The Slow Grind

Inspired by the manifesto ‘Slow Fashion to Save Minds’ (2018) that we had the honour of having a part of Volume 5°, written by artist, curator and director Georgina Johnson and writer and mental health advocate Sara Radin, The Slow Grind is a creative anthology and blueprint for holistic change. This collection of essays, think pieces and conversations, gathers some of the most formidable voices across the creative and fashion industries, to address the crucial questions of creative, social and environmental sustainability. This resource is the essential text for comprehensive change. One that will influence future strategies, penetrate future structures and challenge the systems we are currently a part of.

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The Slow Grind is an exchange between the world we inhabit presently and the world we must build tomorrow. With insight from biotechnologists, activists, photographers, psychologists and visionaries such as Ib Kamara, Caryn Franklin MBE, Bethany Williams, Kimberly Jenkins and Design Museum London Curator, Sumitra Upham, this collection turns the problem of sustainability over from multiple perspectives, prioritising the voices often missing in the conversation, yet most affected by its failures. The Slow Grind interrogates the crisis with rare honesty and candour, iIllustrating exactly where we are, why we’ve ended up here and how we might go about digging ourselves out. Grappling with topics including mental health, fashion and race, education reform, social justice and climate change, it outlines how the arts and its contributors can build a better way forward by developing ecological and regenerative models.

At the core of this collection is the question of wellbeing. The Slow Grind provides a new imperative for change that suggests how we might move towards equally engaged and ethically directed creative economies. Together, these contributors speculate on a future grounded on interdependence rather than competition, to overturn the fundamentally destructive practices and functions that are habituated and continued throughout the cultural industries to secure their ongoing ‘health’ - somehow deemed dearer than our own, that of our neighbours, or even our planet - towards creative ecosystems that address responsibility and reorient towards care.

About the Editor: Georgina Johnson is a polymath, an earthworker and a futurist, driven by curiosity, self-making and care centred ideologies that she embeds in her engagement with disciplines that reach far beyond the fashion industry in which she began. Since graduating with a 1st class honours from LCF in Womenswear and Pattern Cutting (2016), Johnson has simultaneously maintained an adamant set of values (n.b community focused, challenging status quo’s, the creation of space for peripheral experiences) whilst finding an assertive voice in the languages of art and design, curation, art direction, filmmaking and production. Johnson has completed artist commissions for The Photographers’ Gallery and Now Gallery (2017-2018) and exhibited with The National Museums Scotland (2019); underscoring why The British Council and The Design Museum voted her as one of 10x10 2018 - a nomination of the most exciting emerging creatives operating within the creative industries.