As world leaders gather in Paris for COP 21, AnOther takes five with Glacier Girl – the brilliant environmental activist using art and fashion to raise awareness of global warming
“It’s really hard to visualise climate change, especially living in cities, so it often doesn’t feel like we’re affected at all, when we are. I felt I needed to create some kind of visual representation of it, and when I came across photographer James Balog’s work documenting glaciers, I realised they were exactly what I was looking for.
“When I first started Glacier Girl, I was exploring the correlation between mass consumption, capitalism and climate change, all in relation to the environment more generally. On the way to school every day I passed almost 15 billboards, all within a ten minute bus journey. It was crazy – I was just going to school to get an education, and I would be bombarded with all this stuff – so I decided to act like a walking billboard myself. The first thing people see on the streets is your clothes, so I thought that if I could do something positive with that, even just to give people an idea on the way to work, that would be a start.
“This is a massive responsibility that we have taken on, and we must act on it – we cannot just leave things in the state they are” – Glacier Girl
“I’ve just started university, where I’m studying Geography and Environmental Science. The ideas I’m learning about are a lot more complex so it’s harder to float it into the more creative stuff, but it’s giving me a lot of inspiration to create new work. I had thought I wanted to be a Glaciologist, but at the moment I’m interested in creating something more social. I’m just not quite sure yet. As a generation, the most important thing for us to do is to come together to speak about climate change. This is a massive responsibility that we have taken on, and we must act on it – we cannot just leave things in the state they are. This needs to be an epic movement."
London-based Elizabeth Farrell, who operates under the alias Glacier Girl, started her exploration of the devastating effects of climate change and the insufficient means we have of communicating them when a school art project sparked her interest in the topic. She has since harnessed every creative method available to her – from creating wearable items and directing photo shoots, to travelling, marching and protesting. She counts Naomi Klein’s pioneering book This Changes Everything, and the Linklater-directed documentary Fast Food Nation as groundbreaking influences on her practice. When AnOther speaks to Farrell over the phone, she’s darting from the park where she had anticipated taking the call, as a nearby team of tree surgeons are chopping down a tree with a chainsaw. “It’s quite ironic, really,” she says, “struggling to talk about climate change over the sound of a chainsaw. The tree was really quite beautiful.”
