Early Warning Signs

One of Harrison’s contributions to Two Degrees festival in 2011 and now on a life-long tour of UK arts venues. These four signs were designed to mimic those you might find outside a garage or a Bureau de Change. On a mission ‘promote’ climate change, they try hard to grab the attention of passers-by.
Project website

The Early Warning Signs project was one of the outcomes of A Good Climate for Business – Harrison’s residency at Two Degrees festival at Artsadmin in London from 12-18 June 2011.

This series of four ‘climate / change’ signs was produced to be displayed outside Artsadmin on London’s Commercial Street for the duration of the festival. They aimed to act as beacons for Two Degrees – utilising the brazen marketing techniques of capitalism, not as a tool to sell us more, but as a tool to simply remind us of the consequences of our consumption.

Whilst in residence, Harrison began to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in producing such material-heavy permanent signs for the sake of a one-week festival, especially one that was meant to be addressing issues of sustainability. By the end of Two Degrees, it seemed vital for the festival’s and the artist’s integrity, that the four ‘climate / change’ signs be allowed to continue to promote their cause long into the future.

And so the Early Warning Signs project was born. In the spirit of her new mantra ‘reduce, reuse, recycle your art’ and in an attempt to address the responsibility the contemporary artist should have to the objects she produces, Harrison decided to become the facilitator of a life-long project to continue to tour the four signs to different public locations throughout the UK.

Each autumn, four new host venues are invited to ‘adopt a sign‘, agreeing to keep it on public display for the following year.

Since 2011, the signs have been displayed outside more than forty venues in all corners of the British Isles, each documented on the project website.

These include: Two Degrees Festival, Artsadmin, Converse/Dazed Emerging Artists Award, Beacon Art Project, The Hidden Gardens, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Site Gallery, Eastside Projects, Travelling Gallery, Castlefield Gallery, Space Station Sixty-Five, Beaconsfield, Gallery of Modern Art (2014), FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology), Aspex Gallery, NN Contemporary Art, Spike Island, The Tetley, Gallery of Modern Art (2015), QUAD, Arcola Theatre, Edinburgh Printmakers, The Bowling Harbour Project, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, ONCA Centre for Arts & Ecology, Deveron Projects, ATLAS Arts, Solent Showcase, UH Arts, BOM (Birmingham Open Media), Democracy House, CCA Derry~Londonderry, Central Saint Martins, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Kinning Park Complex, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, PEER and Hoxton Trust, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Impact Arts, The Bowling Green, The Hidden Gardens (2021), Woodlands Community Garden and The Mitchell Library in Glasgow where all four signs were re-united during COP26 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project.

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Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.