Prof. Caroline Tisdall

Prof. Caroline Tisdall was feature writer for The Guardian in the 1970s when she began working with Joseph Beuys.

She has published 7 books on Joseph Beuys and worked with him to organise many of his major exhibitions including 'The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland' (MOMA, Oxford 1974; ICA, London,1974;  MOMA, Edinburgh, 1974; Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1974; Municipal museum of Modern art, Dublin, 1974) and his major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1979. The accompanying catalogue published by Thames and Hudson was produced together with Beuys.

Her best known work with Beuys is Coyote: I like America and America likes Me. This book of her photographs and text documents Beuys' iconic dialogue with a coyote in New York in 1974.  For Caroline, this marked the beginning of a way of working with nature, offering her insights that have guided her work in the field of conservation ever since. 

She has achieved recognition for her organic gardens, her conservation work in Africa and her many books and films, which include the direction of Joseph Beuys and The Last Post Run for BBC2 and Channel 4 respectively.    

Since Beuys developed the 7000 Oaks, Caroline has continued to plant trees in the Beuysian spirit in Africa, Holland, England, Ireland and Scotland, including, most recently, a memorial oak wood for her late partner, Paul van Vlissingen.

Caroline has supported the work of many nature and conservation groups and organisations. She was recently elected to the Council of the National Trust, and is a long-term trustee of the John Muir Wilderness Trust. Her film 'Marakele: The Making of a National Park' and rare footage of black rhino translocation in Africa were recently donated to 'Wildscreen Arkive' an international archive of conservation films, whose president David Attenborough hosted Caroline at Buckingham Palace. 

Caroline's commitment to the field of social sculpture has a long history. Her engagement in the work of the Free International University began in the mid seventies with the drafting of a report to the European Economic Community on the feasibility of a "Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research' in Dublin. Around the same time she began doing the preparatory work with groups in the UK towards their engagement in the Free International University programme that she organised for Beuys, with Robert McDowell, to coincide with the Honey Pump at the Workplace in 1977. This was the first in depth contact between Caroline and Shelley Sacks, who was beginning to develop Free international University activities in South Africa. In 1990 together with Lourien Wijiers, she faciltated the international event 'Art and Science meets Spirtiuality in a Changing Economy' - whose transdisciplinary participants included John Cage, Sogyal Rimpoche, Rober Rauschenberg and David Bohm.

Caroline's continuing commitment in the field of social sculpture and transformative projects and support for the work of the Social Sculpture Research Unit has enabled the SSRU network to flourish. 

In 2001, together with Shelley Sacks, Richard Hayward and Graham van Wyk, she initiated the Sustaining Life Project which organised a number of interdisciplinary events on 'protected areas and governance' and several 'connective aesthetics' colloquia. This has now evolved into the new Earth Agenda project. 

Caroline is actively involved in the University of the Trees project, and will work with Shelley in the summer to set up a University of the Trees group in London. Most recently she has facilitated a dialogue between Jill Butler of the Woodland Trust and Shelley Sacks -who have begun to explore how University of the Trees processes might relate to aspects of the Woodland Trust's work.