DavePritchard

DAVE PRITCHARD

phone: 01767 315504

Dave Pritchard is an independent arts and environment consultant. Originally trained as an ecologist, he has worked for 25 years in national and international policy and law with bodies like the Ramsar Convention and UNESCO, and has been a non-executive Director of both Wetlands International and the UK Government’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

Dave chairs the UK Arts & Environment Network (hosted by the Chartered Institution of Water & Environmental Management), and serves on two international working groups on cultural and spiritual values of the natural world, as well as being Vice-Chair of Bedford Creative Arts and an arts adviser to the Forestry Commission.

Most environmental art activity around the world is driven by artists and the arts sector. Dave champions its stronger development within the mainstream environment sector too, so that the subjective and intangible values at stake can be more coherently given their due alongside the dominant western science paradigms, in systems of policy, law, decision-making and public awareness.

As a writer and occasional artist, Dave has collaborated with the Centre for Contemporary Art & the Natural World and the Research in Art, Nature & Environment Group at University College Falmouth, exploring humankind’s relationship with the natural world through a focus on trees.

Trees offer metaphors for many aspects of existence: they are one of our most accessible links to “bigger things”; and their range of social, sacred and mythological significances around the world is no surprise. The growth of an individual specimen can be witnessed at first hand, people can easily relate to its lifespan as of a similar order to a human lifespan, and may even mourn its death. At the same time trees are planted as memorials for grandparents and legacies for grandchildren, and an individual tree’s ability to touch three or four human family generations in succession resonates with time-frames typically involved in conceptions of conservation and “sustainability”. Dave’s book “Dendros” plays on these notions.

Other projects look, photographically, at tree-shadows (approaching closer to the organism’s essence?), trees reflected upon themselves (referencing the idea that only humans contemplate their own existence), and concepts of the “natural”.

Links:
www.ciwem.org/arts
www.greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=266
www.ramsar.org/award/key_awards2008_interview_dp_e.htm