Nick Hayes: Art is Magic

Nick Hayes is the co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign, and author of the Book of Trespass and most recently the Medicine Tree. In this talk, he focuses on a print he made for a poem called Heartwood written by Robert Macfarlane for the Sheffield Tree Protests in 2018 and how it led him to an understanding of the capability of art to change not only the way we perceive reality, but to change that reality itself. Drawing on his experience with campaigning, subvertising, and his notion of books as direct action, he will describe his own journey from an understanding of art as a commodity on a market, to an active agent of societal transformation.