Victory Gardens 2007+: making art as if the environment matters

Unrestricted Contemporary visual artists have been working with the land since the early 1960s. In our current ecological crisis, it is imperative to examine what role the arts can play in working towards environmental change. To this end, Amy Franceschini's Victory Gardens 2007+ will be presented as a case study of how artists are creating both symbolic and functional projects. Then, placed within a broader context of a range of artists' practices, both the role of the artist and contemporary visual aesthetics will be analyzed. In doing so, this thesis will consider how artists dealing with ecological crises can overcome the contemporary debates surrounding aesthetics in socially engaged art.