"My passion and my energy is to inspire people to make a difference,” Emma Skeet tells me on a sunny afternoon in her garden. We are sitting under a homemade pergola. The chairs are vintage and upholstered with her great aunt’s bedspreads, and the table we sit at was a gift to Emma from her son, made from a reclaimed door and filled with shells. Emma’s life is surrounded by art – the salvaged, upcycled and pre-loved. She was inspired by her artist parents to make a difference and, looking back over her career to date, there is no doubt that everything she has done has been in pursuit of making the world a better place.
Norfolk-based art activist Emma Skeet has just made the leap from being employed to working for herself and entirely for the benefit of the planet. Her community interest company Systa (Share Your Story Through Art) is funded through the sale of Emma’s artwork. She works with children, young people and adults to create resources through ‘artivism’ (art activism) and to explore the nine planetary boundaries (climate, biomes, nutrients, aerosols, CO2, ozone layer, biodiversity, water, human-made pollutants) and how we can respect them. Some of the amazing projects she has been involved with include creating a giant flag with secondary-school students at the Suffolk Youth Climate Conference, and The Butterfly Effect, in which hundreds of fabric butterflies with messages of solidarity embroidered on to their wings were made with teenagers at Latitude Festival and given to detainees in UK immigration detention centres to show them they have not been forgotten.
Emma was encouraged to find a career outside art for stability, but her marketing and business studies degree only acted as a foundation for her creativity. In the early 00s, you could find Emma’s range of baby clothes for sale in designer markets throughout the world. These ethical, fair trade and organic sleepsuits and t-shirts, screen printed with her drawings, demonstrate that she was always thinking of the planet. She believed then, as she does now, that: “Buying less, investing in longevity and buying beautiful, well-made clothes, as well as thinking about the supply chain, is key.” It’s no surprise to find her, two decades later, involved in Norwich’s Slow Fashion Week, which encourages this way of thinking. Alongside later roles in education and the charity sector, Emma has supported human rights causes and championed nature, bringing her creative flair to the projects she’s participated in.
Picture a gallery filled with plastic bottles, each containing a child’s self-portrait, fashioned into a huge wave. It was a project Emma initiated as an Oxfam volunteer, with 1,400 children worldwide, to highlight the importance of clean water. What would you do with damaged vinyl records? Emma worked with students to recycle them into poppies for a Remembrance Day display. Or what about the boxes of picture frames you always see piled up at the back of charity shops? Emma used them to exhibit children’s stories in the shop window.
“People are so imaginative, but many have low confidence and don’t think of themselves as creative. I love the teamwork to help them make their voices heard.” Emma brings her flair, creativity and positivity to all those she works with. She shows how art can be used to make a difference, to tell stories, and to create something beautiful and powerful. Her face lights up when she talks about getting young people involved. When she witnesses them “finding their voice,” she says, “it’s magic”.
Emma has worked in paid and voluntary roles that further important causes all her adult life. She started out in the field of human rights, volunteering with the Amnesty International Urgent Action team in Toronto. In the 1990s, she took a paid job with Richard Adams, founder of Traidcraft, within the educational side of his sustainable grocery chain Out of This World. She organised workshops in schools about where food comes from, the people who make it, and its impact on the planet. The data discussed was added to in-store computers, so that customers could see the air miles, ethics and impact of the food they bought. She was at the cutting edge of ethical consumerism. “It was all about incorporating ethics and the environment,” Emma says.
Jumping forward almost thirty years, in her most recent role (before becoming a solo changemaker) she worked with students at the University of East Anglia. She teamed up science and creative writing students to create worksheets for schoolchildren in partnership with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. UEA’s Project Change shares the resources they created online to raise awareness among children of endangered insects in Norfolk and the need to protect them, and celebrates the importance of insects for a healthy planet. The insect artwork created as part of the project was entered into a competition, and a butterfly sock is now being produced with 10% of profits going to the Butterfly Trust. All the projects Emma works on and devises are about enabling people to make a difference. “I love empowering people to realise their potential to be positive agents of change.”
Teamwork is a huge aspect of Emma’s work. As an art activist, she mobilises as many people as she can to express how they feel about climate change and how they can create hope through art. She offers workshops to schools and workplaces, but appreciates she is limited by geography. With funding from her art sales, she is developing a toolkit for schools and home-educating families based around the planetary boundaries, highlighting the positive and hopeful things that can be done, and showing that it’s a “cool thing to care about”. She left her role at UEA, she tells me, because she felt emotionally overwhelmed by the climate crisis and had to do something. She wanted to focus on using art, creativity and science to raise awareness and bring hope to others.
“There is power in collaboration and community,” Emma says, and this is where her project Planetary Partners comes in. It’s an online community art project that everyone can get involved in. Even though she is UK-based, her passion for getting people creative and sharing inspiring artwork is boundless. Through workshops and her website, she invites people to make their own Planetary Partners playing cards, and is sharing the huge deck of hope online.
“Find a voice; make a difference” is one of Emma’s beliefs, and it has such integrity. All her working life, Emma has striven to protect the environment and human rights. She encourages others to share in a hopeful attitude towards our planet and believes that together, we can make a difference.
Nature Painting Drawing Doodling
An art project from Emma Skeet
My philosophy for workshop materials is reuse and recycle, so find any paint and paper you have at home for this project. Try flattening cardboard packaging or opening out envelopes to paint on the inside – they have amazing patterns to paint over!
Think of the plant you want to paint. Find a photo online or take a picture from your garden or a park.
Put some water on your paper or card and dab the colours on to it that you are imagining from your plant. Add more water as needed to help the colours bleed into each other, creating organic shapes. Leave some spaces with no paint.
When dry, use a pen to draw or doodle around the blank spaces left and the shapes created from the colours, copying the image of the plant as a rough guide. Make up your own shapes for extra leaves and flowers.
You can give these as gifts, or use them as cards or cut up for gift tags.
Have fun!
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Angeline Braidwood lives in Suffolk on a smallholding with her husband, two daughters and ever-expanding menagerie. She loves to write about inspiring people, family life and saving the world. On Instagram @angeline_writes
Find out more Take a look at the Planetary Partners playing cards and get involved at systaworkshops.wixsite.com/systa/single-project
Explore more of Emma’s work at systaworkshops.wixsite.com/systa
We would love to see what you create to share and inspire others to find their creative confidence. Post on Instagram and tag @artivist65 and @junomagazine.
Published in issue 87. Accurate at the time this issue went to print.
