5 October 2024
Plenty? festival, The Barn, Banchory

‘Less is More’ features ten works produced over the last decade in the run-up to, during and since her controversial 2016 project The Glasgow Effect.

An attempt to live a ‘low-carbon lifestyle of the future’, The Glasgow Effect was based on a simple premise: that for one calendar year Harrison would refuse to leave Glasgow’s city limits or use any vehicles except her bike.

The book Harrison wrote following this experience, The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint, explores many of the issues the project provoked. These include: Glasgow’s (and Scotland’s) comparatively poor public health, and the many ways we must urgently reconfigure our towns and cities, and our economy so we can all live healthy, happy and sustainable lives.

Central to the book is a critique of the capitalist system we live in which ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’, whose obsession with profit and growth inevitably results in (self-)destruction.

Artist’s Talk & Discussion

On both Saturday 5 October and Sunday 6 October 2024, 1:30-2:30pm, Harrison will host a free exhibition tour and discussion providing a richer context for the works in relation to the Plenty? festival theme of ‘degrowth’.

List of Works

• The Other Forecast (2013)
  Inspired by the format of the ordinary weather forecast, this short film illustrates the interconnectedness of several ‘growth’ trends leading us towards climate catastrophe. Duration: 05:29
• Anti-Capitalist Aerobics (2013)
  Performed live at an arts & climate change conference, this energy-intensive workout exposes some of the fundamental contradictions in the way we live our lives. Film: Emma Crouch / Duration: 07:09
• Progress Report (2014)
  Created by analysing more than a decade of personal data, this graph reveals how Harrison’s so-called ‘sustainable’ lifestyle had simply been mirroring capitalism’s ‘growth fetish’.
• For Love or Money (2015)
  Created to highlight the main causes of Harrison’s breaches to her own Environmental Policy, this pie chart paved the way for her decision to stop travelling altogether for The Glasgow Effect in 2016.
• The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint
  First published by Luath Press in 2019 (Second Edition 2021), this book provides the complete context for Harrison’s thinking and action surrounding The Glasgow Effect project.
• Tonnes of carbon produced by the personal transportation of a ‘professional artist’ (2019-2022)
  Compiled to illustrate Harrison’s increasing travel in the years running up to The Glasgow Effect, and the dramatic impact the project had on reducing her carbon footprint for transport.
• The Glasgow Effect ‘Annual Heatmap’
  Created using data from her tracking device, this map shows everywhere Harrison went in 2016, alongside Glasgow’s four big post-war housing schemes – built well beyond cycling distance.
• Take Back Our Buses (Aberdeenshire)
  Co-produced by the Scottish Trades Union Congress and Get Glasgow Moving (co-founded by Harrison in 2016) as a campaign film in the run-up to the 2022 local elections. Film: Sooz Reilly / Duration: 03:30
• Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde) (2022)
  Inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’ to tell the history of public transport provision in the Strathclyde region from the post-war period to the present day. Film: James Alcock / Duration: 03:52
• Bus Regulation: The Musical – The Trilogy
  This poster illustrates the locations of Harrison’s Musical Trilogy staged between 2019-2023, alongside some of the bus costumes for First and Stagecoach – the companies most dominant in Aberdeenshire.