Christie Swallow is an artist, researcher and maker who crafts new stories from old ideas.
Their work engages with how the Anthropocene's entanglement of humans and non-humans has produced our present planetary crisis. With a background in architecture, their practice engages with topics of ecology, technoscience and heterodoxy through = textiles, collaborative drawing and archival research. Christie has previously undertaken residencies at the European Commission, The University of Birmingham and Hangar CIA. They were the 2020 recipient of the RIBA Boyd Auger Award and previously studied at The University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Art.
Christie's research will look to the phenomenon of the urban parakeet, now common in many European cities, to understand how we might redefine “nature” in an age of climate crisis. Walking and talking through the parks, cemeteries and streetscapes that parakeets call home, Christie will explore the Anthropocene's queer landscape(s), sketching out alternative human/nature relationships. Through engagement and co-creation the project will support worldbuilding and collective imaginaries, allowing us to move beyond outdated and exhausted landscape concepts of the picturesque, towards a theory of artificial ecology. Through the travails of the parakeet, Christie hopes to better understand how we might coexist on this damaged planet.
