What is the role of the arts in the global environmental crisis?

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, known as ‘the Harrisons’, dedicated five decades to exploring and demonstrating a new approach to artistic practice, centred on “doing no work that does not attend to the wellbeing of the web of life.” Their collaborative practice pioneered a way of drawing together art and ecology. They closely observed, often with irony and humour, how human intervention disrupts the dynamics of life as a web of interrelationships. The authors of this book ‘think with’ the Harrisons, critically tracing their poetics as a reimaging and reconfiguring of the arts in response to the unfolding planetary crisis. They draw parallels between the artists’ poetics and rethinking in the philosophy of science, particularly drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead.

Thinking with the Harrisons is for anyone concerned with the implications of ecology as part of a reimagining of public life, including through the interaction of art and science. Throughout their joint practice, the Harrisons sought to engage policy makers, governments, ecologists, artists, and inhabitants of specific places, sensitizing us to the crises that emerge from grounded experiences of place and time.

Anne Douglas is a Professor Emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland, who explores the changing place of the artist in public life. Her research has increasingly focused on art and the environmental crisis from a practice-led perspective. She co-produced the Harrisons’ work On the Deep Wealth of this Nation: Scotland (2017) in collaboration with Newton Harrison and the Centre for the Study of the Force Majeure, University of California Santa Cruz.

Chris Fremantle is a researcher and producer of award-winning projects, including the Harrisons’ project Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. He is a longstanding member of the international ecoart network and co-editor of ‘Ecoart in Action’, a collection of activities, case studies and provocations drawn from the network. He lectures at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland.