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Who is @landartcollective?
@landartcollective was started as a complement to founders Elizabeth Gleave and Marie Dryden’s work forming the Land Art Agency, an initiative founded to champion sustainable practice in the arts. As a photographer, Gleave says that she “found it increasingly concerning that I often had to dismiss my environmental values on working shoots. I couldn’t find platforms for artists who placed sustainable values at the forefront of their work. I realised how much I would cherish and benefit from finding a group of sustainable artists and practitioners to share environmental ideas and concerns with.”
And so the agency and the Instagram page were born, where Gleave and Dryden share artists’ work, highlight useful workshops and toolkits for greening your creative practice, and pull people in for discussions on everything from soil to space.
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Why should you follow?
The account is a gateway into all sorts of questions and pathways related to sustainable practice, from advice on shifting away from the use of toxic darkroom chemicals to reducing the carbon embodied in a digital platform. It was intended as a place to share and trade techniques and support, and “has developed into a supportive and engaged community, with so much enthusiasm and positivity, encouraging change and awareness through inspiration rather than desperation,” Gleave explains. It is overwhelmingly positive to see people making their own choices and headway rather than instinctively accepting the dictates of consumption-driven convention.
Land Art Collective hopes to offer resonances with a diverse range of creative practices, and welcomes the expertise of followers in livening up the conversations that happen on the account. “We hear of people finding their first supportive environmental and art community, able to link up with people across the world and to develop new environmental initiatives together and collaborate on future ventures,” says Gleave.
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What Instagram doesn’t tell you
The Land Art Agency never intended the Collective account to be a static showcase, and they are allowing the dynamics of the engagement on Instagram to shape their industry consultancy and advocacy practice. For instance, their observation of the marked female-leaning gender disparity in their followers and analytics has led them to reflect and begin a strand of work tackling the issue of the feminisation of “nature work” and environmentalism.
“It is predominantly women who take up the responsibility for healing the land while men make the decisions to harm it,” they say. “We would like to be part of the shift towards an environmentalism that is equal and supports the steps towards more conscious societies and decisionmaking.”
Sukayna Powell is a writer, editor, and alternative education advocate
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