I am a Professional Partner and Associate of the Tavistock Institute, where I bring creative practice and social science into transformative dialogue.

I have worked with the Institute in various roles and capacities since 2007, including as a digital content consultant, co-ordinator of the AOC Master programme and a contributing artist to Deepening Creative Practice and other aspects of the Art and Organisations programme at the Institute.

As an artist-researcher, the focus of my work is within environmental media where I develop creative methodologies to explore the geopolitical interface between history, ecology, and the image. I am involved in various interdisciplinary projects, including running field-labs and workshops with rural communities, scientists, geographers and social scientists in Europe and Australia. My practice uses experimental forms of photography and speculative fieldwork to examine the way human and nonhuman histories and events are enmeshed within organic and inorganic life, of salt, soil, and plants, as well as the built environment. The practices I use draw as much on technical media as they do on a landscape’s capacity to act as ‘elemental media’ or ‘natural media’.

I am co-editor of the book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, forthcoming, 2022). Recent activities include Traversing Topologies (SARN), Spot on Economies (PACT Zollverein), Instituting (HKW Berlin). I am a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, the University of London where I am undertaking a practice-based PhD. I also teach at the Royal College of Art, in the School of Architecture.

Other publications include: ‘Para-photo-mancy: notes on biochemical images,’ Antennae (2019); ‘Cinétracts – cinematic cartography in the Australian Mallee’, Living Maps Review, (2019) ‘Photochemical Alchemy,’ CAA Art Journal Open (2019).

www.samnightingale.com