– Art + Nature

Links to artists, projects and organisations working with art and nature, art and flowers, biodiversity and cultivation:

Active Ingredient – an artist led collective founded in 1996 that creates artwork and conducts research into the blurred boundaries between technology, art and science, based in Nottingham.

Anna Garforth – a London based artist using her diverse skills to uniquely capture the aesthetics of nature, particularly her work using moss as a growing graphic material.

Anna Schuleit – ‘Bloom’ – a site specific installation made in 2003 in Massachusetts Mental Health Centre in Boston, USA addressing the absence of flowers in psychiatric hospital settings.

Artist Gardener – Dimitri Launder – Sculptural concepts, edible planting, garden design, devising work that engages and enchants – a poetic and practical narrative through the sustainable use of public and private green spaces.

The Ashden Directory – environmentalism and the performing arts. From 2000 to 2014, the site provided news, features and a database of over 700 productions. Ashdenizen, our companion blog, added commentary on how culture and the performing arts relate to climate change

The Ashden Directory – ‘Flowers on stage’ with contributions from artists and writers across the UK about how flowers have been presented and interpreted on stage.

Avant Gardening – a socially-engaged arts and environment project based in London aimed at engaging all sectors of the community with environment, communication and sustainability issues through art, gardening and community engagement.

Beaconsfield’s Spaceship Earth Project: a sustainable, living roof at Beaconsfield Gallery in Vauxhall, was more than a year in the making, built by volunteers from donated and salvaged materials.

Bloom Magazine – created in 1998 in the Netherlands,to analyse the major trends in horticulture and their relation to the fashion, interior and industrial design industries, particularly using photography.

Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World – a leader in the arts and ecology movement, based at the University of Exeter UK, working with partnerships across the south-west through exhibitions, talks, and artist residencies.

Christine Borland – ‘To be Set and Sown in the garden’ at the University of Glasgow, focused on the discovery of a planting list for a Physic Garden in the University first drawn up in the 16th Century.

Documenta 13 – 100 days – on seeds and multispecies Intra-Actions.

Eyes As Big As Plates – the ongoing collaborative project between the Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth on a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. In particular, their project elderly people wearing vegetation.

Feral Trade – products passed by hands – a grocery business and public experiment, trading goods over social networks.

FIELD projects – Secret Gardens, The Art of Agriculture – artists responding to garden environments in Wiltshire

FIELDCLUB – a four acre smallholding in the UK, set up as a collaboration between artist Paul Chaney and curator Kenna Hernly to investigate issues relating to off-grid living, self-sufficiency and agrarian reform running for 8 years until 2012. Projects include Crap Crops and FieldMachine 1.0.

Fiona MacDonald – an artist and researcher into human-nonhuman relationship

Ferral Practice – Fiona MacDonald’s project site

French Mottershead – Understory 1-12 – 12 interactive experiences created in collaboration with local experts, exploring how humans relate to nature taking place in Finland, the UK, Norway and Austria.

Garden Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London 2011 – the two day event was an exploration of the concept of the garden.

Gina Kranendonk – Artist based in Netherlands, working with flowers.

Graham Dunning – Rea Garden Artist Residency – Research, process and documentation from the artist’s residency at The Rea Garden, Digbeth, Birmingham, UK in 2010.

Green Museum – environmental art online ‘museum’, and giant collaborative art-making tool.

Hollow – Artist Katie Patterson in collaboration with Zeller & Moye has gathered 10,000 tree species spanning time and space for Hollow, a public artwork commissioned by the University of Bristol. Treebank is a digital forest for the future inspired by the Hollow project.

Howard Sooley – photographer of nature and flowers, including Derek Jarman’s Dungeness Garden.

Impossible Forest – a sculpture and movement project: a new garden composed of dead standing trees, plants and flowers, created in 2016 at the Ufer Studios in Wedding, Berlin Germany by Jared Gradinger, working with nature as an artistic and social practice.

John Newling – artist -his works explore the natural world and the social and economic systems of society, often through public art with a social purpose.  Ecologies of Value at Nottingham Contemporary in 2013, was inspired by the natural world and its ecological systems as well as relationships to money and religion.

Jyll Bradley – visual artist. Flower Train explores the dying tradition of Cornish flower farming to create a series of evocative posters shown on rail platforms between Penzance and London – named after the now-defunct overnight trains carrying fresh flowers to market.

Land Diagrams – is an ongoing series in which commissioned writers respond to the same visual encoding of landscape.

Laura Prouvost – visual artist – Swallow – an immersive film that aims to show the taste of the sun.

Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination – a facility for experiment, research and learning based in London, UK.

Marcus Coates – a visual artist who specialises in projects that involve the natural world.  His multi-screen moving image work Dawn Chorus uses unique digital methods to explore the relationship between birdsong and the human voice.  TateShot on Marcus Coates is about his ability to mimic birds. Other work includes ‘Goshawk’ and ‘Red Fox’.

Marie Menken – A Glimpse of the Garden – filmed in a garden through a powerful magnifying glass, filmmaker Marie Menken’s film is a simple visual poem accompanied by the sound of birdsongs made in 1963.

Marlene Creates – The Boreal Poetry Garden – an environmental artist and poet who lives and works in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada.

Martin Prothero – Carbon Light Life – a series of works made using panes of glass meticulously coated with carbon and laid out overnight in places frequented by animals.

Melanie Jackson – visual artist who continues an ongoing interrogation of mutability and transformation. Her work The Urpflanze (Part One) investigates links between industry, aesthetics and plant forms, taking a lead from Goethe’s notion of the Urpflanze.

Michaela Nettell – artist residency at Culpeper Community Garden – documents a twelve-month Research Residency at the garden in Liverpool Road, Islington, London.

The Milking Parlour – political ecologist Nessi Reid lived with two pure-bred Guernsey cows for five days in a temporary ‘Milking Parlour’ constructed in Anchor Square, Bristol (Cape Farewell Commission) to ask the questions: how do we feed ourselves, and our burgeoning population, without it costing the earth?

Mierle Laderman Ukeles – New York based artist and activist, empowering people to act and change societal values and norms. Ukeles was artist in residence at NY Department for Sanitation for many years, making many works including the vital ‘Touch Sanitation’ and her Manifesto for Maintenance.

My Villages – an international artist initiative about the rural as a space for and of cultural production and the continuously evolving relationship between urban and rural practices, geographies and realities.

Nance Khelm – Spontaneous Vegetation. Nance Klehm is a steward of the earth. She is an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and permacultural grower based in Chicago, USA.

Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie – Somewhere – artist film-makers, spanning film, the web, installation, live events and public art, with many projects exploring nature and human connectivity.

Peer Group – a group of artists working across discipline exploring agriculture, society and temporary communities, based in Netherlands

Philippa Lawrence – re:place – a living site responsive art work from 2010.

Plant Performers: Artist Laura Pullig explores the theme of Plants as Performers – how analog instruments can interact with plants and their environment.

Phy.tol.o.gy – in Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, London, brings artists and botanists together to explore medicinal properties of wild plants in urban environments.

Power Plant – a sound and light art experience made by 5 international artists – Mark Anderson, Anne Bean, Jony Easterby, Ulf Mark Pedersen and Kirsten Reynolds – who have created over 30 site-specific installations which transform public parks and botanical gardens into magical nocturnal environments.

RANE – Research in Art, Nature & Environment in the south west of the UK (previously at University of Falmouth.

RebarGroup: Park(ing) – transforming parking spots in San Francisco into PARK(ing) space, thereby temporarily expanding the public realm and improving the quality of urban human habitat over two hours. This has now become Park(ing) Day – a global movement to temporarily transform parking spots into temporary public parks.

Rebecca Chesney – artist exploring land, species, politics, ownership, management and commercial value and the impact of human activities on nature and the environment. Examples of projects include City Birds and Invaders Archive.

Richard Hamilton – Shit and Flowers exhibition in 2010 – images of flowers and landscapes taken from one world (which had, in turn, been borrowed from art history) and returning them to the world of fine art, making an ironic commentary on the co-existence, and in some senses interdependence, of these two worlds.

Secret Garden Project – a Word Garden – by writer and artist Sarah Butler

SEED: art and education project, in Questa, New Mexico.

Seeds of Change: A Floating Ballast Seed Garden by Maria Theresa Alves in Bristol, drawing on the historical connections between shipping, ballast and the storage of seed and the growth of plants.

Simon Whitehead – artist and dance practitioner: performance and deep ecology, often in collaboration with sound artist Barnaby Oliver.

Susanna Bauer – artist working with found natural objects: leaves, stones, pieces of wood…ephemeral things, and using crochet.

Tim Spooner – The Assembly of Animals – a performed sculpture: a universe made up of animals within animals within animals by visual and live artist Tim Spooner.

Treacle – The Rossendale Medicinal Herb Garden – the planting of a new medicinal herb garden next to the Rossendale Museum, Lanchashire.

Upprojects – Secret Garden Project – new artworks commissioned that responded to the rivers and the unique characteristics, communities and ecology of four of parks that the rivers pass through in Lewisham.

‘Up to Nature’ in Bristol produced by Situations, Bristol – artists invite you to leave the city and enter the world of the forest.

‘Up to Nature’ in Austria in The Vogeltennwiese, Vienna, Austria

Wayward Plants – Helsinki Plant Tram – a participatory project which transformed a tram on the city’s transport network into a mobile garden that travelled through Helsinki – mapping potential spaces for urban growing and collecting plant donations – as well as an imaginative urban garden filled with adopted and useful plants.