Text/Image/Archive/Action: creative engagements with past, present and future environments

Burnett, Lucy (2023) Text/Image/Archive/Action: creative engagements with past, present and future environments. In: UNSPECIFIED.

Abstract

One participant in a roundtable discussion with the following abstract: For this roundtable we gather together a group of artist academics who respond to the past, present and future of places in transition through projects involving archival, site-specific research and the production of text and image. Collectively, our work shares an interest in how experiments in form/medium can reflect a changing more-than-human world in the context of varied landscapes across the U.K. Our work variously engages with the multiple environmental crises we live amongst, learns from the past in order to understand the present in forms of creative revisiting, and relates meaningfully to local and digital communities. In our conversation we will discuss methods including fieldwork and walking, archival research, exhibiting, and publishing; specificities from the histories and images of particular times, places and bioregions such as weather, plants, birds and geologies in relation to ‘The Lakes’, flooding in Somerset, and the Lincolnshire Saltmarsh; community engagement through the arts and how this can contribute to future landscape decisions. In relation to the conference CFP, we address the ‘fostering of new ways of looking and feeling towards human and non-human others or at environments that are themselves in transition’ and ‘new formal innovations in ecopoetics and art practice arising in response to a world in transition’.  This curated conversation will interest delegates working on place and climate in text and image (whether as individuals or within cross or inter disciplinary projects), creating impact projects within or outside the academy or using archival research in academic, creative or hybrid work. We look forward to exploring the commonalities and differences in our approaches.