CHRIS FREMANTLE

Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis

Anne Douglas and I worked with Helen and Newton Harrison (the Harrisons), first on Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom and more recently with Newton for On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland. We have also written about their work in articles and chapters. This new book focuses on their early works, the Survival Pieces and The Lagoon Cycle in particular, to understand how they translated a conceptual commitment ‘to do no work that did not attend to the wellbeing of the web of life’ into the place-based ecology focused practice they became known for. We chart the contradictions that emerge in the Survival Pieces and how they lead to the story in The Lagoon Cycle. Our foil in all of this, thanks to Anne’s careful reading, is the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his more recent interpreter Isabelle Stengers. Stengers gifts us the approach of ‘thinking with’ along with some key questions which we use to understand the Harrisons’ journey. 

What is the role of the arts in the global environmental crisis?

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, known as ‘the Harrisons’, dedicated five decades to exploring and demonstrating a new approach to artistic practice, centred on “doing no work that does not attend to the wellbeing of the web of life.” Their collaborative practice pioneered a way of drawing together art and ecology. They closely observed, often with irony and humour, how human intervention disrupts the dynamics of life as a web of interrelationships. The authors of this book ‘think with’ the Harrisons, critically tracing their poetics as a reimaging and reconfiguring of the arts in response to the unfolding planetary crisis. They draw parallels between the artists’ poetics and rethinking in the philosophy of science, particularly drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers.

Thinking with the Harrisons is for anyone concerned with the implications of ecological concerns as a reimagining of public life, including the interaction of art and science. Throughout their joint practice, the Harrisons sought to engage policy makers, governments, ecologists, artists, and inhabitants of specific places, sensitizing us to the crises that emerge from grounded experiences of place and time.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).