EarthArt – an initiative to promote collaborations between artists and earth scientists

Abstract:

The EarthArt initiative at the University of Bristol has been running continuously since 2015. It comprises collaborations between contemporary artists (including printmakers, sculptors, photographers, and video artists) and earth scientists that include a six-month artist fellowship followed by a public lecture (50-75 attendees) and six-month exhibition in the EarthArt gallery, housed in the School of Earth Sciences. The initial concept was (1) to develop and sustain collaborative dialogue and investigations and (2) to share the resulting work with the public. Over the past five years, EarthArt has broadened into sometimes unexpected yet fruitful areas because of the open-ended nature of artists’ research. The focus by artists on social concerns, in particular, has provided a new context for our scientific work. At the same time, access to scientific understanding of the materials, processes and concepts has helped to underpin artistic exploration.

Common themes that have emerged from this collaborative experiment include: (1) a shared interest in the landscape and environment, how we move through it, respond to it, understand it and communicate about it; (2) an interest in time, particularly the juxtaposition of geologic time and human time, as well as questions about how time is recorded in human memories and the land itself; and (3) ways of seeing and experiencing the environment in which we live, including both experimentation and discovery. At the same time, our initiative has highlighted the different but complementary contributions of artists and scientists, such as the artists’ focus on the human and emotional connections to the environment compared to the scientific focus on understanding the physical nature of environmental change. Together these contributions produce a holistic view of our connections to the world in which we live and improve our ability to communicate to the wider public, our ultimate aim.

Finally, we note that collaboration between artists and scientists is under resourced and often overlooked. To date, EarthArt has relied primarily on volunteers and small charitable donations. The structure that we have developed provides a template for similar collaborations and highlights both the challenges to, and rewards from, sustaining meaningful work in this area.