About Us
About Us
Invisible Flock is a multi-award-winning interactive arts studio, based at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Wellcome Collection with Land Body Ecologies.
Research processes and long term global collaborations are how we make our work, often in the form of spaces and installations where human and planetary health meet.
We dedicate our practice to understanding and exploring the complexities of environmental and climatic change we are all living though and how as artists we might foreground alternative and unheard perspectives of our world.
We are artist led. Our studios host us, our collaborators and a rolling residency programme.
We infiltrate many sectors aiming to have a creative impact on ecology, politics, health and society and to expose wherever possible that everything is fluid and can be rebuilt and reconfigured to be better.
The medium of technology has always been the best way for us to articulate new questions and generate alternative understandings of complex systems. We believe in challenging, manipulating and playing with technology to look at the world we live in from different perspectives.
Over the last 15 years we have deeply immersed ourselves in research, working alongside communities, environmental data and forming a crucial understanding of place.
Current and recent projects include the World Health Organisation’s Pavilion at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 2022, as well as at the upcoming COP28 in Dubai, UEA, November 2023; the Land Body Ecologies Festival (June 2023), a free four-day festival held in the Wellcome Collection, London, exploring the deep connections between mental health and ecosystem health; This is a Forest (2023), an exhibition that tells the story of the artists’ journey across sites in Leeds in an attempt to reclaim a part of the city as a forest (October – November 2023); Microtonal (2022), an award-winning sound installation exploring the stories, cultures and land that can be found in between the notes of the western chromatic scale – developed in collaboration between Faqir Zulfiqar, the master potter Allahjurio and Invisible Flock; The Sleeping Tree (2019-2023), a long form, immersive, sound and light experience connecting audiences with the distant ecosystems in collaboration with LEAP (Landscape Ecology and Primatology, Bournemouth University), SOCP (Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme) and FKL (Leuser Conservation Forum), commissioned by Brighton Festival.
Core Artistic Team
“Multi-platform makers of rare ambition & invention” The Guardian
Invisible Flock are part of Sub Zero, a collective of artists and scientists working at the edge of the Arctic where environmental research and art meet. Our hybrid practices intervene to expand understandings and experiences of environmental change through direct participation in research, visualizing and reimagining the outputs of ecological sciences. The collective forms a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural collaboration, articulating and reimagining ways of communicating our relationship to the natural world.
Associate Artists
Founded by Miebi Sikoki, Digital Nativ is a design and fabrication studio exploring technological processes based in Jakarta, Indonesia. As a collective, the studio focuses its work to research, modify and customize industrial grade and emerging technologies, to hack the gap between the industry and the individual.
Miebi and Invisible Flock have worked on multiple projects together over the past 5 years.
Sheila works as both an independent and collaborative artist, having made research-led performance work, place-responsive live art, moving image works, and social art projects engaging participants across age and background, in the UK and internationally for over 25 years. She is interested in the relationship between art and science with particular focus on hybridity informed by her own experience of being mixed heritage (Indian/English), and the practice of medicine and care.
Sheila works with Invisible Flock as part of the Land Body Ecologies Group
Quicksand is an interdisciplinary design research and innovation consultancy based in India. Their work is driven by an approach that seeks to build on a rich, evocative understanding of people and environments, into meaningful opportunities. All Quicksand’s work is grounded in the realities of people, co-creating with rather than for; tuned to inform and inspire, and focused on realising experienceable value.
Quicksand and Invisible Flock have collaborated consistently since 2014 and continue to do so.
Board
Ellen Rutherford is Invisible Flock’s chair. Ellen is an experienced Operations and Programme Director who has focussed largely on delivering government contracts across the youth, criminal justice and employability sectors. Her background has predominately been working for and with not-for-profit organisations.
With a background in Art History, Archeology and Literature studies, Cleo has led global cultural projects for over a decade.This includes innovative partnerships such as the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative in collaboration with the New York based Guggenheim Museum Foundation to national youth engagement programmes in Switzerland. Her role ranges from setting the strategic vision, develop and implement all project related activation and the management of multiple stakeholders. Cleo has also helped initiate major multi-platform storytelling projects to activate communities at a regional, national and international scale.
Justin is Artistic Director of the Unicorn Theatre. Recent directing credits include: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (RSC); SNOW IN MIDSUMMER (RSC/Oregon Shakespeare Festival); THE JUMPER FACTORY by Luke Barnes (Young Vic Prison Project); MACBETH/WINTER’S TALE (NT Learning); THE BOX OF DELIGHTS by John Masefield; adapted by Piers Torday (Wilton’s Music Hall); BEOWULF by Chris Thorpe (Unicorn Theatre); THE CARDINAL by James Shirely (Southwark Playhouse). Justin co-wrote and co-presented the BBC LIVE LESSONS on Shakespeare for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Leverhulme Award for Emerging Directors from the National Theatre Studio.
Ben is a corporate lawyer in the private equity practice at Pinsent Masons LLP (an international law firm which specialises in the energy, infrastructure, financial services, real estate and advanced manufacturing and technology sectors, ranked in the top 15 law firms in the UK). Ben advises both institutional investors, corporates and management teams on buy-outs, buy-ins, fund raisings and related acquisitions and disposals. Ben concentrates on transactions involving companies operating in the technology, retail and consumer, business services and professional services industries. Ben is married, lives in London and in his spare time likes to chuck on a pair of trainers and head out for a run.
Bhavani Esapathi is a writer, maker & social-tech activist primarily focussed on chronic autoimmune diseases, eco-racism & migration. Previously, she was an elected Councillor for the RSA, been on numerous boards for the NHS and Patient Engagement Programmes and is the current Arts & Science President of British Science Association.
Dr Riccardo Labianco is an international lawyer specialised in the law of human rights, humanitarian operations, disarmament, arms control, and international peace and security. Riccardo has researched the responsibility of arms-exporting states, humanitarian principles, humanitarian disarmament, and the enjoyment of civil and political rights in Middle Eastern countries (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and Egypt). Riccardo is currently International Policy Coordinator at Mines Advisory Group and Post-Doc Research Associate at the School of Law, Gender, and Media at SOAS – University of London. Aside from his international law work, Riccardo is passionate about photography, drawing, gardening, and skiing.
Dr. Kinnari Bhatt is a multi-disciplinary lawyer and development practitioner. Kinnari is experienced in the law, policy and regulation of natural resources, energy, and infrastructure projects in developing countries. She is interested in demystifying the social impacts of development projects and ensuring that climate finance is equitable and accountable. She finds solutions through empowerment, law, and policy. Kinnari has written widely on land and Indigenous rights in the context of business and finance. She is founder of Surya Advisory: an independent legal advisory focused on just transition and lives in the Hague with her partner.
