Future Ecologies of Art: Exploring Kew as a site for past, present and future artistic collaborations

Kew's gardens, collections and research offer extraordinary opportunities to artists. Informed by an analysis of selected arts collaborations at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew since the 1960s, 'Future Ecologies of Art' is the first interdisciplinary project that explores Kew's potential to work with artists on diverse and inclusive storytelling about two specific issues: the climate crisis and social justice. Increasingly botanic gardens are turning to artists to create links between scientists, horticulturalists and the public in order to expand their narratives. The project traces these developments and proposes to take botanic gardens seriously as sites of experimental artistic research and engagement. It emphasises the power of artists to capture imaginations, advance alternative and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge-creation and inspire audiences.

The project maps arts collaborations, their evaluations and learnings at Kew via interviews with artists, curators, archivists and scientists as well as through archival research. In this context, it asks how diversifying access to collections and centring artists from marginalised backgrounds can feed into future arts projects. Here it places particular emphasis on investigating - with artists and researchers at Kew - how the increasingly urgent themes of the climate crisis and social justice can be mediated by artistic practices and support Kew's mission to protect plants and fungi for the wellbeing of people and all future life on the planet. The project investigates how art can build bridges between disciplines and audiences in the context of the botanic garden to give visibility to the climate crisis and social justice. It is structured in three phases, (1) an initial phase of scouting interviews, strategy and literature analysis, (2) a research development phase including interviews with Kew staff and artists who have worked with a range of botanical organisations (3) a public outcomes phase which will see two teaching collaborations with UK universities (the MA Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths and the BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art), two workshops, two journal articles and a best practice report for Kew. Throughout each phase it is also informed by a placement with the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh to explore its arts strategy, broken down into three one-month research stays.

The project is situated in the interdisciplinary Plant Humanities and dialogues with museum and heritage studies, particularly a recent focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. It also responds to recent developments in contemporary art theory and art history, especially current turns to ecology and social justice in art practice and a cultural climate in art institutions where artists globally critically engage with plants. It takes seriously Kew's recent commitment to arts collaborations which was highlighted in Kew's Manifesto for Change (2021) aiming to bring together artists and scientists to explore storytelling; and in the current Science Strategy (2021) as a commitment to arts collaborations as societal bridges.

The project is conceived around the following research question:

Drawing from Kew's history of arts collaborations, how can present and future artistic collaborations support GLAM sector organisations to explore diverse storytelling around the themes of climate crisis and social justice?

It is further structured around these guiding questions:
- How have official collaborations between Kew and artists evolved and been evaluated since 1960? What have been avenues for informal collaborations?
- How can Kew encourage artists from marginalised backgrounds to work with collections?
- How can art collaborations strengthen Kew's mission and advance interdisciplinary forms of knowledge-creation?
- What roles can artists take in botanical research organisations to interpret collections for different audiences, and how can these translate to teaching materials?