Taking space in nature: the power of change

A ground-breaking film celebrates seven global-majority women holding space in nature and conservation. It’s a story of constant challenge and transformation, filmmaker Bryony Benge-Abbott tells Karen Thomas

The image that flits through Bryony Benge-Abbott’s film is butterflies. As her interviews end, dancers enter the frame. Birdsong and incantations fill the air as the dancers become silhouettes against rich textiles, shimmering colours that dissolve and change shape before your eyes.

Just as butterflies emerge, dazzling, from the chrysalis they formed as caterpillars, The Colour of Transformation brings into the light seven women working with nature who challenge the status quo. It explains how they have had to transform to do so.

Benge-Abbott asks to meet in the west London community garden that hosted her film premier. It’s the morning after a magical night before. The fairy lights and incense and spiced wine are gone. Even in daylight, Meanwhile Gardens is otherworldly – a woodland glade, growing space and Moroccan garden off the Regents Canal, encircled by brutal concrete.

The site has its own tale of transformation. In the seventies, artists and local people seized a derelict plot from North Paddington council to create a common green space. The name is ironic – Meanwhile Gardens’ future is uncertain.

Larva

A 2017 study by Policy Exchange exposed the lack of diversity – a marked bias for whiteness and wealth – in the UK environment sector. Only farming is less diverse.

Benge-Abbott and the seven women she filmed challenge that bias. The Colour of Transformation explores how her interviewees came to nature and their experiences – good and bad – in holding that space.

It introduces museum scientist Miranda Lowe, mental-health expert Jade Adams-White, land-rights activist Nadia Shaikh, writers Jini Reddy and Soraya Abdel-Hadi, Black Girls Hike UK founder Rhiane Fatinikun and conservationist turned CBeebies host Chantelle Lindsay.

The film is sad and funny, critical and hopeful. The stories show what needs to change to unlock nature, wild spaces and careers to welcome everyone.

Fatinikun shares a childhood memory of her family packing a picnic lunch to eat in the car. They did not eat outdoors, feeling that the countryside could be a hostile space. Now, through Black Girls Hike, she supports Black women and girls to enjoy space in nature.

Abdel-Hadi unpicks industry tokenism. “I never felt othered until my mid-twenties,” she recalls. “When someone from a very high-profile organisation approached me at an adventure event, asking how to get more people like you to their events.”

She immediately felt singled out. And when she looked around for a network to support her, she found none. So she set off to build one.

Chrysalis

Benge-Abbott has British-Trinidadian heritage. Born in Yorkshire, she grew up in rural Kent. Her mother, a psychotherapist, encouraged her daughters to play outdoors and to engage with wildlife. Benge-Abbott loved to lose herself in nature’s colours, shapes and forms, gathering acorns and lichen and feathers.

Despite finding “more direct racism” in cities, Benge-Abbott wasn’t sure she fitted into the countryside. Her mother and sister are white. “You feel eyes resting on you just that bit too long,” she says. “You aren’t just another person. You are noticed.”

She moved to the city, gained a degree in fine art and worked in arts/science engagement. That work inspired her earliest artworks; huge murals of plants and flowers that reclaim inner-city space for nature.

“Being a street artist made me feel visible as a woman of colour,” she recalls. “I had beautiful conversations with young girls who’d come and watch me paint, and check in every day to see the mural taking shape. And sometimes they’d ask to have a go.

“I hadn’t planned to be a role model – but it was positive for them to see a mixed-race woman paint on a public wall – who had permission and could talk about people and plants. It was powerful for me, too.”

But there was also conflict. A white, male bypasser dismissed an oak-tree mural Benge-Abbott had designed with local school children as “painting the wall with Africa”. That hostility positioned “my skin colour as a filter through which people engage with my work”, she says.

It pushed her to seek out others with similar experiences, “to ask other women about that experience of becoming visible – about how to protect yourself. About the benefits and the challenges.”

She went looking on social media. The internet did the rest.

Taking flight

And then Butterfly Conservation and the William Morris Gallery came calling. The gallery planned a retrospective for Trinidad-born textile designer Althea McNish – the first celebrated Black British textile artist. McNish’s bright textiles explored botanical forms from the Caribbean, bringing colour and texture to drab British post-war design.

It invited Benge-Abbott to lead McNish-inspired workshops for women that created nature-led designs. Those motifs inspired the textiles in the film. The Colour of Transformation took flight.

The film is a collage of stories about identity and nature. The thread that runs through it is belonging.

Lowe and Shaikh discuss legacies of empire. When we write innovators and scientists from minoritised backgrounds out of history, Lowe says, people who share these backgrounds feel they cannot contribute and will never belong.

Shaikh questions who owns and who has access to nature. “Working in nature and conservation can be problematic,” she says. “I learned that it’s also part of the system. That’s been heart-breaking because nature has been a deep relationship for me. You’re having to keep refinding your place…

“The reason Black and people of colour are not represented in the countryside as white people are, the reason the UK is one of the most biodiversity-depleted countries in the world, the reason that my organisation is only white people – I came to realise that it’s all the same problem.”

All seven talk about how hard it is to be, so often, the only diverse face. About impostor syndrome and feeling a constant need for self-improvement.

Reddy exposes the tickbox workings of D+I. Event-makers invite her onto panels to talk about how to engage people of colour. She is often the only person of colour in the room. Other panellists get to discuss their work and specialist subjects.

The film offers lessons for the future, too. “The way we’re trying to save nature is using the same tools that have destroyed nature in the first place,” Shaikh says. “Treating land like something to take and consume. Conservation so often talks about taking land for something, forgetting how much people need nature. It’s a problem in conservation, especially in the west.”

It adds up to a short film that covers a lot of ground.

“It shows that the journey to become a leader isn’t straight,” Benge-Abbott concludes. “It’s a journey that meanders – that coils and uncoils, twists and turns. And it never ends. These women do amazing work. They are accomplished and intelligent and really – badass. And yet there’s always that self-doubt.”

All the Elements found, write and artist Soraya Abdel-Hadi

“All The Elements represents different diversity areas – invisible and visible disabilities, sexuality and gender identity, race and ethnicity, different body types in the outdoors, age… People are working in silos but members of these communities are intersectional. Being able to meet someone working on a totally different diversity area to you helps you to better serve your own community”

Feel Good Gardening club founder and mental-health campaigner Jade Adams-White

“Gardening allows young people to be present. They aren’t thinking about future stress or worrying about the past. They can be completely in the moment. Sometimes young people lose that sense of playfulness, that joy. We live in a society with a lot going on – there’s a lot of negativity. Children consume that. [We must] provide space for them to be children, to play, to go back to basics… I use metaphors; when they pull out a weed, they remove a negative thought from their mind”

Black Girls Hike founder Rhiane Fatinikun

“Someone said that Black Girls Hike is like coming back from shopping and putting down your bags. It’s a load off. People understand you; you can relate to them. I don’t think people realise, if you don’t connect with people for a long time, how detrimental that can be to your mental health... It’s only around likeminded people that you realise that this is soul food – and that you’ve been starving”

CBeebies presenter and Great North Wood project officer Chantelle Lindsay


“There’s too often that narrative that Black people aren’t interested in wildlife – that they’re a hard-to-reach audience. I like to flip that on the head: yes we are, and I’m a living testament to that. You have to go to people, find out what ignites them – what’s their draw? Find our unique connection to nature. It doesn’t all look the same”

Natural History Museum principal curator and Museum Detox founder Miranda Lowe CBE


“My Black history tour is a conversation. People can ask me any question… Many people on my tours have never met a scientist, never met a Black, female scientist or curator – it’s their first chance to ask what they want to know about the colonial or the scientific sides of the collections… And I can bring my whole self to it”

Wanderland author Jini Reddy

“It’s important to bring the spiritual into travel and nature writing. It’s about decolonising narratives. It’s about acknowledging ways of being, knowing and perceiving, long excluded and dismissed from mainstream western knowledge bases – but this doesn’t make them less valid or less meaningful”

RSPB policy officer, conservationist and land-justice campaigner Nadia Shaikh


“Nature makes sense to me. It doesn’t ask you questions. It’s just there and it’s solid. It tells you stories and gives you metaphors. It lifts you when the sun shines. You feel wild when the wind blows. You can be all of these things and it’s safe… Nature is everything – I just can’t explain it”

Filmmaker and artist Bryony Benge-Abbott


“There is real burnout among Black women – from the double whammy of the work and the representation. To represent is emotional labour. You have to step outside yourself, constantly; to think about how you’re being received or presented. You have to set boundaries and learn that it’s ok to say no and check that people who want to work with you have the right intentions – and that’s exhausting”

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