The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was organised by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Landscape and Environment programme.
1 Conference contributors took the opportunity to reframe relations between art and environment critically and creatively, with a broad historical and geographical perspective that considered artworks from the eighteenth century to the present. These included in 2009 Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery and Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, both in London. Held at a time when the emergent effects of economic crisis were intersecting with a more established sense of ecological crisis, the conference offered an opportunity to rethink the relations between art and environment, which had become central to a number of art exhibitions and publications. The papers addressed cultural questions of weather and climate, ruin and waste, dwelling and movement, boundary and journey, and reflected on the way the environment is experienced and imagined and on the place of art in the material world. The conference considered relations between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. The papers arise from a conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010 at which a range of practitioners and scholars – artists, writers, curators, theorists, historians and geographers – presented case studies of artworks addressing specific sites, spaces, places and landscapes in a variety of media, including film, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The group of articles devoted to the theme of art and environment in Tate Papers no.17 aims to explore new research frontiers between visual art and the material environment.