The Harrison Studio

Among the leading pioneers of the eco-art movement, the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison have worked for over forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.

The Harrisons’ concept of art embraces a breathtaking range of disciplines. They are historians, diplomats, ecologists, investigators, emissaries and art activists. Their work involves proposing solutions and involves not only public discussion, but community involvement and extensive mapping and documentation of these proposals in an art context. Past projects have focused on watershed restoration, urban renewal, agriculture and forestry issues and urban ecologies. The Harrisons’ visionary projects have, on occasion, led to changes in governmental policy and have expanded dialogue around previously unexplored issues leading to practical implementations variously in the United States and Europe.

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Five Understandings

First understanding

Nature’s economic system stores the energy that it does not immediately need
mostly in carbon formations

Second understanding

Nature does not charge a profit as do culture’s economic systems

Third understanding

All natural systems are dissipative structures with individuals that form them living,
reproducing then dying with indeterminacy as a norm

Fourth understanding

All natural systems have learned to nest within each other, and, within a context of
symbiosis contribute to collective systems survival, sometimes with abundance

Fifth understanding

Human constructed artifacts particularly legal, political, economic as well as
production and consumption systems seek constancy but are often in violation of the
laws of conservation of energy pointing toward systems entropy 

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