Art is essential. The risk of an event like today is that we’re preaching to the converted. Art is essential and everybody nods and the debate here isn’t just whether the artist is essential, the debate is whether, if art is essential, does it need to be funded by public funds?   

So if art is essential the argument I want to make here is that it needs to be understood beyond the arts sector, and this is what I want to address and I’m going to do that by just giving one example of a project that we’ve been working on at MIMA and the MIMA School of Art and Design over the last three months. What I hope this project does is show not only why art is essential but why it matters that it’s paid for by the public. This project is about nature. During this year of lockdowns and restrictions the nation has fallen back in love with nature – from tending our house plants to walking in parks and woodlands. If you live in the landscape of the industrial revolution, this might include walking old railway lines that have been brought back into the natural landscape. We’ve sought refuge in the green shoots of our surroundings whether in cities or in rural areas. We’ve found places to stand outside. To be outdoors and to breathe fresh air has become more important than ever. 

But what has this to do with art, specifically visual art? Let me explain. In 2018 MIMA turned over its whole artistic programme to looking at climate change and nature. We were able to build important relationships with visionary leaders of the Tees Valley Local Nature Partnership and with incredible artists and activists who are driving forward ideas about climate change and nature. We worked closely with Natural England who were the lead advisory agency for the government on the recovery of nature. We held conferences, and commissioned artists working with communities to explore their hopes and dreams. We built into this work a set of interdisciplinary relationships that are fuelling us now. Artists have a really important role to play in the space of nature recovery.

I just want to focus on the word recovery for a minute. Our country is now one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. If we were able to go back in time a couple of centuries we would see that things were very different. The fields were jumping with crickets, the great crested newt was a common sight in our waters, and the skies were full of migratory birds like nightingales, cuckoos and swifts. Through human activity, agriculture, industrialisation, and capitalism, nature has become depleted. In the UK we have lost 41 percent of our wildlife species, since the early 1970s when I was born.   

Since November the team at MIMA have been working with climate scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, Natural England, and the Tees Family Nature Partnership, and with our networks of naturalists and ecologists. We know that there is a global conversation here but it is a conversation that is struggling to make its message heard. We’ve heard about climate change but we haven’t talked so much about nature depletion. As David Attenborough has said, no one will protect what they do not care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced. Research also shows that nature intersects with inequality, if you are a white, able-bodied, middle-class male, you are far more likely to be enriched by natural resources – which raise your sense of well-being, your health, your fitness, and your sense of agency. After agriculture the environment is the sector with the least diversity in the UK.   

But again what has this to do with artists? Here I want to make a very bold and broad-brush statement. At some level art is about creating visions, reimagining the world as it is now and seeing something that could be there in the future, In so doing art enables others to make an extra logical step, a leap of faith perhaps, But if you can see it you can be it. If all of our artists are envisioning the world from a background of safety, privilege, and security, they will simply not be able to produce the kind of visions that will help a diverse community step into an imagined future. And we need many visions, multiple diffractions, versions and alternatives. I’m speaking from a place well known as an iconic dystopian scene. Middlesbrough, the town where I work, was used as the skyline for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. it is a place where most people voted Brexit, for many reasons including the fact that their voices, lived experiences, and community needs were not being heard or met. The vision of the future on offer was not one that people could imagine themselves or their children stepping into. If we only allow our artists to be drawn from privileged communities then we will never bridge the seismic gap between communities, people, places, cultures, and economies, or recover our country’s nature.

 Ecologists are starting to realise that in order to create change they need to create a vision and connect with artists. But art is at risk. Cultural recovery needs artists, community recovery needs many brilliant bold visions, and nature recovery needs cultural engagement. As we make the case for art being essential, let’s keep in mind that we need other communities, other professions, other industries to believe that artists have a role to play. 

To conclude in my role I work with many artists at MIMA. I look after over 400 emerging artists and designers at the MIMA School of Art and Design and I believe there is a role for them in this society in the future. One of those roles is civic community: a connecting role that will help build multiple visions of the future that can coexist. We face an existential crisis and we need to make a public investment in visual art so that many voices can be heard. We need to create space for these voices and space for a planet that can thrive. From this point of view the work that artists do is vital public work.