160 ECOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT & RESTORATION VOL 4 NO 3 DECEMBER 2003

E D I T O R ’ SV I E W P O I N T

Restoration practice: Art, toil and focal practice

t is often said that restoration is both ‘an art and a science’.Most of us would probably interpret that to mean that the

practice of restoration relies not only on scientific informationbut also on understandings gained from accumulated fieldexperience, accessed more ‘intutively’. However, I like to thinkthat there is more to the relationship between restoration and artthan the artful exercise of technique.

David Curtis's feature in this issue makes the point that thereis considerable unrealised potential for collaboration betweenrestorationists and performing artists, pointing to the capacity ofthe arts to vitalise information transfer and enrich motivation forrestoration. Interfacing performance arts and sculptural instal-lations with restoration sites or events can also highlight thedepth of meaning in restoration (Westfall 1994). But can the rela-tionship with art go further than that? Could it be that restorationitself offers an aesthetically creative activity that can deeplyaffect participants like a work of art, or is restoration, at best,merely an ethically satisfying activity with ecological outcomes?

There are intriguing tensions between the arts and reality thathave a bearing on potential for activities to qualify as ‘art’ activ-ities in their own right. The arts are generally elevated aboveeveryday life, yet the urge to open up the frame, to spill art intoreal life, has been a recurring theme for artists since the 18thcentury. European modernists of the late 19th and early 20thcentury sought and found myriad new ways to challenge andexpand our way of seeing the world, expanding our apprehen-sion of art in life. Performance art, in particular, blurs the distinc-tion between process and outcome such that we could imaginerestoration practice qualifying as art process (as it allows the partic-ipants to perceive a multi-dimensional beauty and re-engage withnature in a skilled, creative and moving way). Nor need we beconcerned that restoration as art need transform its subject intosome novel form. We may be accustomed to expecting art tomake something that previously did not exist, but there is astrong tradition in the arts of artists ‘revealing’ or ‘drawing out’the normally hidden rather than replacing it with a form moresuited to human tastes. A photographer, for example, is creditedas an artist for finding (not making) a scene that has the power toaffect us like a work of art. So, perhaps, may contemporary resto-rationists –finding themselves resoundingly and harmoniously‘present’ in their environment when ‘drawing out’ nature's owncapacity to recover – be permitted to see themselves as artists.

This lineage of artists stretching the boundary between artand life proceeds through Dadaism to the conceptual artmovement of the 1970s, during which many artists chose toengage with social issues and “apply their powers of articulationto various aspects and implications of the world ecological crisis

(Benthall 1970).” Indeed, artists and creatively motivated socialchange activists have spawned many community-initiated resto-ration actions in urban and rural landscapes across Australia andNew Zealand, closely matching Eric Higgs' description of ‘focalrestoration’ (outlined in his recent book, Nature by Designreviewed this issue). An outstanding example of such a commu-nity-initiated restoration project is described in this issue'sfeature (by Judy Bush, Barb Miles and Brian Bainbridge) on Mel-bourne's Merri Creek restoration project. There is no doubt, forexample, that the Merri Creek restoration project – the subjectof long-term inputs by community volunteers – has been inten-tionally conceived and consistently developed with the dualgoals of healing environments and communities in mind, involv-ing real people in real actions in real ‘places’.

I can't help feeling that there is more behind focal restorationthan we currently understand. The ultimate consequence of thisdebate may be that aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality are insep-arable. If restoration can be approached as a work of art, so canour very lives, framed as they are by birth and death and setwithin physical and cultural opportunities and constraints.Henry Moore put it this way:

Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form

in three dimensions. The child learning to see first distinguishes only

two dimensional shape. Later…it has to develop the ability to judge

roughly three dimensional distances. But having satisfied the require-

ments of practical necessity most people…don't make the further

intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full

spatial existence (Herbert 1964, p 141).

Eric Higgs refers to ecological restoration as the ‘pre-eminentfocal practice if we steer practice towards valuing ecosystems intheir depth and honoring the social relations that form in themidst of restoration’ (Higgs 2003, pp 194–5). This is a boldclaim. But if we can do all that in restoration, focal practice ismore than a science plus the artful application of skill drawnform experience. It could be part of a collective art work of‘really great breadth’.

Tein McDonaldEditor

References

Benthall J. (1970) Kinetic Art in Transformation – articulate energy. In: Kinetics(catalogue). Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, London.

Herbert, R. L. (1964) Artists on Art. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.Higgs, E. (2003) Nature by Design. People, Natural Process and Ecological

Restoration. The MIT Press, Cambridge.Westfall, B. (1994) 111. Personal Politics: Ecological restoration as human-

scale and community-based. Restoration & Management Notes 12,148–151.

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