Tag Archives: public services
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Artist as Active Citizen
Harrison reflects on The Glasgow Effect for this new text commissioned to launch a-n‘s year-long research project with AirSpace Gallery: Artists Make Change (May 2020 – May 2021). It is published alongside a new text by Dave Beech reflecting on the history of political art, to provoke discussion about artists’ roles in affecting social change. (Word count: 1,540)
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The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint
On 4 November 2019, Luath Press published Harrison’s first book. Inspired by her 2016 ‘durational performance’ The Glasgow Effect – for which she refused to travel beyond Glasgow’s city limits, or use any vehicles except her bike, for the whole calendar year – the book provides the complete context for her thinking and action. (Word count: 119,000)
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Bus Regulation: The Musical
Inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’, this performance / event re-enacts the history of public transport provision in Greater Manchester from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!
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Power For The People!
In this comment piece for The Ecologist, Harrison details how her concerns about climate change led her to start campaigning for the public ownership of our essential services and infrastructure with Bring Back British Rail and Power For The People. (Word count: 766)
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Power For The People
Harrison launched Bring Back British Rail’s ‘sister campaign’ Power for the People in October 2013 in order to popularise the idea of returning the UK’s energy production and supply to public ownership. Together the campaigns aim to ‘join the dots’ between our most carbon-intensive industries and services to make evident the need to remove the profit-motive from all of them in order to meet the challenges of climate change.
Campaign website -
The Redistribution of Wealth
Installed in Tate Britain’s Historic Collection Room, this piece retells the history of UK government spending on the arts from the birth of the ‘Council for the Encouragement of Music & the Arts’ in 1940, right up to the present day climate of cutbacks.
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Bring Back British Rail
As founder of the Bring Back British Rail campaign, Harrison was invited to write about the public ownership of our railways for the Green Party of England & Wales’s The New Home Front II (p.41-42) in 2012, which looks to the post-war period for lessons on how to tackle climate change now. (Word count: 709)
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Austerity & Anarchy
An installation which employs a spotlight and smoke machine to visualise and explore the correlation between cuts in public spending and instances of mass rioting on the UK’s streets.
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A Brief History of Privatisation
An installation in which the oscillations in UK public service policy over the last century are re-enacted by an inner circle of electric massage chairs under the seedy glow of red, and then blue, neon.
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Bring Back British Rail
In 2009, Harrison – the self-professed ‘Che Guevara of trainspotters’ – founded the national Bring Back British Rail campaign to popularise the idea of re-nationalising our public transport system. Now with more than 150,000 supporters across Facebook, Twitter, Riseup and its online petitions, Harrison continues to coordinate the campaign with the help of a small network of volunteers around the UK.
Campaign website