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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Wednesday 8th June, 6:00pm – 7:00pm
With guest speakers Dr Mai Musié and Alessandra Saviotti
In Thinking Green, artist Owen Griffiths uses the collection as a tool to explore our relationship to land use and landscape, as we embark on the work of rethinking the gallery garden. In the first talk of this programme, Owen will be joined by ancient historian Dr Mai Musié, and curator, art educator and cultural activist Alessandra Saviotti, to consider the role of a gallery or museum as a civic space, and as a site to discuss and form ideas for imagining different futures.
Listen to podcast ⟶
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Friday 17th June, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
With guest speakers Claire Ratinon, Sui Searle and Sam Ayre
In the second conversation of the series, Owen Griffiths will be joined by grower and writer Claire Ratinon, artist Sam Ayre, and gardener Sui Searle, to consider the responsibilities involved in creating a garden. The speakers will explore the importance of bringing deeper connections with the land and its histories, especially those of colonialism and industry, to the fore when developing green spaces. Gardens can be potentially radical spaces, used as arenas to ask difficult questions and to model new ways of working together. In order to fulfil this potential, we must acknowledge the often problematic and violent ways in which many of the plants that fill these spaces arrived here. This discussion will turn to the garden as a way into looking at wider society, and in questioning how we got here, will consider how to move forward.
Listen to podcast ⟶
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Saturday 16th July, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
With guest speakers Robyn Tomos & Mererid Hopwood
For this talk and workshop, artist Owen Griffiths will be joined by writer and curator Robyn Tomos, and academic and poet Mererid Hopwood to explore the role of language in relation to the themes being discussed around the development of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery’s garden.
As Welsh language speakers, they will discuss the use of emergent language in the context of climate chaos, social justice issues and decolonial work, and how, like knowledge, these fields are not fixed or stable but constantly evolving. New words are needed to describe new situations, and our adaptation to new crises depends on our ability to find new ways to work, and speak, together.
In this discussion, the speakers will use the Thinking Green exhibition as context for thinking about developing new language skills and how to talk about the future.
Listen to podcast ⟶