What is this catalogue?
It is a continuously growing platform where artists and creative minds working with nature and the natural sciences show their work, think out loud, and discover that the questions they thought were theirs alone are being asked across the world. The Catalogue provides a platform for works interrogating the intersection of science, art, climate change and culture to be distributed through The Big Green network of presenters as well as being promoted through international dissemination.
Why we are doing this
Over four years of working with artists inside natural heritage sites, classrooms and communities, one thing became clear: the practices we most needed to find were the hardest to find. Artists working with scientists, with acoustic ecologists, with fishermen or foragers or park rangers rarely know who else is doing it, and the institutions that would most benefit from working with them, from national parks and geoparks to museums, science centres and research groups, have no sustained way of knowing they exist. The result is a field that keeps reinventing its own methods, and a set of institutions that keeps assuming no one is available. This catalogue is our attempt to fix that in the simplest possible way: by making the field visible, in one place, permanently.
What the catalogue actually is
An online, open-access catalogue of artists and creative minds working with nature and the natural sciences, hosted on The Big Green website and free to join.
Each entry is a working profile. Alongside your name, disciplines and links, it carries the things that actually let someone understand your practice: the questions and materials you work with, whether sonic, relational, ancestral or ecological, the concrete projects where you have worked them through, the shift you are trying to set in motion, and images of the work itself. Profiles can be browsed and filtered by discipline, by region, and by the kinds of natural-science questions they engage with, so someone looking for an artist working on soil microbiology, or on water and memory, can actually find you.
Each profile also states what kinds of collaboration you are open to – residencies, workshops, talks, exhibitions, research collaborations – so an organisation can see at a glance whether an approach makes sense.
It is permanently open and continuously growing. There is no single deadline and no fixed cohort: profiles are added as they arrive, and the catalogue expands over time.
What being in the catalogue gives you
- Visibility to the people who commission this work. The Big Green brings a partnership and network reach that few individual artists have on their own: fifteen partner organisations, four natural heritage sites in Romania, Hungary, Portugal and Latvia, and pan-European networks including Interpret Europe, Culture Action Europe, IETM and ELIA, alongside the Climate Heritage Network. These are exactly the organisations that come looking for artists – for commissions, residencies, interpretation projects, conference programmes and co-productions – and we will actively point them towards this platform.
- A profile that does the explaining for you. Practices like yours are hard to describe in a sentence and tend to fall outside every existing directory: too scientific for arts platforms, too artistic for research networks. Here the in-between position is the entry requirement rather than the obstacle, and the profile is structured to make that legible to a curator, a park director or a scientist who does not already share your vocabulary.
- Peers you can actually find. The catalogue is searchable in both directions. You are not only visible to institutions, you can see who else is working with the same material, in other countries, from other disciplines, and reach them directly. For many of the artists we have worked with, this has been the part that mattered most.
- Access to what The Big Green produces. Everyone in the catalogue is invited to the project’s open activities and receives what we publish: the Green Academy seminar series, mini-conferences, and the toolboxes and methodologies developed across the project on art–science collaboration, natural heritage interpretation, ecological learning and evaluation.
- A stake in something that continues. Four-year projects tend to disperse the moment funding stops. This one is designed not to. The catalogue will keep running after the project closes, and the people in it are the foundation for whatever we and our partners build next.
Where it will be shared
The catalogue lives online from launch, but we will also carry it into the rooms where it can do work: at the closing festival and conference of The Big Green at the Survival Art Review in Wrocław; at the Interpret Europe conference in Nuremberg, gathering over 200 heritage, sustainability and culture professionals; through Culture Action Europe, IETM and ELIA to cultural organisations, policymakers and funders across Europe, through the Green Academy and the project’s toolboxes; and at the scientific and sectoral conferences where the project presents its research on art, behaviour and social change.
Interested? More info on the project’s website!