The hope of something different.

Participatory art is a rich and diverse practice. Much of its energy comes from the creative tensions between different theories and visions, as may be seen from some of the reaction to the Turner Prize jury's choice. But art is not only intellectual and rational. It is felt, perceived, practiced and experienced. Some of the most creative discussions happen within projects, between artists and participants (or, as I'd prefer to say, between professional and non-professional artists). That is why I think of it as a restless art

Scottish artists bring nature into healthcare.

Scotland has a strong portfolio of arts and health projects including both public art installations within healthcare buildings and participatory programmes, in particular with people with long term conditions. This presentation will focus on public art installations by artists and designers which use biophilic and other design approaches to bringing nature into buildings. It addresses the conference themes of Patient Care, Healing Environments and Caring for Caregivers. It is well known thanks to the work of Robert Ulrich that views of nature contribute to patient recover, and it is clear from the work of Stephen Kaplan that views of nature can play a role in restoring our ability to give our attention. OPENspace Research at Edinburgh College of Art (http://openspace.eca.ac.uk/ ) has further substantiated the connections between nature and wellbeing focusing on inclusive access to the outdoors. In Scotland there have been a number of projects in the context of Healthcare where artists and designers have specifically sought to use art and design to bring nature into buildings in addition to what the architects and landscape designers are able to achieve. Four key examples are: Thomas A Clark's (http://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/) project with the architects Reiach & Hall, 'A Grove of Larch in a Forest of Birch,' for the New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow integrated poetry and visual arts into what the architects described as the architecture of waiting. The Aim was to create spaces in which users of the hospital could wait for appointments in 'a place apart having the brightness and stillness of a woodland glade.' Alexander Hamilton's (http://www.alexanderhamilton.co.uk/) Designing for Dignity (http://designingfordignity.co.uk/Inspired-by-Nature) is an approach that draws on a deep understanding of the Victorian poet and artist John Ruskin and of the more recent Biophilia Hypothesis. Hamilton is currently developing designs including furniture and art for the Quiet or Family rooms in the New South Glasgow Hospitals based on an extensive programme of creative engagement. Hamilton is also working on the design of a healthcentre in Glasgow. Dalziel + Scullion's (http://www.dalzielscullion.com/) practice is increasingly focused on addressing nature deficit disorder. Their work encompasses exhibitions and public art. Their scheme for the wards of the New South Glasgow Hospitals will bring the whole landscape of Scotland into one building. Their project Rosnes Benches, currently being installed in the landscape of Dumfries and Galloway, they have also contributed work to the Vale of Leven Health Centre (http://www.wide-open.net/index.php?page=vale-of-leven). Donald Urquhart has completed public art projects for four mental health hospitals including most recently Midpark Acute Mental Health Hospital (http://www.wide-open.net/index.php?page=healing-spaces) and developed Sanctuary spaces for both hospitals and universities. His award winning design for the Sanctuary at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary has become a benchmark (http://www.ginkgoprojects.co.uk/projects/royal-infirmary-edinburgh). These artists and others demonstrate key aspects of the role of art in bringing nature into healthcare contexts including focus on characteristics of nature such as colour, pattern and movement. As artists they use attention, framing and synthesis. In addition to sharing these developments with the conference audience I hope to identify other artists exploring similar issues

The hope of something different: eco-centricity in art and education.

Educational theorist Gert Biesta proposes that we need to be “in the world without occupying the centre of the world.” (2017, p. 3). This injunction provides a frame with which to interrogate the hybrid practice of ecoart. This practice can be characterised by a concern for the relations of living things to each other, and to their environments. Learning in order to be able to act is critical. One aspect is collaboration with experts (whether those are scientists and environmental managers or inhabitants, including more-than-human). Another is building ‘commons’ and shared understanding being more important than novelty. Grant Kester has argued that there is an underlying paradigm shift in ‘aesthetic autonomy’, underpinned by a ‘trans-disciplinary interest in collective knowledge production’. (2013, np). This goes beyond questions of interdisciplinarity and its variations to raise more fundamental questions of agency. Drawing on the work of key practitioner/researchers (eg Jackie Brookner, Collins and Goto Studio, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison) and theorists (Kester, Kagan) the meaning and implications of not ‘occupying the centre of the world’ will be explored as a motif for an art which can act in public space

Land Art Generator Initiative: art and energy.

The Land Art Generator Initiative brings together interdisciplinary teams to develop place-making using renewable energy technologies. LAGI builds on the history of energy infrastructure design: city centre power stations have been repurposed as art galleries. The presentation explores Scotland as a context for LAGI including energy histories; landscape/seascape opportunities for renewables; as well as land reform and community ownership. The role of arts and culture in the social dimensions of energy systems are explored through examples including PLATFORM/Sea Renue and Peter Fend. The presentation concludes with an overview of the LAGI Glasgow project

When is the artist a creative leader? A provisional framework.

Ian Hunter, in the "New Rural Arts Strategy", provides us with a framework for thinking about regeneration, by drawing deeply from rural culture - both its traditions as well as the challenges that are posed to it by social, cultural and environmental change. Hunter proposes that artists could be key to this regeneration process. Working as an artist through the agency of Littoral, he has created the circumstances within this conference and its painstaking preparation, as well as through a long track-record of work in this field, to lead a focused discussion on the development of rural cultures. Our work has also been rooted in rural cultures. In this presentation we want to pick up on two interrelated issues on which Littoral's work has clearly focused: 1) the artist working in the sphere of social, cultural and environmental change, and 2) the artist as leader. However, we remain concerned about the terminology of 'industry' and the focus on an urban model of regeneration; the 19th and 20th century idea of industry is framed by material profit and commodity. We would ask: where is the discourse and criticality within this industry? Additionally, should we be developing a different terminology that speak to an ethos of responsible economics? Within our current research, we are specifically concerned with exploring the issues of artists working directly with other sectors in society. We might summarise our understanding at this point as follows: 1) Artists are increasingly interested in creating the conditions in which the challenges, desires and tensions of changing social, environmental and cultural circumstances become exposed or revealed; 2) By immersing ourselves in or inhabiting these 'created' conditions for a while (within artistic processes and projects as discrete experiences), we have the means as individuals to gain a heightened awareness of the circumstances of our particular lives; 3) In leading, the artist does not set out in the first instance to solve problems. Littoral as an organisation can be read as an example of taking this kind of leading role within a new social, cultural and environmental endeavour

What poetry does best: the Harrisons' poetics of being and acting in the world.

Simply paying attention guarantees the transformation from a nature supposedly asleep to the work that displays nature's strange vitality. Art is what attention makes with nature. This observation by Michel De Certeau, noted French philosopher of the everyday, writing the introduction to Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison's (hereafter the Harrisons) seminal work the Lagoon Cycle (1974-1984), gets to the heart of the Harrisons' project to understand and work with the agency of all things, and to recognize that attention is central to being and acting in the world. A question arises about how our attention, as listeners, readers, and viewers, is drawn into a work of art, or more specifically, how the Harrisons draw our attention through their poetics. One of the salient features of the Harrisons' work is attention to what is actually present, in the sense of suspending disbelief. The particular form of attention that the Harrisons exercise aligns with the forms of attention found in improvisation - being in the moment of an experience and using the materials at hand. They see improvisation within the rich potential of inconsistency and contradiction in human relations with environments. This acts as a stimulus to the improvising of new futures

Thinking with the Harrisons.

This book asks a fundamental question around the place of the arts in the global environmental crises. In arguing that the arts have an important role, we are also suggesting that the arts need to be rethought, reimagined and reconfigured through new forms of practice that generate new qualities of relation between humans and the more than human, and in our imagining of the living world (Ghosh 2016, Latour 2020). The book focuses on the practice of Helen Mayer Harrison (1929-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022), known as "the Harrisons", because their work is widely recognised as pioneering in bringing together art and ecology. It has been included in significant group exhibitions of environmental art (e.g. Fragile Ecologies 1992; Ecovention 2002; Ground Works 2005; Weather Report 2007; Radical Nature 2009; Ecovention Europe 2017; Taipei Biennale Post-Nature 2019). We draw on extensive interviews and discussion with Newton Harrison, undertaken predominantly over the past three years, as well as working with both Helen and Newton on projects over more than 15 years. Our overarching approach to "thinking with" draws on philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, and her approach to thinking with the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who pioneered ways of questioning that are now recognised as foundational to ecology. Stengers draws on Whitehead's work because she is in search of a different science, a slow science, that critiques the current co-option of the sciences into serving capitalism/neoliberalism without taking into account environmental impacts. This resonates with the Harrisons' search - through over fifty years of experimentation - for a different way to be artists; one that, throughout their highly successful careers, has challenged the institution of art to take on 'non-art' questions. They had been intensely aware since the 1960s of the escalating environmental crises. In bringing together art and ecology, their practice frames the problem of what it now means to re-build a world in common. Of particular interest to us as authors and artist-researchers is the process, or poetics, the Harrisons evolved throughout their lives. They started out with a series of quasi-scientific experiments known as The Survival Pieces (1971-74, Chapter 1). The significance of these works is the way they reveal contradictions that raise new questions. These questions make visible hidden assumptions and became generative of new work. In this way the Harrisons developed the situated practice for which they are pre-eminently known, going on to create works that focus on watersheds and bioregions. Their seminal work, The Lagoon Cycle (1975-85, Chapter 2) marks a step change, in which their study of a particular life form, the crab Scylla Serrata, in its habitat Sri Lanka, provokes an experiment in the potential for industrial scale farming, one that exposes them to real life ecological problems in particular places along with the problematic nature of industrialised thinking. They recognise that life is fundamentally improvisatory and explore this as a counterpoint to industrial thinking, imagining the energy within living systems. Improvisation in everyday life and as a particular form of arts practice (Chapter 3) is foundational to the Harrisons' approach; a dynamic that connects the human and more than human within a shared state of being. Improvisation and the ecosystemic emerge as profoundly interrelated in their thinking. Chapter 4 traces how an understanding of the aesthetics within systems - first mooted by Jack Burnham - draws attention to their self-generating, creative potential, a potential that the Harrisons consciously seek to harness and affect through proposing changes to guiding metaphors (e.g. development is replaced by settlement) and by policy proposals for ecological security systems in parallel with social security systems. This in turn raises political questions of how to imagine the world from multiple perspectives, not just within humankind but in human relations with their environments (Chapter 5). The political arises out of their inquiry into different experiences of living and learning to survive. It is always in the context of an understanding of the dynamics of the web of life, which they acknowledge to be subject to limits. They refer to these with irony as 'dictates of the environment', imagining a quality of relationship within living systems as always in the making, simultaneously subject to constraints and open to creativity. We draw on Hannah Arendt and her positioning of the political as an aesthetic concern where individuals are free to judge for themselves and are critical to forming a world in common through encountering a plurality (or diversity) of experiences and perspectives, enlarging their limitations through imagination. Arendt's insights into the political throw into sharp relief the Harrisons' incorporation of multiple voices articulating contradictory positions. Discourse affords the making of meaning in common working with contradictions and becomes the form of the work. Chapter 6 returns to the question of how the current environmental crises provoke the arts and their need to be rethought, reimagined and reconfigured through new forms of practice that generate new qualities of relation between humans and more than humans (Ghosh 2016, Latour 2020). We explore this question further by tracing influence in two directions that have shaped the Harrisons' thought, e.g. Giotto in relation to The Lagoon Cycle, prompting them to reflect critically on the absence of shared guiding narratives in the present as a species. We explore the Harrisons' influence on current artists through interviews that mine different aspects of their approach in the work of: Lauren Bon, founder-director of Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles; Tim Collins and Reiko Goto-Collins, ecology artists practising in Scotland; Cathy Fitzgerald in Ireland, founder of Haumea and The Hollywood Forest Story in Ireland; and Brandon Ballangée, artist and environmental activist, Florida USA. The Harrisons' poetics situate art between the art institution and lived experience, challenging both to face the pressures of environmental change. They frame questions, undertake experimentation that exposes rather than conceals the issues, and create vivid artworks that construct a process of learning that draws us into the discourse as active citizens. The questioning of their practice and knowledge domains offers us the imaginative potential to meet the future with hope

Walking in unquiet landscapes: layers of human settlements in the hills of Aberdeenshire.

Other traditions run through depictions of the British landscape, below and beyond romantic idealisations. Here, Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle trace the layers of human settlements in the hills of Aberdeenshire

A funeral march for economic valuation.

This presentation will explore the various ways that we can think about ecosystems that are degraded or dying and how this relates to questions of economic valuation – what does it mean to attribute a monetary value to the Great Barrier Reef, apparently a significant asset for the Australian economy when the Reef by all accounts will be at least three quarters dead within a generation or two? Drawing on the work of artists who have raised issues of care and maintenance including Mierle Laderman Ukeles and theorists such as Tim Morton, the presentation will juxtapose articulations of economic valuation (eg bees and the Great Barrier Reef) with creative approaches to death and dying. The aim of the presentation is not to offer a solution, method or answer, but rather to evoke the contradictions inherent in thinking about environment

Disciplinarity and peripheries.

By analogy disciplines are a form of ‘centre’ and work across disciplines involves focusing on edges. Some people conceptualise disciplines to have ‘near’ and ‘far’ relations i.e. visual art is ‘near’ art history and ‘far’ from environmental modelling. Disciplines certainly don’t sit tightly next to each other and there are definitely gaps between them – we only need to think about the rationale for ‘multi-disciplinary teams’ in ensuring that these gaps are addressed and acknowledged in for example healthcare between clinical, nursing and other health professionals. This conceptualisation also raises interesting analogies in the other direction, including the possibility that attention to linking two ‘centres’ can produce, in the ‘periphery’, a new centre. The interdisciplinary developments between biology and chemistry resulted in due course in the emergence of bio-chemistry as a new discipline (and thus a new ‘centre’). One of the abiding ‘disciplinary’ debates is whether the objective is synthesis and holism – is the objective to produce centres or even one totalising centre? This presentation will be a meditation on the issues of disciplinarity as a spending time with edges and differences, drawing on the writings of Basarab Nicolescu (multi-, inter- trans-disciplinarity), Gavin Little (proximity and distance), and Murdo Macdonald & George Davie (the Scottish tradition of the Democratic Intellect)