Exhibition, ‘Heat Creatures: Warming our Homes, not our Planet’
Monday 21 February – 13 March
University of Plymouth Sustainability Hub
Free and no booking necessary.
Exhibition Reception and Artist Talk
Friday 25 February, 5-8pm, talk @ 6pm
University of Plymouth Sustainability Hub
Free, however spaces are limited. Register via the form below.
Heat Creatures: Warming our Homes, not our Planet
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Regen Art Lab exhibition ‘Heat Creatures: Warming our Homes, not our Planet’ in the University of Plymouth’s Sustainability Hub from 21 February to 13 March.
Join us for the exhibition reception on the 25 March from 5pm onwards at the Sustainability Hub. We will also be hearing from Sparks and the energy experts about this unique collaboration of art and science at 6pm.
Decarbonising home heating is shaping up to be one of the greatest challenges of the climate emergency in the UK. It is understood that it is not an issue of technological advancement, but of public awareness and political will power. But it is easy to feel lost in the many technology options and overwhelmed in the scale of the challenge.
Karenza Sparks has transformed her collaboration learnings into eleven ‘heat creatures’ which personify different technologies. These are presented as a pack of trading cards and figurines, an engaging and playful approach to help navigate how to decarbonise our homes.
The choice of creating a trading card game also underlines an important message: none of the heat creatures can tackle the problem alone. Each home and household are different and so only through the creatures’ combined powers can we rise to challenge.
Register for Exhibition Reception and Artist Talk
Open to all ages and free entry.
About the artist
Karenza Sparks is a multidisciplinary designer, maker, and animator from Cornwall. She has a particular interest in gamification, story telling, interactive experiences, and participatory artworks. Sparks graduated from Kingston school in 2020 and much of her work has been highly collaborative.
About the residency
The Regen Art Lab is a new artist residency programme for interdisciplinary collaborations to take place between Regen’s clean energy experts and UK-based artists from underrepresented backgrounds in the energy sector. By building a bridge between experts and artists the residency can delve more deeply into an issue, producing well informed, relevant and meaningful works which showcase pivotal stories of the energy transition. You can read more about the process in the opening blog on Spark’s first impressions, and our closing blog by Regen’s energy experts and Sparks on their experience of collaborating.
This year, the Regen art lab challenged artist Karenza Sparks to look at the theme decarbonising heat. For more detail on the challenge of decarbonising the UK’s heat see Regen’s decarbonising of heat paper, or the resources that Sparks compiled during her residency. 
