In an attempt to ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle her Art’, artist Ellie Harrison is offering her most recent works Early Warning Signs up for adoption to arts organisations / galleries interested in publically acknowledging and provoking discussion about climate change. The adoption process, which came out of the period of residency she spent at Artsadmin’s Two Degrees festival in June, aims to deal with the “guilt of production” caused by creating art objects, and to facilitate their ability to continue to ‘do their job’ – to be visible, promoting their cause and helping to keep the issue of climate change on the public agenda.

The deadline for applications is Friday 16 September 2011. Please see the website for details of how to apply:
www.ellieharrison.com/earlywarningsigns
Below are two extracts from the guest text Ellie Harrison wrote for the Artsadmin website following her residency, which describe the ideas and thinking behind the Early Warning Signs project.

You can read the full text on the Artsadmin website:
www.artsadmin.co.uk/artsonline/115/a-good-climate-for-business
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Not much more than a week before I set off for London I came up with the idea for the Early Warning Signs. It was simple: to utilise the brazen marketing techniques of capitalism, not as tools to sell us more, but as tools to remind us of the consequences of our consumption. The aim was to ‘advertise’ climate change: to put the issue back into the public consciousness, from which it has long since been sidelined by the dreaded financial ‘cuts’ and other short-sighted concerns.
Throughout Two Degrees, the four signs designed to mimic those you might find outside a garage or a Bureau de Change, took up residence along Commercial Street - inspiring, provoking and confusing passers-by to varying degrees. One bemused tourist actually did come all the way into Toynbee Studios asking to exchange some currency and, one morning as I was putting the signs out on the street, an arrogant businessman stuffing a croissant into his mouth heckled “so much for climate change” as the uncharacteristic June rain poured down around us.
They provoked thought and / or physical reaction. The signs were a success! They may not have fitted the bill of the grand ‘spectacle’, but they looked good; they acted as beacons for the festival and they ticked the box of one of Larry Bogad’s top tips for ‘tactical performance’ (recounted in his lecture on 18 June), by “drawing on existing signs and signifiers and inverting them”. And yet despite all this, all week I could not help feeling slightly compromised by their existence. I was embarrassed by their unequivocal materiality. Confronted on a daily basis by their objectness, I became overwhelmed by a ‘guilt of production’ that perhaps only an environmentally-concerned artist can.
In February 2010, I had become the self-declared ‘first individual artist to openly publicise an Environmental Policy’ on my website. The fourth section of the policy entitled ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ presents my guidelines for producing what I term as ‘gallery based work’ (loosely categorised as work which takes a more conventional form. ie. an object / collection of objects that take up space in the real world). It is my publicised goal to “attempt to use objects or materials which are either temporarily loaned or secondhand from local sources or eBay.”
It was therefore ironic (and disappointing) that it was for Two Degrees - the first art project I’d been involved in that was actually acknowledging / dealing with the climate crises - that I had been forced to compromise this policy. It was for Artsadmin - one of the few artworld institutions I’m aware of that has actually begun to take the threat of climate crisis seriously - that I was forced to spend more than £480 having four brand new rotating signs produced and delivered (at short notice) by the RotoSigns Company in the West Midlands. [pages 7-8, A Good Climate for Business]
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During my final days in residence at the festival I began to realise that, along with a renewed vigour for fighting for railway justice, my main mission post-Two Degrees should be to ensure that the Early Warning Signs be reused to maximum effect. It should be my responsibility as an artist to ensure that the money and materials required to produce them, would not be just for the sake of a one-week festival, but that the signs should be allowed to continue to provoke reaction - to ‘promote’ their cause - long into the future.
I decided to use the final day of the festival to launch the second phase of theEarly Warning Signs project - a campaign to find new homes for the signs, to find organisations to ‘adopt them’. Following on from my previous writing criticising the artworld institution’s lack of acknowledgement and action over climate change, I became increasingly interested in specifically targeting arts organisations as potential hosts.
By offering the signs free of charge, the traditional economic (and power) relations between the artist and gallery would be sidestepped. Rather than a financial transaction, this would be a ‘responsibility exchange’, a ‘burden exchange’, perhaps even a ‘guilt exchange’. For the year after adopting the sign it would become the gallery’s responsibility to look after it and to make the daily ritual of putting it out on public display. A daily acknowledgement and reminder of climate change. I hope that there will be a positive response to this campaign and that I will be able to put together a schedule of venues enabling the signs to continue to tour the country indefinitely (or at least until they eventually decay / break and need to be retired). [page 15, A Good Climate for Business]