Thinking Green

2022

Thinking Green is part exhibition, part research space, transforming the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery’s Atrium into a community design studio, to rethink our relationship to the environment as we embark on the redesign of the gallery’s garden.

Thinking Green is part of a larger project, Land Dialogues, which aims to deliver workshops, programs, projects and exhibitions, working with communities across two major cultural venues in the city of Swansea; the National Waterfront Museum and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. The project grew from the existing GRAFT community garden project based at National Waterfront Museum, where Owen and the local community have been exploring growing food, community, sustainability, and land use in the centre of the city. Land Dialogues is about bringing gardens into conversation with museums’ collections, and connecting cultural spaces in the city with the developing needs of our communities. Thinking Green, at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, takes place from 8th April to 18th September, 2022.

How can these collections inform new ways of working locally with communities?

In 2019 Owen was invited to work with Director of the Glynn Vivian Karen MacKinnon to re-imagine the gallery’s garden. Thinking Green considers what a garden can be; a sanctuary for wellbeing, a space for creative learning, a haven for biodiversity. The project will act as research and to contextualise the re-thinking of the garden’s green space within the broader history of the gallery, its collection and its industrial roots. It will consider the radical aspects of the garden, as a site to grow, model and harvest ideas of social change. The Atrium offers a critical space to reflect on our relationship to land, from the hyper local to the global, exploring themes of urbanism, rurality, agriculture, industry and climate collapse. By bringing together collections from across the city, Thinking Green examines our shared industrial heritage, and its impact on empire, extraction, environment, labour and land.

Where do these histories intersect with empire, power and colonialism?

How can we use these collections as tools to open up a broader dialogue around the role of the museum within the context of climate change, greater diversity and the task of re-imagining the garden of the Glynn Vivian Gallery to be a radical new community green space in the city centre? We will look at the role of the museum as a useful space, and how the collection can be used as a tool to inform this. To make a garden is an act of hope, an invitation. This is an opportunity to explore the histories that have led us here, and the possibilities of gardens and green spaces, as a vital archipelago, to keep us alive.

As part of Thinking Green, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery worked with Owen to commission two new series of works which will become part of its permanent collection.

Humberto Gatica is a Swansea based photographer, artist, writer and poet. A political refugee from Chile, Gatica’s work has been inspired by and captured his relationship to the city of Swansea. He explores the realities and challenges of migration, and of life as a refugee and activist. Humberto will work with the community at Vetch Veg, a community garden created by Griffiths 2011 in Sandfields in Swansea, to document their growing year. Looking at last year’s harvest and this year’s seeds, Gatica’s collages of the gardeners capture daily life in this urban oasis. 

Sadia Pineda Hameed & Beau Beakhouse have been commissioned to work with Owen to develop a response to the glasshouses of Swansea Botanical Gardens in Singleton Park, which was established by the Vivian family. The artists, who work collaboratively in film, sound, text and publication, considered the histories of Victorian plant collectors and the historic and ongoing colonisation of the natural world and its resources.

Thinking Green
Geodome Talks

A conversation series, Thinking Green: Geodome Talks explores the ideas surrounding the exhibition through discussions with invited guest speakers, artists, writers and curators, online and in the Gallery. 

What does it mean to explore an artwork as a toolkit for change? What is the role of the museum and gallery at a time of global crisis? How can a museum or gallery be a ‘useful’ space in the work of modelling a radical future?

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Everything Change: FOOD