When Chloe Whipple helped produce the Relight My Fire festival at Exeter’s Bike Shed Theatre, she didn’t know she was stepping into something that would shape her next decade of creative work.
“It was definitely one of those projects that got handed to me with not very much information,” she laughs. “But that’s what made it exciting. You’re building something where no one really knows what it is yet.”
That openness — a willingness to explore, listen, and respond — is a hallmark of Chloe’s approach to creativity (and maybe is essential for exploring creativity at the edge of transformation). Relight My Fire brought together artists, engineers, and community energy groups to experiment with how art could ignite conversations about energy, belonging, and change.
“It felt adventurous,” she remembers. “There was this sense that we were all trying something that hadn’t quite been done before.”
A Partnership of Curiosity
Through Regen, Chloe was introduced to Dr Peter Melville-Shreeve, a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter who had spent years designing stormwater and wastewater systems. His technical insight became the foundation for what would become 15 Litres of Water — a project exploring what it really means to live within environmental limits.
“Pete was amazing,” Chloe says. “He didn’t just offer facts — he helped me understand the systems we all live with, the hidden engineering that makes our everyday lives possible.”
Together, they devised a way to measure and monitor Chloe’s daily water use, working out the practicalities of showering, cooking, and cleaning on just fifteen litres a day. “It was an act of radical curiosity,” she reflects. “We wanted to see what living like that would feel like.”
Expert facilitation of this connection was pivotal. “Having a technical expert to champion the idea gave it credibility,” Chloe says. “It turned a thought experiment into a real, lived investigation,” and the project went on to be referenced in multiple research papers.
The Magic in Inspiration
The spark for 15 Litres of Water came not only from technical collaboration but also from a moment of pure wonder. After Relight My Fire, Chloe found herself more open to creative possibility in the energy space, noticing ideas everywhere.
“One evening I was watching a David Attenborough documentary,” she recalls, “and he said something that completely undid me — that all the water on Earth has been here for millennia, cycling through clouds and rivers and bodies.”
That poetic idea — that the water in her glass might once have flowed through a dinosaur or fallen as rain on ancient forests — changed everything. “It was magic,” she says. “The thought that water might hold memory, that it connects every living thing — that’s what gave the project its soul.”
In another piece exploring Being the Earth, Chloe explored what it would mean to embody the planet itself. During an interval, standing by the stage door with a cigarette and a glass of wine, she invited people into the small revelation.
“I wanted people to see how intimately it’s all connected — the way we treat ourselves, each other, and the Earth. There’s no separation.”
That sense of intimacy — between the poetic and the practical, the everyday and the planetary — runs through all her work. It’s the heartbeat of her creativity.
Living with Limits
The project quickly grew from a personal experiment into a public performance and social inquiry. Chloe’s daily routines became both laboratory and theatre, as she documented her experiences and reflections through film, writing, and conversation.
“I started to realise that our relationship with water isn’t rational,” she says. “It’s emotional, cultural, and habitual. We take it for granted because it’s invisible — until it isn’t.”
As she learned to carry, measure, and reuse every drop, she also discovered the fragility of the systems that deliver it. “Working with Pete, I began to understand that water doesn’t just appear from a tap — it moves through vast, leaky, energy-intensive infrastructures. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.”
Her experience gave her new empathy for people around the world living with scarcity. “It changed the way I think about comfort, and what we really need,” she says. “It made me appreciate the labour and energy behind every litre.”
From Personal Practice to Public Conversation
As 15 Litres of Water gained attention, Chloe was invited to speak at multiple events, festivals, and conferences, sharing her story with policy-makers, engineers, and environmental campaigners.
“I hoped my experience might help people understand what it actually feels like to live the kind of change we’re told is necessary,” she says. “To give the conversation about sustainability a human texture.”
But what she discovered was sobering. “I realised that the water system itself is full of contradictions,” she explains. “Water companies need to sell water to survive. They’re profit-driven, even as they talk about conservation. The pipes are leaking, and the responsibility gets pushed onto individuals.”
While her story captured people’s imagination, fewer were able to engage with those uncomfortable truths. “There’s comfort in thinking the answer is shorter showers,” she says. “But the truth is much more complex — and much more political.”
Still, she remains proud of the project’s reach and resonance. “It started conversations,” she says. “It helped people notice — and that’s the beginning of everything.”
Listening, Not Telling
Through her creative practice, Chloe realised that the most powerful creative engagement , indeed the most powerful, and most comforting change, doesn’t come from telling people what to do — it comes from listening to what they already know and supporting them while they act for themselves.
“Listening changes everything,” she says. “When you stop trying to explain and start really hearing, people discover meaning for themselves. That’s when real learning happens.”
That shift — from advocacy to invitation — has shaped her whole practice. Relight My Fire and 15 Litres of Water both created frameworks for others to explore their own relationships with energy and resource use, without prescription. “That’s how you grow community — through shared discovery, not instruction,” she reflects.
Art, Death, and Dancing
Now, Chloe’s attention has turned toward another cycle of transformation — a new dance project exploring Morris dancing and death, rooted in rhythm, ritual, and release.
She’s currently exploring a future as a funeral director, curious about how art can help people meet endings with grace and connection. “I’m interested in how movement and ritual can hold grief,” she says. “How we can make death less clinical, more human.”
Her work, as ever, combines the personal and the communal — tradition and experiment, craft and care. “It’s all the same current,” she says. “Energy, water, life, death — it all flows together. The dance, the water, the flame — they’re all acts of noticing.”
The Ripples of Attention
The ripples from Relight My Fire continue to move outward. Each project, each collaboration, each story carries energy forward — not as a wave that crashes, but as a ripple that expands quietly, reshaping what it touches.
“The best work doesn’t always make a splash,” Chloe says. “It keeps moving through people — you just have to trust that it’s still flowing somewhere.”
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