Aesthetics of sustainability : what impact can a critical multi-media arts practice have on our visions for a sustainable future?

Abstract

This practice-based research contributes to an understanding of an aesthetics of sustainability. In particular, this thesis asks how can sustainable ecological practices creatively mesh with art to enact and promote collective visions for sustainable futures? This project aimed to construct a framework for an expanded multimedia art practice that supports a multispecies resurgence. Sacha Kagan (2011) writes that an aesthetics of sustainability requires sensibility to the environment’s complex and dynamic webs of life and to the social, political, and economic complexities of contemporary societies. Kagan's understanding of aesthetics follows on from both John Dewey (1934), who writes of “art as experience” and points to aesthetic experience as a human’s overall interrelationship with their environment, and from Christopher Crouch, (2015) who understands aesthetics as a force for social change. The research question was explored through international field trips to existing sustainable land practices and traditions, a series of multimedia exhibitions and events, and omnivorous reading. In search of ‘patterns that connect’, this research ventured to various permaculture centres in the UK and Japan, the Amazon rainforest; Satoyama traditional landscape aesthetic in Japan, fire stick farming in Australia and Natural Beekeeping in Spain. These land practises all share a sensibility to the ‘more than human world’. The research engaged with these practises to explore how land and human interactions can co-exist in a sustainable way. Over the course of the research, several exhibitions and creative methods were developed to test how art can be embedded in life and function as a living system. This system emerged from engagement with the Voynich Manuscript, permaculture design, earth-based metaphysics and healing practices, and re-indigenizing with local ecosystems through involvement with herbs, bees, and the hive; amongst other, less tangible, influences and interests. IV In in trans-disciplinary manner, this research references a plethora of artists and theorists including Freya Mathews, Anna Tsing, Donna Harraway, Edwardo Kohn, Buckminster Fuller, Rudolf Steiner, and Joseph Beuys among others. This practise based PHD has led to the development of an approach to artmaking, exhibiting and curating that has been named Apparatus for Resurgence in Trophallaxis (trophallaxis is the phenomena of nurturing and exchange found amongst social insects). This is a multi-layered, pragmatic, and conceptual framework for an expanded multimedia practice. This apparatus emulates the magic, complexity and richness of synergetic systems that are built upon a sensitive, reciprocal relationship with the land and multispecies worlds.