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Art and Ecology

Michaela Crimmin

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is one of the partners delivering the Bat House project. For us this relates perfectly to the RSA's Arts & Ecology programme. This was launched in 2005, in partnership with Arts Council England, to encourage and support artists in addressing ecological concerns. Max Andrews, the editor of a book just published as part of the programme,  LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, describes the context: 'The field of contemporary art is more than ever before a complex global ecosystem. Art encompasses a continually expanding field of activity. Operating within practices that might range from the sentimental to the entropic, activist, documentary or the spectacular, artists – like all of us – are increasingly comprehending and processing for themselves and with others what it means to think and act ecologically in the world today'.

Arts & Ecology in its first phase has been essentially a research-based enterprise conducted openly and in dialogue across disciplines. Key activities have included international conferences, education pilots, artists' commissions, the creation of a new network, the publication of LAND, ART and international activities to date involving Ghana, China, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.

At the beginning of the programme – encouraged by the business rules of prescribed outcomes – we strived for focus. But as we honed our exploration of ecology this became increasingly difficult. The key notion that informs the entire project is that of ecology as the study of the relationships between an individual and their cultural, social, political, economic and natural domains. So any lines drawn are necessarily transgressed immediately. We decided instead to welcome complexity and accept the impossibility of neat parameters. People frequently say that artists operate on the margins. Actually, the strength of artists is that they often work across margins and disciplines, revealing new insights and asking questions in the process.

To work with Jeremy Deller means exactly that. He sets in motion collaborative and creative projects. In the Bat House Project he has introduced mechanisms to involve people in creative thinking - in this case encouraging us to engage in finding new ways of addressing threatened species and habitats.

Jeremy Deller is one of a number of artists with whom we are working at RSA Arts & Ecology. Tue Greenfort is also developing work based in London. In his case a very different project, looking at the mamouth amount of waste created, and the unwieldy systems employed to remove it. Kate Thompson, an author who last year won the Whitbread prize, will write for a young audience. Other artists are focusing on Bristol which has become a hub for both the communication industry but also agencies focusing on the environment, including the Soil Association.

Just completed are four education pilots where we invited artists to work alongside environmental scientists and a philosopher to encourage young people to explore environmental issues through art. Currently being evaluated, these projects revealed the fears that children are experiencing, their feeling of powerlessness, but also their ability quickly to develop ideas to change their own behaviour and to influence and involve others.

The RSA as an organisation for over 250 years has had an ambition to effect positive societal change - to address the big issues of any particular time. Every day the media tells us of the threats to the future of human, animal and plant, the dangers, the looming catastrophes. Of course we need to be challenged, to change our behaviours, for the West to be far more altruistic. But perhaps it is in the everyday and the local that the solutions are to be found. In coming together. Combining our different perspectives to address the issues which are manifest on our own doorsteps. There is an image of artists wearing Prada, their work changing hands for vast sums of money, all behind gallery walls. There are also artists working quietly, in the public domain, enabling new insights, new possibilities, new sensibilities.

Michaela Crimmin is Head of Arts at the RSA

Art & Ecology artist in residency Tue Greenfort during his research in London.



Jeremy Deller’s photograph of Heavy Rain in Guangzhou. Image taken during Arts & Ecology workshop in China, May 2006.
© the artist.