Studio Social with Owen Griffiths, Tuesday 7 February, 7-8pm, online via zoom
For the fourth Studio Social we are delighted to welcome Owen Griffiths: Artist, Founder & Director Ways of Working, Swansea.
He will discuss a recent project titled ‘Thinking Green’: part exhibition, part research space, which transformed the Atrium at Glynn Vivian Gallery into a community design studio as a means to consider our relationship to the environment.
The project imagined what a garden can be; a sanctuary for wellbeing, a space for creative learning, a haven for biodiversity. It considered the radical aspects of the garden, as a site to grow, model and harvest ideas of social change.
In Thinking Green, Griffiths used 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. By looking at the collection though different lenses we can explore its connections to trade, climate and the wealth that made the city of Swansea.
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?
Thinking Green: Land Dialogues is funded by 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It has been produced by Taliesin Arts Centre in partnership with the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea Council and The National Waterfront Museum part of Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum of Wales.
(Image courtesy Owen Griffiths and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery)
About Owen Griffiths
Owen Griffiths is an artist, workshop leader and facilitator. Using participatory and collaborative processes, his socially engaged practice explores the possibilities of art to create new frameworks, resources and systems. This takes many forms, but includes reclaiming and rethinking events, rituals and spaces of dialogue through making gardens, co-designing spaces, curating events and making feasts. Griffiths explores climate, landscape, urbanism, social justice, food systems and pedagogy, creating projects and events that prepare us for the work of the future.
He is interested in working locally and in long term dialogue with communities and projects. These long-term conversations make a case for slowing down time, rethinking the expectations around participation to model new collaborative methods which raise question around equity, empowerment and sustainability.
In 2020 Griffiths developed Ways of Working a new community participation platform and company in order to work in ways he feels are urgent; speaking to climate crisis, localism and radical collaborative projects.
Griffiths was a British Council USA Fellow in 2014, working with artists and community growing networks including the Edible Schoolyard and LA Community Garden Council amongst others across California. In 2016 he was awarded a Creative Wales Ambassador role by Arts Council of Wales, researching land use, community and participation through placemaking, food systems and regeneration. Griffiths has also developed projects with 14-18 NOW, National Museum Wales, Cultural Olympiad, Transport for Wales, Natural Resources Wales, HM Prison Services as well as local authorities, schools and housing associations.
In 2017-2019 he was co-director of Gentle/Radical a community arts and social justice project based in Cardiff. He leads long-term projects including GRAFT: A Soil Based Syllabus with National Waterfront Museum of Wales, Hinterlands Wales, The Trebanog Project with Artes Mundi, and Land Dialogues with Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. He is an associate artist with Peak Art in the Black Mountains and Taliesin Arts Centre Swansea University. Griffiths graduated from the School of Wales and Space at The Royal Danish Academy of the Arts, Copenhagen. He is a member of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University.
He is based in Swansea, Wales.
https://www.aboutreconnection.com/
Studio Social: a series of online artist talks. In each session, an artist will share one recent work or project with time for Q&A. This series profiles artists for whom both people and place are at the centre of their practice.