In the absence of such a discourse, this interdisciplinary practice-related investigation aims to identify the ‘green solution’ as a specific class of commodity, examining its distributed modes, impacts, temporalities and aesthetic regimes. In doing so, this project seeks to ask: What might the ‘solution’ tell us about art’s relation to capital today?

Drawing on the legacies of conceptual art, this inquiry will examine strategies such as carbon-offset and natural-capital frameworks, phytoremediation, and green finance to consider emergent frontiers by which nature is capitalised and capital is naturalised. Research will lay the ground to consider how the production of new distributed artistic forms might act to demystify ‘solutions’ seductive claims by denaturalising and disrupting the logics of accountancy and financial speculation that underpin them.

This thesis brings together practical work alongside a written analysis. Artworks will mimetically internalise the novel strategies of ‘green solutions’ to develop new critical artistic forms, using materials including carbon-stocks, serialised publications, sacrificial anodes and contracts. Theoretical work will expand on theories of value, autonomy and artistic form to situate ways of working alongside contemporary debates in eco-materialism, critical theory and post-conceptual art.

This research not only seeks to challenge the rhetoric of ecological techno-fixes, sustainability and global stewardship, but also aims to reflect how contemporary artworks are both shaped by environmentally embedded processes of value-formation and themselves subject to the logic of solutionism. In doing so, this PhD seeks to develop a critical artistic praxis that considers ecology at the level of artistic form.

Website: https://www.hughnicholson.net/

Supervisors

Primary Supervisor: Kristen Kreider
Secondary Supervisor: Carey Young