Artistic and educational aims and programmes
An integrated programme of exhibitions, artist-led projects and educational activities reaches out, across the art forms and other disciplines, to address the urgent social, environment and scientific issues that concern us all today.
The Centre organises four exhibitions a year spanning art, design, new media, photography and architecture, with artist residences, long and short-term projects linked to educational workshops, talks, conferences and courses. Work resulting from residences and projects forms part of a permanent collection, along with other commissions.
It also organises occasional live events and work across the art forms, involving literature, music and dance and promotes links with science, new technologies and other disciplines.
The Centre stimulates a network of research links with Universities and organisations in Britain and abroad, tour its exhibitions internationally and reach out through the world-wide web.
The Centre has three chief aims:
- To develop new understandings through the work of contemporary artists which explores the social, environmental and scientific issues involved in our changing relationship to nature.
- To create new art and art practice by supporting artists to respond to the wider historical and cultural constructions of 'nature'.
- To increase access to the contemporary arts by breaking down barriers to public engagement.
The policy is to develop a programme that involves a plurality of approaches, including work that crosses disciplines, is process-led and engaging to visitors. A thematic approach is adopted in each year which is determined accordingly to topicality and the ability to lend itself to different interpretations through the year.
Within a framework of exhibitions, events and educational activities, the CCANW examines some of the most important contemporary issues concerning society's relationship to nature, for example:
- How our ideas of nature are culturally constructed and our experience of nature is mediated through history and culture.
"Humans and nature construct one another." Alexander Wilson
- How the physical demands that our way of life puts upon the natural world might be reconciled with the sentiments and values for nature which our culture has generated.
"Nature and I are Two." Woody Allen
- How society draws behavioural analogies from the natural world to inform its own operation.
- How our personal ties, perceptions and experience of the natural world can become enhanced or eclipsed by new technologies.