THIS month, at a range of museums and gallery cafes across the UK, farmed salmon has been replaced by more adventurous offerings. A tasty wrap made with ocean greens and a salad using dulse are just two of the menu items in store as part of Becoming Climavore, a nationwide initiative which originated on Skye and is designed to respond to ecological concerns about intensive farming.
The new menu items use filter-feeders and regenerative coastal ingredients that have a positive effect on marine ecology and respond to the ecological challenges in the waters around Britain, including foraged Cornish seaweeds and ocean greens.
What connects Cornish seaweed, the city of Coventry, climate concerns and the Isle of Skye? The answer is art.
The Climavore project was first devised in 2015 by two artists, Daniel Fernandez Pascual and Alon Schwabe, who work under the name Cooking Sections. They worked with Atlas Arts in the Isle of Skye in 2016, with local restaurants and young people, to learn about how to obtain and use sustainable local ingredients.
This autumn, Cooking Sections have been nominated for the Turner Prize and are part of a prestigious exhibition which has just opened at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry. Climavore is a project with nationwide reach, and it’s making waves as an example of how art can unlock environmental issues.
Our #ArtUnlocks campaign shares examples of the way that artists innovate, exploring new ideas and ways of working across a whole range of policy challenges. Atlas Arts is one of our 300 organisational and members who work at the heart of their communities. Shona Cameron, the Skye-based producer who now works on the Climavore Station, is part of Taisbean, our project for visual art producers and curators in the north of Scotland.
Recently the SCAN team have been meeting parliamentarians to share with them the way our members’ work contributes to their constituencies. In Glasgow, we shared with local MSPs the work that curator Thomas Abercromby had done to revive the much-missed Springburn Library as a cultural space. In Argyll, the local MSP learned about the work of Cove Park, a unique artists’ residency centre which welcomes local communities and artists from all over the world to its outdoor classroom, designed with the input of young professionals from Scotland and Ghana. In Larbert MSPs learned about their industrial heritage through Foundry Fortune, an outdoor monument trail devised by artist Nicola Atkinson that celebrates the skilled workers of the former Carron Foundry.
We’re shouting about this work because we believe, given the right support, art organisations can bring new perspectives to many of the challenges we currently face.
Moira Jeffrey is director of the Scottish Contemporary Art Network.
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