By Camille Cuzzupoli

Language is a gift.

We don’t often think about what a marvel it is that someone can say “I feel hungry” and another person can understand their exact set of emotions based only on that tiny combination of words. Language is one of the most important mechanisms in fostering understanding between humans. By articulating how we feel, listening, comprehending, and responding in kind, we are able to collaborate and work together towards solutions for ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.

However, this isn’t how language tends to be understood in today’s culture, nor is this always how it is used. Language – the thing meant to bind people together – is often used to divide them. This is a problem that regularly manifests in political campaigns with popular slogans. “Defund the police” is a phrase meant to communicate the need to divert funds away from law enforcement and into more holistic alternatives and underfunded areas like education and the arts. But this isn’t what detractors hear. They misinterpret the slogan as taking away all money from the police force and letting crime on the street run rampant. Part of the reason this misinterpretation happens is because of the language we use. In order to engage in open dialogue with those who disagree with us, we need to cultivate arguments and rhetoric that they haven’t heard or already argued against. Active thinking and engagement is forcefully initiated.

I myself have struggled to feel understood my whole life. Whenever I have attempted to explain my emotions, opinions, or outlooks, it has always felt like nobody truly comprehended me. As an adult, I cope with this struggle by taking part in the aforementioned cultivation. I use very specific words and try to explain things in such a way that the other party can both digest and respond to what I am expressing. When it works, there is no greater feeling. When it doesn’t, it feels like the only thing left to do is to give up. But when it comes to talking about climate change, giving up isn’t an option. The climate crisis is the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced; it is something we all have to agree on, and something we all have to be prepared to fight. 

Giancarlo Abrahan’s short play Whistler understands this all too well.

Whistler is about an island community suffering from the rise of automation and the depletion of resources, and the inevitability of having to leave everything behind to make way for the new. The play was written for Climate Change Theatre Action 2021 (CCTA), a worldwide series of readings and performances of 5-minute plays about the climate crisis, presented this fall to coincide with the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow. The prompt given to the playwrights was  “Envisioning a Global Green New Deal.” According to the CCTA website, “we encouraged [playwrights] to show us what their dream future looks like – and how we might get there.” Hailing from the Philippines, Abrahan wrote about human displacement as a consequence of environmental protection measures, the grief inherent in said displacement, and the struggles of making one’s voice heard to those who can’t or won’t listen.

Abrahan deserves massive props for his poetic sensibilities. The experience of reading a play can often feel incomplete, because plays aren’t meant to be read; they are meant to be experienced in performance. Without the visual and audial elements, a play often can’t have its full intended impact. Whistler is not one of those plays. It sits firmly between poetry and drama, and with its phrasing and expressions, creates a reading experience that speaks deeply to personal experience. One of the most potent passages is the Boy’s discussion of his island community,  and the rise of automation and its consequences:

Misinterpretation is a constant throughout the text of Whistler. When a Green New Deal finally comes, it is not understood as such. “Green new deal” is misinterpreted as “a grey nude eel,” “agreein’ you’d hell,” “agri, no deal,” and so on. It is necessary to the community, but it cannot be properly understood, and therefore cannot be properly utilized. Poignantly, the people who live on this island are often only one letter short of being on the same page. Take, for instance, the exchange between Woman and Boy:

Whistler’s exploration of the consequences incurred from tiny misunderstandings is disturbingly reflective of patterns we see in society every day. Right-wing conservatives hear “Green New Deal” and interpret that as “the liberals want to take away your burgers,” and they parrot that interpretation so often that it overshadows the actual contents and intentions of the Green New Deal. It’s similar to a game of telephone; whatever the outcome is, it’s nothing like the original message. Scientists and activists are very specific with the language they use to discuss what climate change is, the kind of impact that it has, and the actions needed to fight it. The recently released IPCC Report is a perfect example of this; when the United Nations Chief describes the report as a “code red for humanity,” it’s nigh impossible to understand that as anything but a desperate, urgent warning. And yet, Twitter has already started to see detractors claim this plea is just liberal fear mongering – that scientists are exaggerating. For what purpose? Even they don’t seem to know.

So… how do we move forward? If we can’t communicate effectively, what’s left for us besides the end of the world? Is it too late after all?

No. It’s never too late.

If we can’t communicate effectively, we have to change our rhetoric. Instead of saying “end fast fashion,” we can say “improving working conditions in the clothing industry will lead to products being better and less waste being produced.” Instead of saying “climate change has caused displacement,” we can say “heads had to learn to wear new hats.” We can find a different point of view. Forge a new path. Choose a different tactic. Those who are against a climate revolution want us to succumb to climate grief. They want us to give up when we say “sweat” and someone else hears “sweet.” They want nihilism to bind our hands so that we can’t put them to work. They want to pollute our hope, because without hope, we have nothing.

We don’t have to let them do that.

(Top image: Siargao Island, Philippines. Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash.)

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Camille Cuzzupoli is a rising senior at Bennington College and summer intern for Climate Change Theatre Action. She studies dramaturgy, theatre history, and costume design, and has worked as a Field Work Term intern for HowlRound Theatre Commons and Actors’ Shakespeare project. As an artist, she seeks to encourage critical thinking, personal transformation, and social equity through the theatrical medium. Her work has been published on howlround.com and medium.com.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By Amy Brady

This month, I have for you an interview with an author who’s been involved on the climate front in numerous ways. Alexandra Kleeman (You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine), an Assistant Professor at the New School, has worked with Writers Rebel NYC and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Climate Reads series. Her latest novel, Something New Under the Sun, tells a richly layered story about multiple crises: climate change, corporate greed, and the widespread dissemination of misinformation. We discussed what draws her to these subjects, why she chose to set her latest novel in Hollywood, and how she’s witnessed the climate crisis manifest in her own life.

Something New Under the Sun touches on several ecological crises. I know that you’re also involved with other climate-related projects, such as Writers Rebel and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Climate Reads series. What draws you to these issues and why do you seek to explore them in your writing?

I moved around a lot as a kid, and the outdoors became a place of stability and security for me – not because these environments were all the same, but because common plants and animals showed up in each, like friends I recognized. I also had the experience, in every place I lived, of watching someplace I cared about get destroyed, a place that looked to developers like an unutilized piece of land but that contained little marshes and special trees that I had named and loved. When I saw what they put in the place of those woods or fields that I knew as particular, special entities, it always seemed to be an imitation of something else we already had, another blocky strip mall or vinyl-sided house. It gave rise to an intense fascination and ambivalence about the things that humans built, so durable and resistant to change in some ways, but also so fragile, unable to sustain themselves without a continual influx of energy, money, and natural resources. That feeling has fed a lot of my writing, which often examines the man-made and the processed as alien, denaturalized things – like the surreal, existential snack cakes in my first novel, You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine. But the climate-related changes that I’ve seen over the last decade, from rising sea levels and flooding close to my home in Staten Island to the record-breaking wildfires that have scoured my hometown, have driven home the fact that the consequences of warming are already arriving, the emergency moment is now. 

To me, literature has an ethical obligation to help incorporate these cataclysmic shifts in our environment into our daily understanding of reality, to connect the precarity of those already experiencing drastic upheaval as a result of climate volatility to the lives of those who remain relatively untouched as a result of their privilege and geographical location, to describe the affects associated with climate grief, precarity, and ecological mourning and make them more concrete and palpable, to make them something than can be discussed more easily and more often. What does it mean to live alongside catastrophe and continue on living “life as we know it”? How can we metabolize the information we are given about climate change, how can we become less insulated, in mind and behavior, from the climate catastrophe that is already arriving? Literature doesn’t create direct change, but I do believe it can help us think through the impasses that keep us from organizing and taking action.

As you mentioned, you’re currently living on Staten Island. Why did you set your novel in Hollywood? Might it have anything to do with the extraordinary wildfires and droughts we’ve witnessed out West the last few years?

I knew that I wanted to set my novel in the West, in the sort of landscapes that I grew up in and feel a strong connection to – landscapes that were always troubled by drought and are increasingly going up in flames. But Hollywood was an especially compelling Western location because of the way it sits at the intersection of the constructed and the natural: surrounded by chaparral and desert and habitat still wild enough to support handfuls of mountain lions, but also home to a film industry based around pouring massive amounts of energy and craft into making these projects that seem to just unfold effortlessly before the eyes of the audience. The resources and apparatus that conjure these stories seem to vanish into thin air, and then the experience of watching a film and becoming absorbed in it feels almost immaterial, ghostly. It seems like a fitting metaphor for many other things in our American lifestyle – the way the massive amounts of water, oil, fertilizer, and labor that go into a carton of almond milk become invisible within the bright-lit aisles of the grocery store. Los Angeles is fascinating to me, because it represents at once its own unique materiality and the dream of becoming immaterial, changeable, infinitely plastic.

Your novel explores corporate corruption – and its relation to environmental degradation – through a wonderfully unique story. What inspired this part of your novel? Anything in real life?

There are so many instances of corporate corruption and destructive, short-sighted action right out in the open – the work of the gas and oil industry to suppress information about climate change and alternative energy technologies, the suppression of information about the harmful effects of PFOAs by DuPont chemical. In general, there’s a substitutive logic at work in this country that has unintended and harmful consequences – maybe the most important case study for me when writing this book was what we saw happening in Flint, Michigan, when the local government switched the city’s water source during a budget crisis. The new water hadn’t been treated with corrosion inhibitors, and lead began leaching from the old pipework into the drinking water supply, exposing the city’s majority Black population to high levels of lead over many years. Residents noticed a difference in the color and taste of the water and lodged many complaints which were ignored by the local government. There’s a tendency to think “Water is water” (or “wood is wood,” etc) erasing the specificity of a material’s origin and history and composition. But how these resources are obtained, how they interact with their new context matters: Substitution has unforeseen consequences; it’s never a simple one-to-one swap.

Your book also explores the rise of “alternative facts” and misinformation – a problem we’ve long seen in the realm of climate communication and amplified further in the era of COVID. What is it about this problem that interests you? Were there any case studies that particularly fascinated you while writing this book? 

I’m fascinated by the world of misinformation and disinformation – not as much from the perspective of those working to sow confusion in a self-interested and cynical way, but from the perspective of those eager to believe it. I think there’s a powerful emotional impulse underlying the preference for an “alternative interpretation” of reality, and it can be understood and empathized with insofar as those of us who truly believe in the actuality of the climate crisis also experience the extreme tension caused by the idea that a world that feels stable and consistent on a day-to-day basis is in fact under threat and in the process of transforming into something that will feel alien. It causes even those who take climate change seriously to experience the desire to avoid thinking about or acknowledging the crisis at times, to avoid talking about it with others in order to preserve social harmony, to plan as though the conditions of life now will be the conditions of life twenty years from now. You could also say that, even though many of us (and presumably everybody reading this) believe that climate change is real, we do not necessarily behave in our daily lives like people who believe that the actions we take in the present make the crucial difference in how much the world will warm in our future. It is very difficult, psychologically and logistically, to divest yourself from a vision of the world that you feel relatively adapted to – and embracing alternative facts is a way of resolving that psychological strain.

To the extent that you feel comfortable, would you share how climate change and/or other environmental problems have manifested in your own life? 

I live on the North Shore of Staten Island, close to the ferry and directly adjacent to a waterfront that was wrecked in Hurricane Irene, two years before Sandy. The fenced-off waterfront, overgrown with weeds but also populated by an apple tree and a rosebush and a few other remnants of the landscaped thing it used to be, is a daily reminder of its vulnerability to the sort of disasters that are certain to happen more often in the coming years. Along my walk to work is a section of the walkway that is literally falling into the harbor, and after storms or during higher tides the water comes up over the wreckage and sloshes onto the path. Also, the walk I usually take to work has been obsolete for several months, after a sinkhole opened up in the walkway and the whole area was fenced off – I still feel the impulse to walk that same route, and a sense of loss and uncertainty when I realize that I can’t. We see the signs of rising sea level and increasingly unstable ground and know that our time here is finite. At the same time, my home state of Colorado, a place I always thought I’d like to retire to someday, is burning each summer with record-setting fires that make the air so smoky it can seem on some days like the Rockies have vanished. I feel homesick all the time, whether I’m in New York or Colorado, and ultimately I think I’m most homesick for another time, a time of small, predictable changes, a time when disaster wasn’t woven into the fabric of daily life.

This is a funny question for someone whose book is only just hitting shelves, but what’s next for you? Anything you’d like my readers to watch for?

My next project is a novel spanning many different time periods and set on different islands. I’m fascinated by islands – my mother is from an island nation, and islands have served as a symbol for so many fantasies of how life and community might be reconfigured to allow for a better life, as well as the literal terrain for enacting these experiments. After so many dystopias, I’m excited to finally write something bordering on utopian – though I’m sure in my hands the term will look a little different and darker than what might be expected.

(Top image: Photo by Fred Tangerman/Djerassi.)

This article is part of the Climate Art Interviews series. It was originally published in Amy Brady’s “Burning Worlds” newsletter. Subscribe to get Amy’s newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

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Amy Brady is the Deputy Publisher of Guernica magazine and Senior Editor of the Chicago Review of Books. Her writing about art, culture, and climate has appeared in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, the New Republic, and other places. She is also the editor of the monthly newsletter “Burning Worlds,” which explores how artists and writers are thinking about climate change. She holds a PHD in English and is the recipient of a CLIR/Mellon Library of Congress Fellowship. Read more of her work at AmyBradyWrites.com at and follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By Joan Sullivan

What kind of “leader” would – on the very same day that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its most dire climate assessment to date – obfuscate (once again) his government’s purchase of a controversial oil pipeline expansion as a way to generate revenue to “achieve its long-term climate objectives?”

What kind of “leader” would – the day after the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report paints the starkest picture yet of the accelerating danger caused by human use of coal, oil and gas â€“ urge OPEC and its allies to increase oil production? 

What kind of “leader” would – in the same week that the IPCC made it crystal clear that climate change is now “affecting every inhabited region across the globe” – announce a nearly $4 billion investment in coal?

What kind of “leader” would – a week after the IPCC’s ominous report – approve a new gas drilling project beneath a national park?

In the context of the climate emergency, none of these politicians deserves the title “leader.” Leaders are supposed to lead. But these so-called “leaders” are nothing more than handmaidens beholden to the fossil fuel industry. 

Let’s throw out the faux honorifics and refer to these politicians as nothing more than “elected officials,” a description that underscores the temporary nature of their present jobs. Because they could quickly become un-elected in the next election cycle when we, the voters – especially young voters â€“ replace them with people who have the courage to speak to truth, who are not tethered to the fossil fuel industry. People whose words and actions embody the possibility of near-term social collapse.

I am full of rage this week. Rage at the shameful and tone-deaf responses of our elected officials to the IPCC’s urgent call for “rapid and unprecedented societal transformation.” Rage at “our apparent inability to stop ourselves from destroying our only habitat.” Rage at our collective suicide, according to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek:

Rage at the indifference – there’s no other word for it – of close friends, family, and neighbors who carry on with their fossil fueled, fast fashion, frequent flyer lifestyles as if July 2021 was not the hottest. month. ever. recorded. in. human. history.

“The worst is yet to come,” according to the IPCC, “affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own.” The looming collapse of the Gulf Streamis one of the tipping points that worries me most: scientists admit that it “must not be allowed to happen.” It would have catastrophic consequences for all species across the globe, not just for humans.

In a leaked version of the draft IPCC report earlier this year, one sentence jumped out of the nearly 4,000 pages and went viral: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems; humans cannot.” 

How could anyone be indifferent to that?

A recent Instagram post by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson suggests why:

It’s fair to say that [the science is] often very disembodied. It is knowledge that doesn’t have a physical sort of storage; there’s no memory of it in our bodies.

Olafur Eliasson

Embodiment: is this the secret sauce that’s been missing in the artistic community’s response to the climate crisis to date?

Over the coming months, I’d like to explore this concept of embodiment for future posts, especially as it relates to the energy transition. I welcome comments from any artists, architects and/or scribes (in the space below) describing how they are, in Eliasson’s words, bringing “an experiential narrative” to their artistic interpretations of the energy transition. I will contact each of you separately and hopefully will feature your work in future posts in the Renewable Energy series of Artists and Climate Change.

Artists, it’s time to lead. Energy is at the heart of the climate emergency, and a transition away from fossil fuels must be at the heart of its solution. As Ursula Le Guin observed, “Resistance and change often begin in art.”

For those who have not had time to read the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report 2021, Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis, here’s a two-minute video summary:

(Top image: Partial cover of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis, 2021.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer focused on the energy transition. In her monthly column for Artists and Climate Change, Joan explores the intersection of art and the energy transition. She is currently experimenting with abstract photography as a new language to express her grief about climate breakdown. You can find Joan on Twitter and Visura.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Peterson Toscano

Over 10 years ago, Eli Sparks was struggling to make sense of climate change. She said:

…that summer in Virginia was insanely hot. I remember being in the community pool and when I popped my head out of the water, the water evaporated so quickly I felt downright cold! I also remember walking with coworkers to the cafeteria and thinking, ‘Why in the world are none of these people alarmed about climate change??!!’

She was really struggling, so she wrote a story for herself. Tell Me A Story is a conversation between a parent and a child, a story within a story. Eli, who is now Citizens Climate Lobby’s Director of Field Development, has shared the story with friends, fellow climate advocates, and at public gatherings. She gave Citizens Climate Radio permission to turn the story into a short radio play. Tell Me a Story is performed by Zeke and Anna Loomis-Weber.

Anna Weber-Loomis (she/her) just finished her first year at Sterling College in Vermont. She is studying outdoor education and sustainable agriculture. Zeke Weber-Loomis (she/her) just finished her first year of high school. She spends her free time drawing, playing ukulele, and running cross-country and track.

Next month: Chantal Bilodeau tells us about Climate Change Theatre Action 2021. Discussing one of the plays in the festival is Dr Zoë Svendsen, Lecturer in Drama and Performance in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Jenny Blazing

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a proliferation of climate-related disasters across the world. Storms have become stronger, wildfires more intense. Sea ice is melting at a higher rate as the earth grows hotter. Each of these problems alone endangers human welfare. Together, they represent an existential threat. Scientists often describe our position as nearing a “tipping point” at which we teeter at the precipice of an irreversible cascade of ecosystem collapse. My new collaboration with fellow artist Carin Walsh presents a different view of our role in this crisis. It serves as a reminder that we are not passive observers of this disaster, but active agents with the ability to change course and build a safer and healthier future. Our message is that while the climate is approaching a tipping point, our society is at a turning point. We have the power to choose whether we will continue on our current path, or whether we will turn to embrace the measures necessary to reverse climate change.

As a North Carolina artist, my visual arts practice has given me a unique perspective on our climate crisis through the course of several U.S. administrations. I have been alternately moved and discouraged by the fitful progress punctuated by the dramatic setbacks the country has endured in confronting climate change. As I have shared my projects amid the chaos, countless conversations with critics and allies have provided a lens into the concerns that guide our collective response to this crisis. This feedback has driven my creative approach. When I began my work as a climate artist in 2014, I saw momentum towards solutions. I was heartened when the Democratic administration relied on its executive authority to implement the Clean Power Plan to significantly cut planet-warming emissions. And progress continued as the U.S. committed to signing the Paris Climate Agreement. It was possible for mildly concerned onlookers to assume that our climate crisis would be addressed by these measures alone.

In those years, I contested this complacency with my Building Worlds series of acrylic and collage paintings. These time-lapse AnthropoceneScapes represent humanity’s impact on the planet over the span of our existence and provide an important reminder that our efforts to solve the climate crisis are far from over. In the North Carolina visual arts ecosystem, these works occupied the small environmental section at impactful exhibitions such as the annual Pleiades Arts Truth to Power, while the bulk of the gallery was filled with art addressing issues of racial and economic justice, exploitative immigration policy, health care disparities, and many other pressing social justice concerns. I felt somewhat impractical and fantastical in my artistic focus on climate change when these issues seemed to have greater impact on the immediate health and wellbeing of people. Here and elsewhere, the climate crisis was framed as a distant and distinct issue, independent of the economy, health, and social justice – leaving climate policies to be attacked as unfeasible and even a threat to these “other” issues.

In 2016, those of us who had hoped that progressive policies would help solve our crisis were jerked from this naivety. A new president was elected, subsequently pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord in the name of “economic progress,” and began to dismantle many other climate-friendly policies and programs.

It was during this sobering time that Carin Walsh and I launched our collaborative environmental art practice, WALSH/BLAZING. Determined to better understand the framing that led our society so far astray, we consulted with climate communications experts and surveyed the literature to refine our goals. We discovered that although countless studies show that climate change is inextricably interwoven with jobs, health, immigration and social justice, people are often unaware of evidence supporting that fact. We also learned that personally relevant storytelling can be an effective means of conveying the essence of these findings. With this in mind, we developed Changing Worlds Now, a multimedia installation featuring Carin’s audio/video collage projected onto and interacting with my acrylic and collage mural. The piece highlights the personal impacts of climate change through a unique, storytelling art experience that weaves a past-present-future narrative with imagery from local neighborhoods and city landmarks, and invites viewers to reflect on what the climate crisis means to them and their families. We hoped that these personalized hypothetical scenarios would instill in our viewers a heightened awareness of the intimate and tenuous connection between climate stability and societal function.

It is a testament to the severity of climate change that in recent years, the impacts of this crisis have shifted from looming hypothetical to stark reality for many Americans. My current work draws inspiration from the effects that climate change has already had on my own family. My painting, California Dreamin’, is based on the experiences of my parents, whose house was destroyed by the Valley Fire wildfire in Cobb Mountain, California, and who are threatened by severe air pollution every fire season. I am also inspired by the multitude of social justice movements that recognize climate change as a major barrier to racial and economic equity in the U.S. and abroad. My painting, Trickle Down, speaks to climate justice issues laid bare by the pandemic and the need to address environmental hazards that disproportionately threaten Black and Brown communities. Much of my current work illustrates the harrowing impact of our climate crisis to reinforce the urgent need for action. 

With this need for action in mind, Carin Walsh and I are presenting our September 2021 exhibit, Turning Point, at Meredith College’s Frankie G. Weems Gallery. This exhibit seeks to build awareness that humanity is at a turning point in the battle against our climate crisis. It presents the truth of where we stand, exposing the effects of climate change and the catastrophic consequences we face if we do nothing. However, it also offers an optimistic message. At this unique moment, political, economic, technological, and societal forces are converging in an encouraging direction to effectively address climate change. The ultimate objective of Turning Point is to impress upon viewers our collective responsibility for building a better world and that each of us can play a role in driving solutions that are focused on the lives and wellbeing of people.

The narrative within Changing Worlds Now and the vivid scenes depicted in paintings such as California Dreamin’ and Trickle Down should remind viewers of the harsh consequences of this disaster. Rather than simply accepting this reality, visitors will be prompted to act by expressing wishes for future generations, composing letters to their legislators, and exiting wearing an “I acted” sticker representing their support for climate measures. We hope that these actions will give visitors a sense of ownership and agency in solutions to our climate crisis. As they depart, they will view my painting, Hope Springs Eternal. It carries an encouraging message that our battle against climate change can be won, as we now have cost-effective technology to create a clean economy that can add millions of jobs and help stabilize our world.

It will take collective action to support solutions to this massive issue. Humanity’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we are capable of such action well beyond what we could have imagined. Many in the U.S. and around the globe have listened to science-based recommendations and have supported measures to restructure logistics in the working world, educational systems, and countless other vital activities. Sara Peach of Yale Climate Communications suggests that we can each marshal our unique skills and connections in our communities to magnify the impact of our actions. For me, this means focusing my visual arts efforts on exhibits like Turning Point that I hope will inspire others to act as we collectively work to move our climate away from the tipping point.

(Top image: California Dreamin’ acrylic painting incorporating original hand-painted paper on stretched canvas, 30”x 40”(Blazing))

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Jenny Blazing is a full-time working painter, installation, and found object sculpture artist living in Durham, North Carolina. Her acrylic and collage paintings incorporate original hand-painted and monoprinted papers. In addition to ongoing representation in various exhibits, her work is regularly on view at 5 Points Gallery in downtown Durham, and she is a member of the curatorial committee of Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill. Blazing graduated from University of California, Davis with degrees in Environmental Design and Economics and subsequently earned a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Susan Hoffman Fishman

Many artists have begun making work related to the climate crisis in recent years. But Australian visual artist Penelope Davis decided to address the subject eight years ago. Originally trained as a photographer with a portfolio including mainly camera-less photographs, she turned to sculpture and the looming environmental disaster after observing her first jellyfish blooms along the Melbourne coastline. Although alarmed by what appeared to be an unnatural and terrifying phenomenon, she was also attracted aesthetically to the jellyfish’s semi-transparency and how they reflected light. 

A jellyfish bloom consists of a vast number of jellyfish, often spread over miles of water. To Davis: 

Jellyfish are a great metaphor for everything going wrong today. They’re beautiful and beguiling and so work on an aesthetic level for me but they’re harbingers of doom, a completely malevolent presence… They proliferate in large numbers in places where other species can’t survive – in warmer, highly acidic, and polluted waters. They create their own ecosystems by altering the nutrients in their environment, which makes it hard for other organisms to survive. In effect, they represent the last ones standing after everything else is gone.

After her initial encounter with the blooms, she began to think about other environmental issues impacting her local coastline, including flooding and plastic pollution. Focusing less on photography, at least for the time being, she started to investigate materials and processes that she might use to create sculptural pieces referencing the proliferation of jellyfish, plastic pollution, and our culture of overconsumption.

Davis spent two years learning how to work in three dimensions, which was challenging but liberating at the same time. In 2016, she was awarded a three-month studio residency at Carlton Connect’s initiative, LAB-14, in Carlton, Australia, a large co-working space built to connect scientists, industry leaders, researchers, and artists. It was there that much of her work on the project was accomplished. With the City of Melbourne’s $10,000 fellowship that accompanied the residency, she was able to reduce her outside work schedule and concentrate on the developing installation, which she later called, Sea-Change. During the residency, she engaged with climate researchers and scientists from the University of Melbourne who provided input on the climate issues she was addressing and encouraged her progress. Unlike the artists with whom she normally spends her time, whose focus is primarily on the local art world, the people she met at LAB-14 were dealing with complex global problems. The importance of their work motivated her to “step up” with her own.  

To make Sea Change, Davis combed secondhand shops and dollar stores for used materials, including bottle tops, electrical plugs, mobile phone chargers, and other discarded items that are part of our throwaway culture. She then painted all of the components with silicon, creating molds that she pulled off once they were cured. In addition to using the found objects, she made molds of organic materials such as kale leaves and seaweed. Davis was especially pleased with the semi-transparent/semi-opaque, floppy qualities of silicon, which successfully modeled the movements and appearance of jellyfish. In order to create the dome-like form of the jellyfish, she sewed all the individual molds together and attached them to armatures constructed from clear plastic colanders (for the bigger ones) and clear plastic discs normally used in laundry bags for drying bras (for the smaller ones). 

In 2017, Sea Change was installed at the MARS gallery in Melbourne before traveling to other sites around Australia and to Hong Kong. It consisted of 53 sculptures hung from the ceiling with strands of monofilament. Overall, the works appeared as if they were floating on water currents. Although beautiful and ethereal from a distance, they seemed menacing, other worldly, and industrial upon closer inspection. Constructed with the detritus of human consumption, Sea Change calls attention to the human behaviors that have led to the climate crisis in the first place. 

Plastic, Davis’ current body of work, is a continuation of her exploration of environmental degradation. Made from 2019 – 2021 during the pandemic lockdowns (Davis is now experiencing her sixth lockdown in Australia), Plastic is a parody of the natural world. Each of the individual sculptures is made from silicon, steel, and nylon thread using the same methods that she developed for Sea Change. Each is what she refers to as “hyper-colored” in bright, primary colors and black. She states:

The works synthesize the waste of human overconsumption into florid forms and mutated morphologies in an attempt to reveal and reflect on our symbiotic relationship with the natural world – and the havoc and loss we are wreaking upon it. They are at once monstrous and beautiful, vigorous yet emblematic of loss. Great care and attention to detail is invested in the slow, haptic process of piecing and sewing these works together – in direct contrast to the automated mass production of the plastic used as the source…This new body of work was developed within the context of a looming environmental disaster, enormous socio-political unrest, and a global pandemic threatening billions of lives and livelihoods. Questions of nature and the natural world are no longer coherent, predictable, or stable. Nature is plastic.

Plastic will be exhibited at the MARS gallery in October 2021. With this new body of work and with Sea Change, Penelope Davis has added her name to the long list of artists all over the world who are using the power of art to bear witness to environmental disaster and to provide the opportunity for others to process their grief about what we have lost.  

(Top image: Sea-Change Installation at MARS gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2017. Photo by Matthew Stanton.)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate disruption a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and photographs have addressed water and the climate crisis. Her most recent work, called In the Beginning There Was Only Water is a visual re-creation of the world, a 40-panel re-imagining of the natural world without humanity’s harmful impact upon it. This fall, she will be participating in an artist’s residency at Planet, an international company providing global satellite images, where she will be comparing changes over time to bodies of water throughout the world. 

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By Joan Sullivan

Some personal news: 

Yesterday, Climate Visuals and TED Countdown announced the 100 winning photographsof their recent Open Call for Photography: Visualizing Climate Change.

These photographs will be showcased at the TED Countdown Summit 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland, from October 12-15, 2021. Afterwards, they will travel to Glasgow from November 1-12 for a photo exhibition at the make-or-break COP26, supported by Scottish Power.

I am so humbled and honored that three of my photographs were selected by a diverse independent international jury for this global initiative. All of my photographs responded to the first of five core TED Countdown themes â€“ Energy, Transport, Nature, Food, Materials. 

(Energy, or more specifically the energy transition, has been the cÅ“ur of my work for the past decade. I am particularly proud that one of my energy transition photos currently graces the masthead of Project Drawdown’s  climate solutions web page.)

According to the TED Countdown website, the Visualizing Climate Change initiative “ultimately aims to support climate change photographers, educators, communicators, and campaigners by the creation of a new, equitable, and accessible collection of the world’s most impactful photography.”

The 100 winning photographs will be added to the Climate Visuals library â€“ an online resource of images freely available to key groups communicating on climate (editorial media, educators, campaigners, and non-for-profit groups) “to help them engage their audiences in the lead up to COP26 and beyond.”

I recently learned about another energy transition artist whose work will be displayed at both the TED Countdown Summit and the COP26. I have not yet spoken to Jessica Segall, a Brooklyn-based video artist, sculptor and performer, but I hope to interview her soon for a future post on Artists and Climate Change.

In the meantime, please check out Segall’s brilliant short film Say When, one of five short films commissioned and produced by Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun for its new Fast Forwardfilm series. An interview with Segall about her solar energy work can be found here on the Little Sun website.

(Top image by Joan Sullivan.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer focused on the energy transition. She is a member of Women Photograph. In her monthly column for Artists and Climate Change, Joan explores the intersection of art and the energy transition. She is currently experimenting with abstract photography as a new language to express her grief about climate breakdown. You can find Joan on Twitter and Visura.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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