Artists’ and Creators’ Reframed Relationship with Nature Since the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This report is part of a wider research project, Reframing Creativity, which studied how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the work and creative practice of professional artists, producers and makers. Here we discuss a specific finding about artists’ and creators’ relationships with nature. After conducting a first round of interviews with 11 participants, we identified that around half of them had talked about having found a valuable connection with nature since the pandemic—even though nature was not a topic in our sequence of questions. This led to a deeper analysis of nature and creativity through a second round of interviews with 11 further participants. For both rounds of interviews, we used a semi-structured questionnaire with a snowball sampling method for recruitment. We conclude that artists and creators developed new meanings and perspectives on their relationship with the outdoors as an unexpected result of the new first-hand experiences they were able to have outside, that is, as a result of the opportunities the pandemic enabled. We also argue that creators face an urgent need to find a healthy balance between the unstoppable advancement of digital technologies, accelerated by the pandemic, and the fundamental need to be connected with the natural world. These new creator-nature connections should be fostered, preserved, and researched further.