The Queer ecologies reading group led by artists Nat Walpole and Rowan Lear comes to Timespan for a series of reading sessions connected to the exhibition We Move As A Murmuration

Fri 26 July, 3pm – 5pm
Reading Together
Want to make space and time for reading together? Join Rowan and Nat from Un/Nature to read quietly together in the gallery. We’ll be browsing some of the books currently exhibited as part of We Move As A Murmuration. These include poetry, fiction and theory inspired by queer ecologies, land justice and environmental issues. 

Feel free to bring your own reading materials as well. Drinks and snacks will be available.

Sat 27 July, 11am – 1pm
Birds and Belonging
Explore relationships with birds through the lens of queer ecologies. Join a special edition of Un/Nature, a reading group which was initiated by artists Nat Walpole and Rowan Lear at Glasgow Zine Library in 2022. Discussing recent poetry, autobiography and fiction, we will think about what it means to belong to a place and how encounters with the more-than-human world can create new kinds of kinship.

Texts we will read include: Harry Josephine Giles’s poem May a transexual hear a bird?, Amanda Thomson’s Belonging, Joshua Whithead’s Making Love with the Land and Judy Grahn’s Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit. We will have printouts available, as well as snacks and hot drinks.

This event will centre the perspectives of LGBTQI+ people, but we welcome all curious and supportive allies to join us as well. No previous study or reading necessary, but you will receive a pdf of the readings when you sign up if you’d like to read in advance.

Walk-ins welcome, but please book your space by emailing enquiries@timespan.org.uk to receive the pdfs of the reading before.

About Un/Nature
Un/Nature is a queer ecologies reading group, plucking texts from zines, philosophy, critical theory and poetry. Since January 2022, the group has delved into a universe of gay plants and sapphic seagulls, monstrous mushrooms and bent binaries. Centring queer, feminist, indigenous and decolonial perspectives, Un/Nature reimagines nature as promiscuous, entangled, co-operative, wilful and revolutionary. Un/Nature is hosted by Glasgow Zine Library and co-organised by Nat Walpole and Rowan Lear.

Biographies
Nat Walpole (she/her) is an artist and writer based in Glasgow, working in painting, drawing, and text. Her practice explores trans feminine identity through mythopoeia, wriggling among the symbolic meanings of the nonhuman and human.
Recent solo exhibitions include Narcissus and I, Glasgow Project Room, 2021. Publications include Unblemished: Stories of Trans Stigma, produced with SeeMe Scotland, 2021. Residencies include The Out of the Blue Print Printmaking Residency, with Out of the Blueprint Studio, 2020.
www.natwalpole.co.uk

Rowan Lear (they/she) is an artist and researcher based in Glasgow. Colluding with photography, writing, vegetation, clay and other lively materials, Rowan traces the sticky and entangled histories of sensation, labour, agriculture and ecology. 
Solo exhibitions include a sudden branching, Birnam Arts (2021) and Adheres to the Tongue, The Muted Horn, Cleveland (2018); while group shows include Grafting: The Land and the Artist, curated by Revolv at London Art Fair (2024), Why do it together when you can do it alone?, curated by Pic London at Lewisham Arthouse (2019); and Rising from the Hill, NCAD, Dublin (2017). 

https://rowanlear.org