Natalie Joelle is a completing doctoral candidate in the transdisciplinary environmental humanities at the intersection of theory and practice at Birkbeck, University of London, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Fund for Women Graduates. Her critical and creative work can be found as part of ISLE, The Goose, Routledge Environmental Humanities, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, Plumwood Mountain, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Her work gLeans was longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment 2021. www.gleaning.info

The project’s artistic work will involve hands-on and experiential learning through experimenting with gleaned ink materials, and new collaborations with charitable organisations focused on food waste and redistribution. It will also involve reflection on how the technology of ink making can mediate representations of gleaning figures from art history, told in the transdisciplinary context of contemporary managerial cultures. In its creation by an autistic and multiple disabled work student, the work continues a long history of gleaning by disabled people. The use of a font derived from the lines of art historical gleaners invites reflection on technology and the body and engagement with the environment through its reembodying of digital type. The project’s conceptual focus on the marginal practice of gleaning strives to promote a more equitable and just world.