Artists in the Field

I became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in early 2016, having attended and presented at eight consecutive conferences since 2012. At the 2019 RGS Explore Conference I was honored to chair the Artists in the Field workshop and panel on Sunday the 10th of November. It was the fifth iteration of the workshop and this year corresponded with an exhibition of the same name. Displayed in the main pavilion of the RGS, the exhibition highlighted a number of artists making work in and about diverse landscapes, and featured numerous publications and fieldwork research. I co-curated the exhibition with fellow exhibiting artists Alice Pedroletti and Luce Choules.

Exhibition text:
From watersheds to fault lines, the Earth’s core to the cosmos, Artists in the Field offers a glimpse into practices of intricate fieldwork across a variety of environments, each with a critical eye and rigorous aesthetic approach. Departing from visual displays that may be seen as merely complementary to data-driven explorations and scientific studies, the artworks hint towards a truly interdisciplinary future—where the arts and geography stand alongside one another as collaborative methods of understanding and connecting with our environment, both near to home and further afield.

The exhibition brings together a diverse collection of work from 14 international artists working across a number of disciplines. Solo explorations with poetic intent converse with group projects encompassing a number of fields of research. Individually and together they can shift between the concrete and ephemeral, offering new perspectives of the places we celebrate and the challenges encountered in our changing world.

Artists
Ruben Brulat, Luce Choules, Edwina fitzPatrick, Roseann Hanson, Laura Harrington, Emma Harry, Duy Hoáng, Alexandra Hughes, Alice Pedroletti, Andrew Ranville, Himali Singh Soin, somewhere-nowhere (Rob Fraser and Harriet Fraser), Rhona Taylor

Additional photographs courtesy of somewhere-nowhere