Making space for Keeping Warm

By Becky Shaw

For the past three years I have been a co-lead on Just Heat, an international research project that explores people’s experiences of energy change since 1940. Our focus was to explore how the social, political and emotional meaning of home heating could inform current change.

This has involved working closely with the lead investigator, an energy researcher from Sheffield Hallam University, and three other academic leads from Tampere University, Finland, Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, and Lund University, Sweden. My role was co-lead but also leader of a team of artists- and I was also the UK artist. In each of our four countries we appointed an artist to work with the research teams all the way through the three years. We did this because we thought that the input of the artists would ensure we held the aesthetic and sensory dimensions of home heating central throughout the project. We saw our novel fusing of artists into a research project as an experiment in itself- to understand how artistic research might expand and challenge more familiar modes of research.

Keeping Warm, Becky Shaw, Stamford Art Gallery, January 14-27 2025. 

The team collected over 300 oral histories in diverse communities who are affected by decarbonisation processes differently. While every individual, every community and every nation is different, there were clear themes that arose. These included the value we place on thermal delight, the connection between heating and family structures, gender, labour and space; and the significance of energy security and the complexity of relationships we have with the state. Transition tends to be communicated as a clean (Western) sweep where we simply moved from the age of wood, to the age of coal, to the age of electric etc- but this bears no relation to reality where the use of one is tied to the use of another, and indeed many of us build our home heating with a patchwork of different systems and materials.

Towards the latter stages of the project, we have been delivering ‘public conversations’. These are carefully orchestrated conversations with the communities we have worked with and energy decision-makers in the same locations. These happen within spaces where we can present the artworks so these can feed into and enable a conducive environment for discussion. Our public conversations were shaped by advice by Shared Futures, a group that enables community voices to be heard by decision-makers.

One of the biggest questions for us, when we developed these events, was what would be the right space to do them in?  This would involve finding spaces where we could bring together research, art practice, communities and local politicians- and which also fully considers the mobility and geography of the community. There are few spaces which can offer such an expanded context. The artists adopted different approaches to space in each nation, using a cinema foyer, a design fair, a library and a social activism space. As an artist my focus was on what space would enable me to present the work in, but at the same time, we recognised that a contemporary gallery space was unlikely to be physically or feel culturally accessible in the communities we were working.

One of our case studies, Stamford in Lincolnshire, was chosen because it was a green ‘transition town’ (a political award that doesn’t exist anymore). We decided to use Stamford’s Art Centre. This is a busy community space with a cinema, a café, big poetry programme, and masses of community groups- a footfall of at least 100 people a day. The gallery is usually used to show local artists work- usually painting or craft- and displayed on hanging rails.

Keeping Warm (detail), Becky Shaw, Stamford Art Gallery, January 14-27 2025. 

I presented 50 plus enlarged drawings scanned from tiny fast drawings made while listening to oral histories. There were mounted on cardboard and displayed with a combination of leaning, clips and hardboard stands. The images were interspersed with home heating advertisements that brought a ‘chilly’ and authoritarian language that counteracted the intimate and informal language of the drawings. The drawings overlapped each other and made stories/tensions between each other. However, I was uneasy about how my deliberately informal and transitory display mechanism (chosen because oral histories always change and are like verbal collage) might interact with the conventions of the non-contemporary art gallery. This involved paying attention to how audiences engage with works, and how their frames of reference affect how they see the work. I needed to take the audience on a journey where they might see the roughness of the drawings and the cardboard as an intentional part of the artistic language rather than being ‘unfinished’ in relation to what was usually shown there. The drawings were accompanied by twenty lenticular images that fused people’s drawings with home heating related advertisements, and a film reel of 14 different playful experiments with transition- which I will explore in a separate blog.

We were concerned about how to make the oral histories themselves present. We chose not to play recordings in this space but instead decided to look for a strategy to bring the contemporary community together with the oral histories and enable the stories to be embodied and lived again. We were introduced to Darren Rawnsley who leads many youth and theatre groups in the area and asked if he might bring a group of people to read excerpts from the oral histories. He brough a team of 8 readers aged from 10-80. The power of hearing an oral history about heating poverty and households without hot water read by a contemporary child, was unsettling and, for me, really interesting. The reading made the relationship between children’s experiences now and in the 1940s both present, lifting the tendency for the stories to be seen as nostalgic or romantic. This strategy (which I have used in earlier works such as A: The Christmas Party) also enabled us to work with the readers and to forefront their performances. By bringing the artworks and the readings into this space we wanted the oral histories to be alive and present again, rather than something we had taken away and analysed in a separate space.

Becky Shaw is an artist researcher, Professor in Fine Art Practice, and College Academic Lead for Research Enterprise and Innovation at BCU.

Just Heat is funded by CHANSE, Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe, a joint initiative of 27 research funding organisations from 24 countries.