Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place

This book explores an exciting range of creative engagements with ecologies of place, using geopoetics, deep mapping and slow residency to propose broadly based collaborations in a form of ‘disciplinary agnosticism’.

Providing a radical alternative to current notions of interdisciplinarity, this book demonstrates the breadth of new creative approaches and attitudes that now challenge assumptions of the solitary genius and a culture of ‘possessive individualism’. Drawing upon a multiplicity of perspectives, the book builds on a variety of differing creative approaches, contrasting ways in which both visual art and the concept of the artist are shifting through engagement with ecologies of place. Through examples of specific established practices in the UK, Australia and the USA, and other emergent practices from across the world, it provides the reader with a rich illustration of the ways in which ensemble creative undertakings are reactivating art’s relationship with place and transforming the role of the artist.

This book will be of interest to artists, art educators, environmental activists, cultural geographers, place-based philosophers and postgraduate students and to all those concerned with the revival of place through creative work in the twenty-first century.

Mary Modeen, Associate Dean (International) and Chair of Interdisciplinary Art Practice, researches broadly across Art and Humanities at the University of Dundee. She explores perception and place-based research, connecting many concerns. As such, this research is usually interdisciplinary, appearing as both art and writing.

Iain Biggs is a former Director of the PLaCE research centre at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Dundee, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Environmental Humanities Research Centre at Bath Spa University.