca likes to see this as an example of how Art can Save the World.

Becca is Deputy Director at the Old Fire Station a centre for creativity, in a building shared with the homelessness charity Crisis UK. As an organisation we have signed up to Culture Declares a Climate and Ecological Emergency and support a city wide journey towards Net Carbon Zero.

The Old Fire Station’s intention is to face the Climate Emergency by working with others to:

Educate ourselves about the emergency
Take practical steps to reduce carbon emissions
Use our creativity to help our community face the challenges ahead
This is not work we can do alone and are grateful for the support of other cultural organisations, artists and the links that Green Arts Oxfordshire Network helps us create.

Kim Pickin

Founder and former Director, The Story Museum

The Story Museum is a most unusual museum in the heart of Oxford which aims to enrich lives, especially young lives, through stories.
Kim grew up in her family’s tourism and hospitality business, studied to become a child psychologist, then veered off into book publishing. Commissioning Jonathon Porritt’s ‘Seeing Green’ in the 1980s led to her joining the board of Friends of the Earth, tapping into environmental concerns that have never gone away. After a stint at business school she worked as a communications consultant and writer, becoming freelance and moving back to Oxford once she had children. When her youngest went to school her interest in children, stories and the city came together as The Story Museum, a huge creative project that took 20 years and much help to bring to fruition. The museum’s now in the capable hands of an energetic new generation and she’s focussing once more on the climate emergency, doing what she can to reduce her footprint and help others reduce theirs.

A favourite quote: “Humans are capable of a unique trick, creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in our minds… As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently, as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our mind’s eye, we are already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. The act of imagining somehow makes it real – and what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.” Brian Eno

Joanna Kidner

Artist and Educator

Jo Kidner is a multisensory installation artist; she enjoys investigating and creating artwork from materials she finds in her nearby domestic and rural spaces. As a member of the Green Arts Oxfordshire Network and an eager participant in The Great Big Green Week, Jo is keen for art to promote conversations about the urgent issue of climate crisis and climate justice, the conservation of ecological habitats and the correlation that caring for the environment has on our physical and mental wellbeing alongside the long-lasting care of ecologies

What inspires you to act?

Last year having read the IPCC report in August 2021, I was galvanised into action to organise and deliver an Art event with a group of 8 other artists to promote conversations about the climate crisis, climate justice and whether art can make a difference as part of The Big Green Week in preparation for COP26.

An artwork: ‘Watery Ecstatic’, Ellen Gallagher, 2006/ ‘Object’ Meret Oppenheim 1936
A performance: ‘Missing’ by Gecko theatre company 2019
A book: From ‘What Is to What If’ by Rob Hopkins, ‘The OverStory by Richard Powers’ or Regenisis by George Monbiot, Station11 or Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel
A song: Maps by the Yeah, yeah, yeahs or Paranoid Android Radiohead
A film: Dune 2021
A poem: ’The Hill We climb’ Amanda Gorman
Anything else that inspires me: Roland Barthes essay on cooking his critical essays The Responsibility of Forms
Inspirational quote: ‘What if we took play seriously?’ Peter Grey from Free to learn

Jeremy Morgan

Director / Designer, Fizog Design

Jeremy founded Fizog Design in 2005 and since then has provided branding, digital, infographic and traditional print design for clients in sectors such as engineering, sustainability, technology, science and culture. A passion for typography and visual design has seen Jeremy initiate personal projects alongside his professional work, including the development of his own typefaces. Jeremy is a contemporary painter, whose body of abstract work is painted on the off-cuts and by-products of construction and carpentry. During the covid lockdown he founded the contemporary painting group ‘EPOX’ which linked artists virtually through a series of online talks. He exhibits widely and was recently invited to become a member of the Oxford Art Society.

What inspires you?
An artwork: Untitled (parliament), Fiona Rae
A play: ‘The Scottish Play’ – this rollercoaster of an action thriller has always been my favourite by The Bard!
A book: Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
A song: All The Way, Du Blonde
A film: The Square, director: Ruben Östlund