Create, Connect, and Care: Art for Our Environment

What matters most to you in nature? How can everyday and discarded materials help us think differently about the environment around us?
About this Event

A hands-on Frugal Artist-in-Residence (FAiR) workshop and showcase

What matters most to you in nature? How can everyday and discarded materials help us think differently about the environment around us?

Join us for a free, hands-on morning of creativity, making, and conversation, where you can explore environmental issues through art, experiment with simple materials, and contribute to a growing collective artwork.

During the morning, you can:

• Add your creativity to a collective artwork, responding to the question “What matters most to you in nature?” Individual contributions will be brought together to create a new shared art piece.
• Experience an artificial lung installation made from repurposed and recycled materials. Connected to live air-quality data from locations around the world, the lung changes its breathing strength and rate to make invisible differences in the air we breathe visible.
• Create with found and sustainable materials alongside one of the original FAiR artist, James Robinson, in a playful, co-creative activity.
• Discover the story behind FAiR, and how artists, communities, researchers, and schools in Malaysia and the UK have used creativity to explore environmental challenges together.

These activities build on the FAiR (Frugal Artist-in-Residence) Exhibition, held in Coventry in August, which brought together artworks and stories created across Malaysia and the UK. FAiR explores how locally available, natural, and repurposed materials, combined with creativity and community participation, can encourage new conversations about our environment. Check it out!

Whether you joined us for the exhibition or are discovering FAiR for the first time, everyone is welcome. No artistic experience is needed… just curiosity and a willingness to get involved.

When and where

📅 Wednesday, 28 October 2026
📍 Room DD126, Delia Derbyshire Building, Coventry University

Main workshop and showcase: 10:30am–12:30pm
The morning will include the FAiR showcase, demonstrations, and artist-led co-creative activity, followed by lunch at 12:30pm.

Creative space open: 10:30am–4:30pm
The collective artwork will remain open throughout the day, so visitors can drop in and add their contribution until 4:30pm.

Places for the 10:30am–12:30pm workshop are limited, so advance registration is recommended.

This event is part of Coventry University's Festival of Social Science 2026 and is supported through the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account.