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When Clare Bryden first picked up her knitting needles to make art, she didn’t think she was becoming an artist. Her background was in science and maths — numbers, systems, and logic. But one day, over coffee with a friend, a spark was lit. They were talking about Exeter’s new waste incinerator and how to raise awareness of its environmental impacts. “We didn’t want to protest angrily,” Clare recalls. “It was already being built. We wanted to keep them honest — to have a conversation.”
That conversation became Particulart — “the art of knitting chemistry in gentle protest.” It was a playful but pointed act of craftivism — a 3D knitted model of greenhouse gases, rendered in colourful yarn and suspended in space. Each molecule had its own personality; each stitch, a quiet act of care.
“I suppose it was about making sense of things,” Clare reflects. “And processing what was going on in the world. It was creative, it was play, it was protest — but gentle protest.”
Clare’s scientific background gave her work precision; her creative process gave it humanity. She turned data into touchable art — something people could hold, talk about, and respond to. “I’ve never believed in shouting or guilt-tripping,” she says. “If you can touch people’s hearts, even in a small way, that’s when things start to change.”
And it did change things. Her 3D greenhouse gas graphs were later recreated by scientists at the Met Office as part of climate training for non-specialists. They reported that the tactile, visual approach helped participants understand complex information — and that “dyslexic colleagues found it highly engaging, effective, and enjoyable.”
That small ripple from one knitted idea shows the power of creative methods to shift learning and communication across sectors.
“It’s about opening up a tiny chink of light for conversation,” Clare says. “Once people start talking, they connect — and that’s when new thinking happens.”
Her work with Regen and the Art and Energy Collective deepened this philosophy. Clare became a familiar figure at workshops and events, helping people think differently about energy and climate through making. She later inspired a knitting character in Something Wonderful in My Back Yard — the community musical about local energy and imagination.
“I think what I loved most,” she recalls, “was the joy of it all — the playfulness, the community. Making with people. It wasn’t just about the finished work, it was about the conversations and the moments that happened while our hands were busy.”
Clare believes that being side by side — rather than face to face — creates a different kind of openness. “When you’re making something together, there’s less eye contact, less pressure. You’ve got space to breathe and think. It’s a gentler way to connect.”
For Clare, art and energy work are not about making grand statements, but small, steady ripples of repair. “There are two strands,” she explains. “How we repair the world, and how we care for ourselves in it.”
She sees art as both process and metaphor for repair — “like kintsugi,” she says, referring to the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. “It’s about showing the cracks and making them beautiful.”
Her knitted molecules, her colouring books for climate mindfulness, and her later work in poetry all explore that same impulse: to bring the broken and the beautiful into dialogue.
“Art can show where the world is broken, imagine how it might be, and help fill in the gaps,” she says. “That’s how we begin to repair things — one stitch at a time.”
Clare’s creative journey also inspired others to take action. Her gentle, humorous, and intellectually rich approach made space for people who might otherwise shy away from activism. Through projects with Regen, local festivals, and exhibitions, she helped redefine what it means to engage with climate change — replacing confrontation with curiosity, and fear with craft.
“I like to think of it as throwing a pebble into the pond,” she says. “You never know where the ripples go. But they go somewhere.”
Looking back, Clare sees her art and energy work as both a personal evolution and a community catalyst. It gave her a new creative identity — one that combined her analytical mind with her imaginative heart. It also left a legacy: people who now associate energy and climate issues with creativity, conversation, and care.
“If people can start to see themselves as makers — not just consumers — that changes everything,” she says. “That’s what the arts can do. They give us a way to participate, to repair, to belong.”
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