Dr Chris Fremantle
| Biography | Chris Fremantle is Research Fellow and Lecturer at Gray's School of Art. He works as a producer of public art and design projects, a writer/editor in particular on ecoartscotland.net. The focus of Chris' work is the role of art and design in environmental research. He is currently leading the arts work package in a Future of UK Treescapes project focused on genetic diversity. He is Curatorial Research Associate with the UFS Collaborative Arts programme and Arts Advisor to the European Marine Board's Embracing the Ocean initiative. He has worked with James Hutton Institute, Rowett Institute for Nutrition and Health, Scottish Rural University College, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and been involved in the Landscape Decisions and Valuing Nature programmes. Chris' practice-led research includes work on 'live' projects as well as a focus on exemplary practices. Fremantle, together with Professor Emeritus Anne Douglas, has written extensively on the practice and poetics of Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1934-2022), pioneers of the art and ecology movement. Chris was producer for the Harrisons' project 'Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom', and Associate Producer for Newton Harrison's 'On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland'. Several projects Chris has produced have won significant arts awards. 'Place of Origin,' a 'landscape as art' work in Aberdeenshire by John Maine, Brad Goldberg and Glen Onwin received a Saltire Award in 2007. 'Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom,' the project by the the Harrisons received the first Nick Reeves Art and Environment Award in 2010, and the 'Land Art Generator Glasgow' project received the award jointly in 2016 with ecoartscotland. The NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde's new Stobhill Hospital, which Chris project managed in support of Lead Artist Thomas A Clark, won seven major awards including Prime Minister's Award Better Public Building 2010. |
|---|---|
| Research Interests | My current research focuses on the role of artists in public life, through attention on exemplary practices (in particular the pioneering ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b.1932) 'the Harrisons') and through practice-led work as a producer/curator. My work is policy and impact oriented, with a particular concern for how different disciplines and practices work together across distinct potentially incommensurable ways of knowing. This is particularly focused on the role of artists in environmental and landscape decision-making, understanding the ways that artists frame and conceptualise eco-centricity seeking to reposition the human within the ecological, including how to imagine societies which put back more than they take out of ecosystems. This has a pedagogical dimension which is common across eco-art (and design) practices where the work seeks to engage audiences and participants in new ways of understanding interdependency. It also has a significant policy dimension which I have been investigating through an examination of different approaches to time and temporality manifest in global environmental policy and in artists' practices, particularly those engaged in 'deep mapping'. I am currently researching the concept of adaptation as it features in policy discourses in parallel with an investigation into understandings of improvisation in arts practices. |
| Teaching and Learning | Currently Responsible for Critical and Contextual Studies for the Masters Programme. Supervising Undergraduate Dissertations Also taught on Contemporary Art Practice on all Stages |
| Scopus Author ID | 36674954300 |
| PhD Supervision Availability | Yes |
| PhD Topics | Socially Engaged Art, Social Practice Art, Ecological Art, Arts & Health, Practice Led Research, Improvisation |