LADA Screens: Miranda Whall

About Crossed Paths – Scots Pine

Miranda Whall’s performance practice employs crawling as a tool that enables her to embody, inhabit and understand a place and its narratives from a four-legged rather than two-legged perspective. So far she has crawled through mountains, woodland, rivers, seaside promenades, tidal mudflats an island and urban centres. On Saturday 6th November 2021 she crawled with a 6-year-old potted Scots Pine on her back through the centre of Glasgow – from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers-by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and Miranda silently and determinedly made their way through heavy rain and high winds to reach their destination. The intention of Miranda’s heroic/tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism is an expression of her grief, despair and outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed and an insistence that non-human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates.

Miranda’s hope is that crawling to the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference carrying a tree, that was equal in size to her body, might inspire human beings to re-think and re-align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. She believes that we all literally need to get down from our human centric, two-legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice – that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human made catastrophe.