The beginning of the second decade of the first century of the third millennium.
2010 - UN International year of Biodiversity - diversity of species has declined by almost 30 per cent since 1970, according to a WWF report.
2011 - UN Year of the Forest - “Trees stand for me as a threshold into the huge world of the environment.” David Nash, RA Magazine Summer 2010, Issue Number: 107
“We have a task in hand. Culture in the developed western world has always positioned itself in distinction to nature: now we have to discover our nature within nature. We have to re-evaluate the function of art within the framework of a sustainable lifestyle… Is it possible to re-think art and take it from this finished-object status and make it into a verb, a participatory, open space, a place of transformation and exchange of ideas and reflection on our state and status? Can we use art as a way of investigating this perilous time?” Anthony Gormley, Art in the Time of Global Warming published in “Long Horizons: An Exploration of Art and Climate Change”, British Council, February 2010.
This is a blog about the development of my art walking practice as research into some of the ways that people value place and how these various ways of appreciating places can be expressed and read together as a community vision. It does this in the context of community resilience and landscape change. The practice is the subject of PhD research funded by Swansea Metropolitan University.
The blog records and reflects on various pieces of fieldwork which are themselves pieces of participatory action research. The practice described can loosely be called activist art; it involves developing briefs with co-researchers, partnership brokering, facilitation, ‘art-walking’ with people and making work. This primary research benefits from the co-operation and collaboration of many people, organisations, agencies and artists. In particular the work is developing from the practice of the Gloucestershire arts collective, “Walking the Land”.
My research question relates to the integration of subjective and cognitive appreciation of nature and the ability of an arts practice to enable people to develop an engaged and relational aesthetic for their place.
The initial focus of the research is based on a number of initiatives in Stroud, Gloucestershire which include “The Weave”, “Folly Wood Community Woodland” and projects of “Walking the Land”. The Weave is a project to develop a community vision for the landscape change that the restoration of the Cotswold Canals will bring to the the Stroud Valleys.
Folly Wood is a community owned woodland which is developing and delivering a plan to integrate the aspirations of the members with the ecological and landscape value of the woodland.
Walking the Land is an artist collective connecting art, landscape and community. (See ‘Projects’ page for more detail, including more about ‘art walking’.)
The site was developed in association with Tom Keating