Garden / School / Kitchen / Boat / The Future / Long-term Relationships / Pavilions / Consultation
About
Owen Griffiths is an artist, workshop leader and facilitator. Using participatory and collaborative processes, his socially engaged practice explores the possibilities of art to create new frameworks, resources and systems.
This takes many forms, but includes reclaiming and rethinking events, rituals and spaces of dialogue through creating gardens, codesigning spaces, and making feasts. Griffiths explores climate, landscape, urbanism, social justice, food systems and pedagogy, creating projects and events that prepare us for the work of the future.
He is interested in working locally and in long-term dialogue with communities and projects. These long-term conversations make a case for slowing down time, rethinking the expectations around participation to model new collaborative methods which raise questions around equity, empowerment and sustainability.
Biography
Owen Griffiths
Griffiths was a British Council Fellow in 2014, working with artists and community growing networks including the Edible Schoolyard and LA Community Garden Council amongst others across California. In 2016 he was awarded a Creative Wales Ambassador role by Arts Council of Wales, researching land use, community and participation through placemaking, food systems and regeneration. Griffiths has also developed projects with 14-18 NOW, National Museum Wales, Cultural Olympiad, Transport for Wales, Natural Resources Wales, HM Prison Services as well as local authorities, schools and housing associations.
From 2017-2019 he was co-director of Gentle/Radical, a community arts and social justice project based in Cardiff. He leads long-term projects including GRAFT: A Soil Based Syllabus with National Waterfront Museum of Wales, Hinterlands Wales, The Trebanog Project with Artes Mundi, and Land Dialogues with Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. He is an associate artist with Peak Art in the Black Mountains and Taliesin Arts Centre Swansea University. Griffiths graduated from the School of Walls and Space at The Royal Danish Academy of the Arts, Copenhagen. He is a member of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University.
In 2020 Griffiths developed Ways of Working, a community participation platform and company in order to work in ways he feels are urgent; speaking to climate crisis, localism and radical collaborative projects.
Ways of Working
Ways of Working emerged in 2020, amidst a global health crisis, existing and growing inequality, increased austerity and climate chaos. Established around a kitchen table after homeschooling had finished, it was set up in dialogue with friends, comrades and communities. Through the formation of a company, Ways of Working will bring the agendas of social, environmental, racial and community justice into projects which involve everyday infrastructure. These processes might start by thinking about how our streets look, how we can protect our green civic spaces and how our galleries and museums work with communities.
