01229 825085
Art Gene, Bath Street, Barrow-in-Furness,
Cumbria, LA14 5TY England, UK
Remember Nature Exhibition Opening Tuesday 4 November 2025
Join Art Gene for the opening celebration of the Remember Nature: Intra-actions exhibition in the Art Gene Gallery, Nan Tait Centre, Barrow-in-Furness
About the exhibition
Remember Nature: Intra-actions exhibition brings together art and food to explore our relationship with ecologies – the land, living systems and each another. Featuring lead artist Maddi Nicholson, alongside Alistair Debling and Faye Matloub, it looks at how history has created a disconnect between people and the environment – reducing the land to resource and erasing ecologies, separating humans from the natural and food producing environments we belong to. The exhibition challenges this separation between nature and society, and invites us to imagine a more caring future where people, land and ecology are recognised as deeply interconnected.
The exhibition’s title and concept is borrowed from philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Unlike interaction, which assumes we are separate entities that engage with each other, Barad suggests that all beings – people, places, materials, ideas – emerge through their relationships and entanglements. We are not separate from the natural world; we are shaped with and through it.
Join us on the Opening Night
Art Gene Gallery
Nan Tait Centre
Tuesday 4th November 2025, 6.30pm – 9.00pm
This is a free event with a light buffet and refreshments for all – drop in before 8pm.
Find the full venue address below.
Booking is not compulsory but we ask you to kindly confirm your attendance by emailing rachael.barker@art-gene.co.uk, or scanning the QR code below
or calling 01229 825085.
What to expect at the exhibition opening on Tuesday 4th November, 2025
Guests are asked to use the Abbey Road entrance to the Nan Tait Centre, or if step free access is required, the door from the carpark; they will be directed upstairs via a lift or the stairs.
Food and refreshments, made by exhibiting artist and chef, Faye Matloub, will be served on arrival, ahead of short speeches in the main gallery from 7.00pm. Director of Art Gene, Maddi Nicholson, will say a few words about the nationwide Remember Nature project and introduce the exhibiting artists, Alistair Debling and Faye Matloub.
Exhibition continues:
Wednesday 5th November – Friday 21st November 2025
Noon – 4.00pm, closed Sundays and Mondays
School and community groups welcome by appointment
The exhibition is free of charge
Remember Nature: intra-actions has been curated as Art Gene’s contribution to an England-wide art project, Remember Nature, 2025.
About Remember Nature 2025
Remember Nature 2025 is an ambitious new staging of the visionary art project initiated in 2015 by the celebrated artist Gustav Metzger (1926-2017), and curated by Andrea Gregson and Jo Joelson.
Remember Nature 2025 marks the 10-year anniversary in partnership with 17 regional arts partners across England, culminating in a nationwide Day of Action on 4 November 2025. It will bring people together, through a programme of cultural and artistic public interventions, to act collectively to face the climate and nature crisis.
The partner organisations are:
Art Gene (Barrow-in-Furness), Baltic Contemporary (Gateshead), Castlefield Gallery (Manchester), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea), FACT (Liverpool), Hauser & Wirth (Somerset), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), KARST (Plymouth), Kestle Barton and CAST (Cornwall), Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), MIMA (Middlesborough), Homotopia (Liverpool), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle upon Tyne) Serpentine (London), Tate Modern (London) and Turner Contemporary (Margate).
Remember Nature 2025 builds upon the initial Remember Nature in 2015 and Metzger’s call to action, which urged arts professionals and students from all disciplines “to make a stand against the ongoing erasure of species” and create new work to ‘remember nature’.
From coast to coast, city to town, contemporary arts organisations, artists, makers, and wider members of communities have developed artistic and public interventions in cultural venues and outdoor spaces, taking inspiration from Metzger’s works, manifestos and DIY aesthetic, to communicate why we need to ‘remember nature’ to ask wider audiences and members of the public to stop, pause in their daily routine, to slow down and think about the importance of nature and thus call to them to act and to adapt to the climate crisis.
The artistic acts and interventions on the Day of Action will be live streamed, recorded and shared via a new project website: https://remembernature.art/
Remember Nature 2025 is supported by Arts Council England, Teiger Foundation, Hauser & Wirth, University for the Creative Arts at Farnham, Gustav Metzger Foundation and the project partners.
About Art Gene’s Day of Action
On the Day of Action, ahead of the public opening, Art Gene will host a communal feast, prepared with produce from its own organic site Allotment Soup: the Isle of Walney Community Growing Space. The meal will be followed by artist talks held in the Art Gene Gallery in Barrow-in-Furness. The feast is a private, invitation-only event to celebrate and thank all those who contributed to and participated in the development project from Spring 2025.
In February and March 2025 Art Gene commissioned Alistair and Faye as our Real Barrow Artists in Residence having commissioned their proposals: ‘What can you bring to the table?’ (Alistair) and ‘Sufra Dayma’ or its English interpretation ‘Bless the Meal’ (Faye). Since then, Alistair and Faye have been working closely with individuals from Barrow’s refugee and asylum-seeking communities. The outcomes of their residencies will be on display in the exhibition. Their projects include contributions from Ahmed Elking, Emmanuel Papy Madro Singo, Saidi Khamis, Summera Jabbar, Yohannes Haile, and Milen Habton. Art Gene thanks the wider group that took part in the workshops and to Furness Refugee Support for its support throughout the projects.
The exhibition opening is free and open to the public – all are welcome to attend.
Maddi Nicholson said:
“Art Gene has long been an advocate for nature, developing Allotment Soup: the Isle of Walney Growing Space to protect green space on Walney Island, and promoting every-day community action to challenge biodiversity loss. Drawing on the talents of many artists over the years, we have championed the importance of the nature on our doorstep in Barrow, from salt marsh as a carbon capture to kidney vetch as the sole host plant for the endangered Small Blue butterfly. It will be fantastic to draw on this legacy and be part of a national day of art action for nature.
Artist biographies
Maddi Nicholson
Maddi Nicholson is an artist and Founder Director of Art Gene, a visual art charity and Arts Council NPO. Art Gene’s research remit extends across a programme of environmentally aware placemaking, socially engaged art projects, residencies, exhibitions, and education work focusing on the role and engagement of artists empowering communities in the revisioning of their social, natural and built environment. Maddi Nicholson was commissioned to Remember Nature. She has designed a poster for commercial sale and made new work (launching in the Art Gene Gallery on 4 November 2025). Today we release her short film trailer for the project: ‘Mother Nature Mailed, She’s Mad’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1qeDLIEpcU
Alistair Debling
Alistair Debling is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cumbria, UK. He makes films, photographs, performances, meals and installations. His work investigates diverse fields, from queer nightlife and ecology to militarism, agriculture and architecture. Through sustained engagement with a particular community, he likes to discover unlikely connections between things: what does a nuclear power station have in common with a disco ball? A dairy cow with a canonised saint? A gay bar with a wild elephant?
Recent projects have been commissioned and presented by Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness; Jwllrs, Morecambe; the Grundy Gallery, Blackpool; Grizedale Arts, Cumbria. Recent screenings include HOME, Manchester; Providenza, Corsica; Copenhagen Architecture Festival, Denmark; Atelier WG, Netherlands.
Faye Matloub
Faye is a British-born Iraqi artist and chef based in London. In 2023, she graduated from Central Saint Martins with a degree in Sculpture. Following her studies, her artistic practice gradually transitioned toward the medium of food. As her work moved beyond the confines of the studio and onto the plate, she began to define this evolving body of work as Edible Mediums.
Edible Mediums encompasses a diverse range of formats, including workshops, community engagement projects, supper clubs, and written work. As a second-generation Iraqi, Faye uses food to engage with different communities, learn from them, and conduct research on the preservation of migrant identity – emphasising the importance of creating accessible language for first- and second- generation immigrants like herself in a creative context.
Address
Art Gene Gallery, Nan Tait Centre, Abbey Road, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, LA14 5TY
Enter via the Abbey Road Entrance. For step free access, please use the alternative entrance located next to the Nan Tait Centre car park where you will be greeted by a member of staff.
To book a viewing or for more information contact Rachael:
rachael.barker@art-gene.co.uk
01229 825085
Click here to view the full press release.
