Art Meets Science in a Time of Climate Collapse

Is it radical to have an arts-based educational research lab inside a science gallery?

Maybe. But perhaps what’s truly radical is that we’re still surprised by it!

Launch of the lab at Science Gallery Melbourne, opening night with Dr Ryan Jefferies, Director, Science Gallery Melbourne and Dr Kate Coleman, SWISP Lab. Image credit: Gregory Lorenzutti

At SWISP Lab, our work is unapologetically youth-centred and participatory. We research through art what it means to live in the thick of climate collapse. We create spaces where young people are not just heard but become co-researchers, co-designers, and co-storytellers of the futures they demand.

The incoming Brazilian presidency for COP30 reminds us in its fifth letter: climate action begins and ends with people. Territory is not just ‘Land’ it is identity, governance, and future. Memory is infrastructure. Storytelling is climate action.

That’s why art belongs at the heart of climate research.

SWISP Lab living lab launch at Science Gallery Melbourne with Professor Marek Tesar Dean of the Faculty of Education University of Melbourne, Vice Chancellor, Professor Emma Johnston AO with SWISP lab’s Dr Kate Coleman and SSHRC Learning with the Land, PhD candidate Cassandra Truong. Image credit: Gregory Lorenzutti

Art doesn’t sit on the periphery of “real” science it opens it. It complicates it. It makes climate data and planetary processes relational, embodied, and felt. In the gallery, we work in the Anthropogenic event space, where art and science meet, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes joyfully, always generatively.

Science Gallery Melbourne at the University of Melbourne is leading the way by inviting us in. Together, we are creating a living lab that refuses disciplinary silos. This is not outreach. It’s not an “arts-wash” for science. It’s inter- and transdisciplinary research in action where knowledge moves, tangles, and transforms between methods, mediums, and communities.

As we move toward COP30 in Belém, deep in the Amazon, the urgency is clear. We need climate research that doesn’t just model scenarios but reimagines the very conditions for living together on a heating planet. We need art and science together not as uneasy neighbours, but as co-conspirators in the work of memory, care, and change.

SWISP Lab’s Dr Kate Coleman and Dr Sarah Healy in residence at Science Gallery Bengaluru for opening week of Calorie, with Experimentors in 4-9 August 2025. Image credit: Kate Coleman

Because the climate crisis is not just a scientific problem. It’s a human story. And in the telling, we might yet find our way.