Chris Fremantle

Chris Fremantle is a producer, researcher, lecturer and artist.

A number of public art projects he has produced have won awards, including ‘Land Art Generator Initiative Glasgow’; ‘Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom’; and ‘Place of Origin’. Alongside ecological projects, he has also been responsible for strategic programmes across multiple healthcare settings. He has had his own works included in exhibitions at LookAgain, Summerhall, and the Maclaurin Galleries. He is currently Lecturer and Research Fellow at Gray’s School of Art, and was part of the team delivering the ‘Art Space and Nature’ MFA at Edinburgh College of Art. He is Arts Advisor to the European Marine Board, Research Associate with the UFS Arts program, and involved in various UKRI funded environment research projects. He was formerly Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.

Fremantle established ecoartscotland in 2011 as a platform for research and practice. It comprises online publishing, events, and a mobile library. Over the last five years Fremantle has completed a practice-led PhD and which is the focal point of an emergent body of work focused by the ecoartscotland library. Multiple outputs have been generated including research installations, the library as bing experiments (https://ecoartscotland.net/2022/10/15/ecoartscotland-library-as-bing/), as well as visualisations https://chris.fremantle.org/explore/ecoartscotland-library-as-bing/

Chris Fremantle’s practice includes research, writing, drawing, installations, curating and the development and management of a mix of public art projects and arts-based research networks. He explores the contribution of the arts to reimagining the human as part of environmental assemblages. He is interested in the relationship between language, text and the world around us. He has a specific interest in the dialectic between social discourse and generative and regenerative ecological forces and the tensions between the urban and industrial conditions of society.

Fremantle recognises the value of writing in place-based deep mapping and critical inquiry of social-ecological landscapes as well as raw materials for exploration of the tensions between theory and practice. His is currently focused on ‘changes of state’ of materials through natural and human processes. He is inspired and challenged by artists who use books as sculptural material. This is manifest in the ‘ecoartscotland library’ project which is at once a mobile research resource, and sometimes an installation exploring materiality. An ongoing and fundamental reference point is the work of John Latham who observed that academia has produced more waste than industry over the past 300 years. Other points of reference are the Donald Judd Library and e-flux ‘Martha Rosler Library’ project.

Fremantle’s work has been included in exhibitions and projects by The Barn, LookAgain, Summerhall, and the Maclaurin. He has produced work with NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, as well as the Glasgow Canals Partnership.