Work

Lectures

Transmediale: Capture All

Harrison discusses her strategies for monitoring and redressing the work-life balance, as part of the Time & Motion panel at Transmediale 2015: Capture All.
Political Campaigns, Writing

How the ‘Them’ became ‘Us’

In this short text, written for ShareAction’s Listen to USS! divestment campaign in 2014, Harrison exposes how compromises can so easily occur when one grows-up and gets a ‘proper job‘. (Word count: 998)
Lectures

Department for Business, Innovation & Skills

Talk by Ellie Harrison to students at Funen Art Academy in Denmark, presenting the ideas behind the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills – a title borrowed from the UK Government for her studio during her six-week residency at the academy.
Performance / Events

The Global Race

The Global Race is an absurd vision of an Olympic games of the future, in which the brilliance of human ‘innovation‘ means we no longer need to break a sweat! At an athletics track in central Berlin, a group of ‘elite athletes’ and members of the public competed in a series of races on Segways.
Lectures

In conversation with Ewa Jasiewicz

Harrison in conversation with journalist and activist Ewa Jasiewicz at Talbot Rice Gallery as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2014, discussing her referendum-themed installation / event After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess? and the relationship between art, activism and social change.
Installations

After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess?

An installation / event completely contingent on the result of the Referendum on Scottish Independence on 18 September 2014. The four large confetti cannons installed inside Talbot Rice’s Georgian Gallery would only be detonated in the event of a ‘yes’ vote.
Project website
Writing

The Art School Handbook

In this essay, written in 2014 during her first year teaching at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Harrison surveys the troubled global landscape of higher education and sketches out her vision for The Art School of the 21st Century. (Word count: 5,668)
Performance / Events

Transition Community of One

Devised in 2014 in response to Glasgow Open House Arts Festival, this special event at Harrison’s flat in Glasgow aimed to expose the paradox at the heart of her lifestyle and challenge her actually existing ‘socialism in one person’. Monthly screenings continued in 2016 as part of The Glasgow Effect.
Internet / Broadcasts

Ellie & Oliver’s Long Distance Relationship

For Glasgow Open House Arts Festival 2014, Harrison & her former flatmate Oliver Braid reunited to present two special editions of their popular radio show, as part of three interlinked projects taking place over two weekends, across both their new residences in the west and east of the city.
Lectures

Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life

Harrison explores her growing awareness of her own labour conditions and changing relationship to work in this talk at the Time & Motion symposium at the Royal College of Art in March 2014.
Performance / Events

Attempt at an Inventory…

Created specially for The Hospital for Dazed Art exhibition, for which artists were asked to revisit and rescue old or discarded artworks, Attempt at an Inventory… is Harrison’s attempt to take account of all the creative production she was responsible for in her formative years, exhibited alongside her first known self-portrait.
Political Campaigns

Say No to Tesco

In 2013, Harrison led the Say No to Tesco campaign, which began as a protest against the proliferation of small supermarkets in Glasgow and concluded in the group presenting a petition to the Scottish Parliament in 2014.
Political Campaigns, Writing

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)
Writing

Work-a-thon for the Self-Employed

Harrison identifies how she gradually became more politicised as a result of her growing awareness of her own labour conditions and ‘self-exploitation‘ within the post-Fordist world of work. An edited version of this text was published in the ‘Activism‘ chapter of Playing For Time (p.205-206) in 2015. (Word count: 711)
Writing

Eat 22: The Personal is Political

One decade on, Harrison reflects on her seminal 2002 project Eat 22, and examines her persistent interest in ‘consumption‘ in recent works: Vending Machine, The Other Forecast and Anti-Capitalist Aerobics. An edited version of this text was published in the ‘Food Growing‘ chapter of Playing For Time (p.177-179) in 2015. (Word count: 692)
Performance / Events

Anti-Capitalist Aerobics

Originally created as a disruption during Invisible Dust’s Ways of Seeing Climate Change conference on 30 October 2013, Anti-Capitalist Aerobics engages delegates in an energy intensive workout in order to expose some of the fundamental contradictions in the way we live our lives.
Performance / Events

The Other Forecast

Recorded LIVE in front of a green screen, Harrison’s The Other Forecast offers her summary of the absurd consequences of capitalism, as a warning about the future we are heading towards if the system continues unchecked. Broadcast on the Big Screen at MediaCityUK in November 2013 as part of The Other Forecast project – a collaboration between Harrison & John O’Shea.
Project website
Political Campaigns

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
Writing

Counter-Hegemonic Propaganda Machine

A manifesto of sorts outlining Harrison’s values and strategies for approaching life and art-making. Written in 2012 in response to a provocation by psychologist Tim Kasser for The Art of Life (p.19-21) published by Mission Models Money & Common Cause. (Word count: 1,229)
Lectures

For the Love of It

A polemic by Harrison to conclude Artquest’s For The Love Of It conference exploring the various factors which can and should motivate artists.
Internet / Broadcasts

Friendship Festival

For Glasgay! 2012, Harrison & her flatmate Oliver Braid presented Friendship Festival. Building on the success of their popular radio show, they invited six other friendly duos with intimate and provocative thoughts to share with the world, into their home for a series of weekend radio show ‘takeovers’.
Installations

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.
Political Campaigns, Writing

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)
Social / Networks

National Museum of Roller Derby

The National Museum of Roller Derby (NMRD) collection was founded at Glasgow Women’s Library in 2012 as Harrison’s contribution to the Library’s 20th anniversary celebrations. As a new ‘outreach’ initiative, the NMRD aims to bring a whole new, strong and revolutionary young audience to the Library, by using it as a home for the UK’s first permanent archive for the new and exciting all-female, full-contact sport of Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby.
Project website

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.