Te Mātai Tangata TaiaoEnvironmental Humanities

Art tells us about ourselves. It helps us to understand who we are.

It expresses who we are.

And it reflects who we are.

In many ways, art communicates between people and across time. We can learn about people across time by looking at the kinds of images that they've created.

And within those images there are these concerns.

People's politics, there's people's desires, there's people's beliefs.

There's people's relationships. All of those things are inside the artwork.

This is Su Ballard - Take One.

You have the art object, or the art event, or the art experience.

And then you have the narratives that express the impact of that work.

And I think that's what art history does.

It connects the bits together.

There's contemporary art that just takes you to a space that you could never imagine.

And I think that gives us hope.

But hope goes together with grief.

Artists, they help us grieve what we've lost.

Whether it's extinction.

Whether it's environmental transformation.

And through grief, often, we end up in a space where action starts.

The best contemporary art asks us to critically engage with now.

And simultaneously imagine another kind of future.

There are historians who, in the way I do, work with the material object.

Work with the thing that's in front of us and try to tell stories that accompany it.

The challenge now is that, are we living through the transformation of our livable environment?

The scientists who are having to deal with the most distressing data.

Who come to me and say, "Why are people not listening to us? What can we do to work together to be able to communicate these ideas?"

They have a level of complexity in their knowledge that I can't possibly know. But I can feel.

If our problem is climate change, then we need everyone's tools.

We need tools of critical observation, and we need tools of imaginative interpretation.

We need tools that help us see the problem.

Whether we're seeing it for the first time, or whether we're seeing it again and again and again.

If I can sort of make that connection between what a scientist is doing over here, and what an artist is doing over here.

If I can be the person in the middle who starts to put together those stories.

Then I'm starting to, you know, help out a little bit as well.