Christina Renowden, Victoria Nature Festival Coordinator, Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research (Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning)

Connect deeply with the lyrics and melody of a song, immerse yourself in a painting, lose yourself in dance. Art evokes the felt experience. It provides a nuanced, visceral, sensorial portal into new ways of thinking and feeling. If you let it, art can make you feel uncomfortable and challenge your worldview. It can spark an ‘a-ha’ moment and open us to new ways of knowing and understanding the world.

Photo by Tiko Giorgadze on Unsplash

Through a science communication lens, merging art and science can create a critical and logical understanding alongside a personal, sensorial, and emotive understanding of the world.  Moving away from an information-driven approach is important as communicating to the public is more nuanced and complex, and in short, it is about making people care.  Facts and figures are less likely to engage people’s emotions or affective domain of learning. We need to go beyond the facts and craft messages that evoke emotional connections between people’s lives and the science.  Some scholars consider integrating art into environmental issues has the potential to act as a ‘deep leverage point’ as it uses emotion to create change in a system.

The enduring art of storytelling, for example, can be used to communicate important messages in an effective, relevant, and engaging way. This can be particularly effective with new audiences, who are less engaged or are unlikely to read an abstract, let alone a published journal article. But short, on-point videos, story maps or sound scapes with an authentic story, strong hook and creative flair may bring people on a journey of learning more about our world and how to care for it.

Another way art can communicate ecology and act as a catalyst for change, is through participatory place-based art. Where the ‘viewer’ is integrated into the learning by doing and responding to phenomena and place through creative inquiry. This was the focus of a research project I led (with  Tanja C. Beer, T. and Luis Mata) which conceptualised and carried out a series of ArtScience experiences delivered to volunteer participants within a ‘Living Lab’ project. The living lab was a unique Indigenous-led, temporary arts space, botanical exhibition and ecological event called The Living Pavilion at The University of Melbourne. It was located on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Woi Wurrung language group, who have belonged to and been custodians of those lands for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Australians do not create a binary between art and science, the land and its ecological processes, songs, water, animals, plants, rocks, thoughts, stories, dance and relationships are Country; signifying the land and all its inhabitants, whether human or non-human, as ‘co-creators’.

In the project, we ran three ArtScience workshops for a total of 20 volunteers who attended The Living Pavilion. Using a head, heart, and hand approach, we integrated a creative component to help evoke a more emotive response to complex sustainability issues, such as biodiversity loss. The workshops included a science ‘walk and talk’ around The Living Pavilion focussing on frogs, insects, or plants. After the talk, participants were invited to create an art piece using paint, macro-photography, or botanical crafting to reflect on and express what they had learnt and experienced during the science talk.

This experience created three interesting outcomes. Firstly, people embraced discovery and learnt something new about urban nature, which was thrilling and motivating. Secondly, others experienced an immersive state of ‘flow’ where people were absorbed and found joy in the activity. Lastly, people shared their deep feelings of attunement and how they had become more aware of local nature around them since the experience.

Our goal was to bring together art and science in a meaningful and accessible way to engage people with biodiversity themed content. Rather than a one-off science talk, integrating the participatory art and creative inquiry component allowed for a more nuanced approach to deepening emotional engagement, cultivating empathy, and providing a broader appreciation and connection to the more than human world.

Art is, and always will be, a standalone endeavour; as will science. But together, there is a ‘third space’ of emergent knowledge that may be revealed through a shared ArtScience experience. ArtScience has the potential to bring about transformative change in an individual, it is a platform for self-expression and provides access to different ways of knowing and enables us to attune more deeply to nature.  In the First Knowledge series book Songlines (edited by M. Neale and L. Kelly, p. 54), the Yirrkala elders say “Country cannot speak for itself, so art must speak for Country”.

There are some extraordinary examples in the world that elevate this third space through a shared experience of art and science. A couple of examples I wanted to highlight was Tyama at the Melbourne Museum; and  Ice Watch by Olafur Eliasson. These examples teach us new ways of knowing, connect us with nature, improve ecological literacy, and motivate pro-biodiversity behaviours.