Biography
Mark Macklin is Professor and Chair of Physical Geography and Director of the Centre for Catchment and Coastal Research, Aberystwyth University. He is an authority on river systems and environmental change and over the last 30 years has collaborated with archaeologists, biologist, engineers, historians and visual artists on a wide range of interdisciplinary projects. His research focuses on human-river environment interactions and is conducted worldwide with current projects in the Sudanese Nile, Queensland Australia, Kazakhstan, Crete and the UK. Mark has held visiting professorships in Australia (Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University), the USA (Universities of Arizona, Indiana, and Wisconsin), New Zealand (Massey University) and the Netherlands (University of Utrecht). 

Themed Panel (Suggested)

Rapprochement of Art and Science in the Watery Realm
The growing public awareness of the effects of rapid environmental change associated with anthropogenic global warming has resulted in a recent rapprochement between art and science. Pictures of polar bears apparently stranded on precariously small and shrinking icebergs in the cold, dark-blue Arctic Ocean have become the iconic images and visual metaphors of the threat that ‘dangerous’ climate change poses to humanity. There are however increasing signs of image fatigue when polar and other seemingly remote environments are used to convey the message of the necessity to tackle, and adapt for, climate change. Most people will confront the impacts of global warming in form of more frequent extreme weather events, which impact on their homes, gardens and familiar places they regularly visit. There is therefore a pressing need for greater localism and realism in the representation of environmental change, which will require the re-focusing of art-science collaboration at a more local scale to explore environmental issues that impact directly on individuals as well as on the communities in which they live and work. In this paper Judy Macklin and Mark Macklin (printmaker and physical geographer, respectively) report on a long term collaborative art-science programme that is exploring people-water environment interactions in the UK, Mediterranean Europe and Australia. They are integrating landscape narratives based on traditional geological approaches within a novel printing and text-based framework to produce a visual dialogue that documents the physical, biological and cultural co-evolution of riverscapes over contemporary, historical and prehistoric times. Themes that are being developed are the impacts of catastrophic floods on communities and their cultures, including the creation of water myths. Based on a summer 2012 collaborative art-science residency at Joya, Andalucía (http://www.losgazquez.com/en/joya/), some pointers to undertaking meaningful and productive collaborative art-science projects are also offered.