Talks

Garden/Art/Garden | What on Earth is Land Art?

15 Sep 2026, 6:30pm - 7:30pm

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15 Sep 2026, 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Garden Museum

Booking information

£20 Standard
£15 Friends
£15 Young Fronds
£10 Student
£10 Livestream

This event is sold out

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What on Earth is Land Art? Making works in and of the natural environment

In this session, environmental artist Chris Drury – whose large-scale works have sparked international debate about fossil fuels and dying forests – describes his practice and why he resists the ‘Land Artist’ label. He is joined by curator and writer Ben Tufnell, whose decades of thinking on art, land and nature make him one of the field’s most authoritative voices.

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This series, chaired and curated by landscape historian and critic Tim Richardson, aims to broaden our ideas of what gardens, landscape and place can mean in the context of artistic practice in an era of climate change. Across five evenings, Tim has invited a range of practitioners, curators and academics to discuss their own work and to reflect on the broader scene. Each evening will close with a period of socialising (a drink is included in the price of the ticket) so that the discussion can continue. Book for all five evenings at a reduced price here.

Please note that our talks now begin at 6:30pm, rather than 7pm, giving you more time to enjoy dinner at our award-winning Garden Museum Café. Table reservations are available here. Your talk ticket also includes entry to the Garden Museum’s temporary exhibitions from 6pm on the evening of the talk.

Speakers

Tim Richardson

Tim Richardson is the author more than 25 books on landscape topics including the contemporary scene. In his work he has always operated at the intersection of art and the garden. He is currently art critic at The Idler and also continues his work on gardens and landscapes, which have included books on the work of Tom Stuart-Smith and Martha Schwartz, and a genre-defining work on landscape conceptualism entitled Avant Gardeners. He was founder and director of the Chelsea Fringe Festival.

Chris Drury

Chris Drury has been described as a Land Artist but he himself says that he seeks to make connections between: Nature and Culture, Inner and Outer, Microcosm and Macrocosm.

To this end, he collaborates with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines and technology and uses whatever visual means and materials that best suit the situation.

He has made works all over Europe and America, and in 2007, a British Antarctic Survey residency in Antarctica and a solo exhibition, Mushrooms|Clouds at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2008. His work, Carbon Sink in Wyoming, sparked a worldwide furore about the burning of fossil fuels in connection with dying forests in the Rockies. In 2016 he completed 3 international commissions in Western Australia, Montana and South Korea and in 2025, he made a large piece on the Rhine in Germany. 

Ben Tufnell

Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. He has published widely on art and artists engaging with ideas of land and nature. A selection of his essays are collected in In Land: Writings Around Land Art and Its Legacies (Zero Books, 2019). He is also the author of two novels, The North Shore (Fleet, 2023) and Paradise (Influx, 2026). 