What happens when different ways of observing the same place meet?
Field Notes for the Future and the Art & Ecology Field Lab invite ecologists, climate scientists, conservation practitioners, researchers, educators, and students to explore what becomes possible when scientific research encounters artistic practice, community knowledge, and sustained attention to place.
The Field Lab creates opportunities to share research beyond disciplinary boundaries, develop questions collaboratively, experiment with different forms of observation and documentation, and involve communities in understanding the ecological changes happening around them.
This isn’t about translating science into art – or asking artists to communicate research after the fact. We are interested in working alongside one another from the beginning, allowing different methods, questions, and forms of knowledge to shape what happens next.
Ways to take part
You might:
- bring an existing research question into conversation with artists
- develop collaborative artist–researcher fieldwork
- invite artists into ongoing ecological research
- contribute methods or observations to Community Field Notes
- involve students in interdisciplinary field activities
- develop community biodiversity or ecological observation projects
- lead a field walk, demonstration, workshop, or conversation
- experiment with creative approaches to research documentation
- connect community observations with longer-term ecological monitoring
- explore new research questions emerging from the Field Lab
The community is part of the conversation.
People who live, farm, garden, walk, work, and spend time in a landscape accumulate knowledge of that place.
Field Notes for the Future creates ways for those everyday observations, memories, questions, and experiences to sit alongside scientific and artistic forms of inquiry – not as substitutes for scientific data, but as another way of understanding how ecological change is experienced and noticed.
For researchers interested in public engagement, citizen science, knowledge mobilisation, or participatory research, the archive offers a growing space in which these relationships can be explored.
A place to try things together
The Art & Ecology Field Lab is developing at Fallow Art Farm in Kinburn as a shared site for field research, creative practice, ecological stewardship, experimentation, and public participation.
It is also a prototype: a place where we can test what sustained collaboration between artists, researchers, and communities might actually look like when everyone has the time and space to bring their own questions.
Have a question we could explore together?
You don’t need to arrive with a fully formed collaborative project.
If you’re working in ecology, biodiversity, climate, conservation, environmental science – or another field that could benefit from encountering artistic and community ways of knowing – we’d like to hear what you’re working on and what you’re curious about.
