Art and Herbarium

Background The potency of exploring the interconnections between the arts and sciences lies in the possibility of reformulating problems and questions traditionally articulated by a single scientific discipline (Wyatt & Brueggemeier 2017). Situating this project within this arts-science nexus, the Art & Herbarium project began with a quest for a new kind of environmental literacy, one drawn from the recognition that scientific objectivity and human-centred knowledge are equally insufficient for responding to the environmental crisis unfolding before us. Contribution For the Art & Herbarium project we invited seven artists to visit the Melbourne University Herbarium to create work that responds to the ways scientific disciplines and resources are connected to discourses of colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, and the settler colonial project, and all their exploitative impacts. Presenting art works from different disciplines as an art exhibition invited a larger public audience to engage with the topic in a multi-sensory way. Using the format of an art exhibition allowed us to further enquire about how environmental literacy is intertwined with regimes of feeling and how feelings of loss and grief, empathy, hope and joy, not only surface and recede, but contribute to more enduring ways of knowing the natural world. Significance This project responded to the role of affect and the aesthetic in shaping how and what we know. In Donna Haraway's terms, knowledge in the fray of crisis must be situated and invested. Art & Herbarium was funded by the Copyright Agency ($20,000) and produced an art exhibition at Lab-14 gallery in Melbourne (300 visitors), an exhibition catalogue (with ISBN) in 2017 and a guest-edited and peer reviewed journal issue for Unlikely - Journal for Creative Arts in 2018.