‘Island Archives’ at The Cambridge Festival
Recently, I ran the event ‘Island Archives: An Art Making Workshop’ held as part of the Cambridge Festival and hosted with the assistance of CRASSH (Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities).
Participants, including students, researchers, and the public, were invited to artistically create their own island while reflecting on the nature of island places and practices of natural history archiving. The session began with a short introduction wherein I offered provocations about approaching island-related themes of time passing, evolutionary processes, landscape change, and knowledge preservation.
I also discussed what artistic methods could offer us as we thought about island spaces. I reflected:
‘Art as a method opens up different ways of engaging and knowing, particularly when we are thinking about non-human subjects. Scholars talk about the ‘arts of noticing’ – detailed attention to the world that can come through artistic practice. Artistic practice can help make the complexity of islands tangible in imaginative ways. Island environments are shaped by deep time, slow ecological change, and sometimes invisible relationships that can be hard to grasp – artistic practice invites ways to represent these relationships. Art also allows us to engage with time differently, providing us with the possibilities of layering the past, present, and future and inviting an attention to change, slowness, and fragility. Artistic practice also allows us to question what forms of knowledge get seen or archived – providing us with the chance to create alternate archives that might be personal, speculative, or challenging. Artistic practice allows us to engage with island spaces not just as objects of study, but as lived, imagined, and relational environments—where ecology, time, and history can be explored in different visual ways.’
Participants then drew and collaged their responses, creating Islands that were real, imagined, and metaphorical.
The event ended with the group sharing the wonderful works that they had produced. The responses were enormously creative, generative, and engaging. Some of the islands imagined networks of interconnection that spoke to the artists’ own life histories. Others challenged temporalities of change, presenting us with inter-folding pasts and presents. One response bridged connections between seemingly disparate places, reimagining a Pacific island inundated by climate change transposed into Nordic waters. Researchers from all backgrounds participated, with students from the medical sciences, architecture, creative writing, and environmental sciences bringing different approaches and perspectives.
The workshop was a marvellous example of the power of artistic practice to extend thought, bring diverse people together to create, and engage new publics in different forms of research.
