Fox: Inconvenient Bodies and Other Sense-pectives (2025)
During Open House Festival (Sept 15–19), we welcomed visitors into our Visitor Centre to learn more about London National Park City. We also invited them to experience a new work by Becky Lyons, Fox: Inconvenient Bodies and Other Sense-pectives (2025), which was exhibited in our space. The piece encouraged people to pause, reflect, and engage in their own way. The response from visitors was warm and thoughtful, with many taking the opportunity to connect with the work.
Conservation in England is often shaped by the perspective of a so-called ‘normative’ body, while knowledge from disabled and other differently-sensing bodies is frequently overlooked. Attitudes to caring for nature can therefore reproduce ableist assumptions and exclude diverse ways of knowing.
In this new piece of research, artist and Ranger Becky Lyon, turns to the figure of the fox—often seen as out-of-place, inconvenient, or wayward—as a lens to explore how conservation might be reimagined through alternative perspectives.
Fox: Inconvenient Bodies and Other Sense-pectives is a pop-up exhibition or “tactile essay” that brings these ideas to life through sound, moving image and performative printed matter. Developed in dialogue with Rangers with lived experience of disability from the London National Park City network, the work invites audiences to sense with, and think through, bodies that navigate the world differently.
Supported by TURF Projects, as part of the At The Meadow’s Edge programme.
Becky Lyon is an English-Jamaican artist and researcher from London. Her practice explores the politics of ecology in England and the role of art in rehearsing more equitable and liveable worlds. Working across tactile objects, sensory installations, moving image, sound and publications, she draws on embodied and sensory ways of knowing to reconnect us with place and question harmful power dynamics.
Alongside her artistic practice, Becky runs Ground Provisions, a ‘schooled-by-the-forest’ for adults and The Department of Artecology, a space for transdisciplinary conversations in the conservation sector.
A Volunteer Ranger for London National Park City, undertaking her PhD research at Goldsmiths University on touch as a method for critical ecological stewardship.
Contact: Instagram / Linkedin / Email: beckyl.lyon@googlemail.com
