Public art - an exploration of people, place and nature

This blog post was written by Project Assistant Ellen Pye.

In the run up to the 2019 Festival of Nature weekend, the Shape My City group were excited to be joined again by artist and landscape architect Scott Farlow (who had visited previously for the livebuild planning session). The focus of this session was exploring public art and how it could inspire the group to come up with some creative activities to engage the public with the themes of people, place and nature through the livebuild over the Festival of Nature weekend.

Scott asked the group “What do you think of when you think of public art?”

We came up with lots of ideas like Banksy and street art, public sculpture and artwork that takes place outside. Next Scott and Amy gave us envelopes full of lots of pictures and asked us to sort them in to two piles, “Art” and “Not Art”. I turned out they were all examples of diverse, real-life public art projects! Scott explained to us how public art can be lots of different things. Examples could be temporary community based engagement projects or maybe a creative replacement for seating, lighting or other public amenities. It could mean large scale permanent sculptures, which can often be designed to be symbols of cultural identity or landmarks.

Scott went on to give a presentation about his route and interest in public art. Scott trained as a landscape architect at university and was always drawn to the creative side of design. After working for many years as a landscape architect he decided to work for himself as a public artist. Scott makes work that explores identity, belonging and sense of place and creates things like sculpture, books, films and poems to engage people. He found his training as a landscape architect was really helpful when it came to things like practical skills and project management and applied this to his work as an artist working with the public/ in the public realm.

The Shape My City young people had various questions for Scott, including:

What is it like being a public artist? 
Scott said he believes that everyone is an artist. He’s been feeling his way and feels like he's still learning. He thinks it’s good to try things you’ve never done before and it’s fine to admit you don’t always know what you’re doing. This gives you freedom to think more creatively.


How do you deal with things going wrong?
Scott said that you deal with it by being honest and being prepared to stretch yourself. You need to fail to learn and it’s very human to do so. It’s fine and important to get things wrong sometimes.

Scott and Amy then went over the design brief and plan for the live build that weekend at the Festival of Nature. The idea was to build a temporary pavilion that was to act as the 'Lost and Found' Forum. We’d use the weekend to collect stories and thoughts about what people had lost and found in nature, and what nature means to them.

The activity for this week's session was to some kind of creative public engagement activity to engage the Festival of Nature visitors with the themes of people, place and nature through/using the temporary pavilion which the group had designed and were going to build on site the following day. at the. The idea behind the Festival of Nature is bringing nature into cities to make people happier, healthier and to mitigate climate change. Amy and Scot asked the group to create something to engage the public with these positive messages around nature

The group came created loads of really interesting and inspiring ideas to engage the public These . included provoking and thoughtful messages about climate change on postcards and luggage tags to hang around the pavilion. Lots of the group came up with powerful drawings exploring climate - the idea was to use the pavilion a s a temporary gallery where the public could draw and add their own nature inspired creations. There were also some great ideas around the value of nature, for example the slogan ‘money isn’t the only type of wealth’ and an amazing poem about consumerism. It was all summed up with the brilliant pun ‘We can’t get around climate change, so we’ll have to CLIMB-ATE!”

The creations by the Shape My City young people were used over the following days to engage the Festival of Nature visitors as part of the Shape My City 2019 #livebuild in partnership with the Landscape Institute to celebrate its 90th anniversary.