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

In conversation: a poetics of empathy: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison.

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are pioneers in the creative development of art and ecology. It was Helen who read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a critical influence in their decision in the early 1970s to do no work that did not in some way benefit the ecosystem. This commitment became a compass throughout their lives as artists, shaping a practice unique in its focus and complexity. Helen was an English Major with a Masters in Psychology who had worked in education extensively and to a senior level before becoming a full-time artist and Professor at the University of California San Diego. Living in New York in the early 1960s she had also been the first New York Coordinator of the Women's Strike for Peace. Newton, in contrast, had been apprenticed to the sculptor Michael Lanz from a very young age, and trained in figuration. He graduated from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1952 and thereafter pursued a career as a sculptor. He took his MFA at Yale (1963-65) alongside Chuck Close and Richard Serra, and, Helen helped him learn Joseph Albers' color theory. He went on to be one of the founding members of the new Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego CA where they both later became Professors Emeriti

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

Research: knowledge and method: reflections on Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison and David Haley's practice.

This paper is by way of an initial attempt to articulate a set of thoughts that are still emergent. These thoughts are concerned with artists working in public life. They are concerned with the form of research that artists do. They are concerned with the uses of knowledge. Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2005-2008) was undertaken by Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison (the Harrisons) and David Haley, and which I joined as producer. More generally I tend to describe myself as a producer and researcher. The research word has a number of uses and I am going to try and make a little sense of them first by identifying the various individual relationships with research. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are Professors Emeritus of the University of California at San Diego, and have been involved in research on at least two levels for much of their career. Greenhouse Britain is typical of their work (as well as the work of David Haley) in that it involved working with scientists and others: people working on the ground with environmental issues such as farmers and water engineers

The dynamic of the edge: practice led research into the value of the arts in marginal spaces.

This paper articulates an approach to art and design practice that questions two fundamental assumptions: firstly, it is not framed by the creative practice of an individual artist delivering an authored artwork to a public or audience; secondly, it involves, in a creative process, people who do not necessarily or readily define themselves as creative in relation to their everyday life

Inconsistency and contradiction: lessons in improvisation in the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison.

The essay draws out the learning from the authors' analysis of the practice of Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b.1932), collectively known as 'the Harrisons'. Inconsistency and contradiction are conventionally eliminated in research but, according to the artists, are opportunities for creative improvisation. Drawing on key works including: The Lagoon Cycle (1985), Atempause für den Save Flüss (1989), A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (1995), and Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2008), the critical reflection on the artists’ poetics focuses on their use of metaphor and improvisation. The artists describe actively seeking contradictory metaphors as starting points for projects and improvisation is manifest in the artists’ work as process, as well as in the forms of language used in texts. The essay explores the Harrisons’ interest in their methods being taken up by other practitioners and disciplines: they term this 'conversational drift'. Fremantle proposed the focus on inconsistency and contradiction; Douglas contributed research on improvisation; Fremantle and Douglas jointly analysed discursive approach

Jane Jacobs and the nature of (practice and research) work in public.

Jacobs argues that economies follow the same rules as ecological systems. They behave in the same way as systems in nature: as dynamic systems of interdependency. The core of Jacobs' argument is energy, whether it is manifest in ecological systems or in economic systems. Our contention is that Jacobs' argument applies to cultural systems (and we take it that the arts, both practice and research, are aspects of cultural systems). In this paper we are seeking to revisit Jacob's framework and think about the extent to which her observations might also form a methodology. Our hunch is that Jacobs' careful unpacking of ecology as a construct might be useful for artists and researchers to grasping the relationship between method, artistic creativity and art research