Iain Biggs’ work and research explores the relationship between people and ecologies of place, community, memory, and identity. He started his professional life working as a painter/printmaker/teacher. He then became involved in an interweaving range of different practices. These included deep mapping, writing, drawing, and, occasionally, site-specific performance and other time-based work.
“I believe that genuine change with regard to the environmental situation requires engagement with individuals at the psychological level as well as both social and environmental action.”
Ecologies of place and ‘deep mapping’
Much of Iain Biggs’ creative activity is associated with his previous deep mapping work. Of that phase of his work, he wrote in Climate Cultures for their series of longer articles:
“I’m interested in ‘polyvocal’ drawing that helps me explore ideas – often about landscape or landscape related issues – through combining different media and/or categories of sign. It’s an informed ‘playing around’ that aims to keep different elements ‘talking’ to each other, rather than to arrive at an aesthetic solution. However, aesthetic qualities remain indicative of imaginative ‘fitness for purpose’, like the goodwill that sustains a conversation between people who hold very different views on a single topic. “
Iain Biggs’ practice of open deep mapping continued between 1999-2013, and required extended fieldwork, which he is no longer able to do. However it led to a number of key collaborations and creative projects and continues to be a major artistic concern. It led to his authorship (jointly with Professor Mary Modeen) of ‘Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residency’ (Routledge 2020).
Creative climate action
Increasingly, Iain Biggs’ input into creative environmental activity is through engaging with and supporting environmentally-active individuals, groups, and collaboratives in the UK and Ireland. His range of activity is wide and includes mentoring individuals, engaging in project evaluation, and facilitating discussion groups. He actively takes on advisory and consultancy work. He practices both formal and informal writing. As part of Land2, he was a keynote speaker at GroundWork’s conference in 2018 for the Regarding Nature programme.
“I have recently acted as a consultant for the Irish/Scottish project: ‘The Rural Reimagined: Connecting Irish and Scottish Artists and Writers with Rural Practices and Narratives’ and I am currently working with the ‘Narrating Rural Change’ network in Wales, based at Swansea University, which brings together a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, community organisations, artists, NGOs, farmers and others. I am also externally evaluating ‘Gleann na Phúca, A Glen River Creative Climate Action Project’, located just outside Cork in the Irish Republic.”
Research fellowships and directorships
Iain Biggs is currently an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Environmental Humanities Research Centre, Bath Spa University. Formally, until 2013, he was employed at the University of Western England (UWE), Bristol, where he was Reader in Visual Art Practice. He became Director of the PLaCE (England) Interdisciplinary Research Centre, which he continues involvement with. He co-founded the LAND2 and Mapping Spectral Traces networks with the late Judith Tucker. The artist has also previously held a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Galway (now Galway University).
