By Joan Sullivan

2021 was an exciting year for artists, poets, and musicians inspired by energy and the energy transition.

Art of Energy, the world’s first virtual art gallery dedicated to all things energy, was launched in February 2021 during the inauguration of the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. 

Founded and directed by Dr. Mette High, Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at St Andrews, the Centre for Energy Ethics is an interdisciplinary research center that provides a platform for innovation and collaboration across the arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences. Its goal is to shift conversations about our complex relationship with energy – how it is produced, distributed, and consumed – in new directions. 

In its inaugural year, the Centre for Energy Ethics hosted a whirlwind of art-related events that underscores its commitment to creating diverse and inclusive spaces in which students, researchers, artists, and the public can embrace uncertainty, ask questions, and push boundaries. 

“From the very beginning, art was absolutely fundamental to the creation of the Centre for Energy Ethics,” explained Dr. High during a recent conversation via Zoom. “Art was not an afterthought.” 

Truer words have never been spoken. Art and artists played a central role in the Centre’s first year: three virtual galleries, a curated soundscape, poetry readings, world premieres of musical compositions, climate fiction writing competition, not to mention a podcast, blog, Energy Café, several workshops, and a pre-COP Mock COP. And all this was in addition to the Centre’s ongoing research agenda, policy workshops, publications, international conferences (including COP26) and fundraising. Kudos to the entire CEE team! This is truly an impressive achievement for your inaugural year. 

So while the Centre’s staff and colleagues take a well-deserved rest over the winter pause, I encourage readers to peruse the Centre’s website to fully appreciate its broad mandate and nurturing ethos of collaboration and inclusivity. 

For this post, I simply want to highlight two of my favorite artistic collaborations organized by the Centre for Energy Ethics in its first year. I’m looking forward to discovering new energy-inspired art in the Centre’s second year. And there’s already a hint of great things to come: an artist-in-residence for emerging artists will be announced in the coming months for a targeted launch in September 2022. Get your C.V.’s ready!

Art was not an after-thought.

– Mette High

As a visual artist, I was pleasantly surprised that out of the diversity of the Centre’s inaugural artistic events, I was singularly attracted to two energy-inspired artworks that involve sound. 

First, the ethereal electronic soundscape created by the brilliant psych pop duo pecq. According to Research Fellow Sean Field, this soundscape was commissioned by the Centre for Energy Ethics for its February 2021 launch. It is a hauntingly beautiful mélangeof field recordings by the Centre’s researchers, superimposed over barely discernible chants from climate activists, and interwoven with electronic sounds that evoke, for me, the static discharge or vibrations of millions of invisible electrons that surround us. This experimental artwork, filmed by Ross Harrison, transported me into a subliminal dreamworld full of creative tension between hope and despair, between light and dark, between the past and the future. It is wonderful.

I was also captivated by the world-premiere of four musical compositions during the Fringe of Gold concert in November 2021. In collaboration with the University’s Laidlaw Music Centre, the Centre for Energy Ethics launched an international competition to commission original musical compositions inspired by artworks in the Art of Energy collection. 

Composers were challenged to create new works as a form of musical ekphrasis, a term of Greek origin that I had to look up: the “phrasing” or re-interpretation of a visual artwork into words or music. 

In response to its call for composers, the Centre received 152 submissions from around the world. Of these, a jury selected the following four winning compositions, each of which earned a £500 commission fee:

• Gaia, Mother Earth, by Emma Arandjelović – inspired by artwork by Katerina Evangelou 
• Rewinding, by Tom Green – inspired by artwork by Adam Sébire
• Pylon, by Neil Tomas Smith – inspired by artwork by Ted Leeming
• Terra Cycles, by Sarah Horick – inspired by artwork by Natasha Awuku

The world premieres of these four compositions were performed by St Andrews music students during the Fringe of Gold music festival (see video above). According to the Centre for Energy Ethics’ website, this concert was “a celebration of music, collaboration and coming together to consider and address big societal questions about how to create a better energy future for us all.”

Collaboration. I can’t think of a more positive vision to usher in the new year. If we have learned anything from the global polycrisis of the first two decades of the third millennium, it is that collaboration across disciplines, across cultures, and across political and organizational divides, is at the heart of a just transition. Not just an energy transition. But more importantly, a human transition towards a new era of resilience and stewardship.

(All photos by Joan Sullivan.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer and writer 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 eco-anxiety about climate breakdown and our collective silence. 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 Amy Brady

This month, I have a wonderful interview with three artists for you. Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, and Jessica Tam are all visual artists working in different mediums. However, they share a fascination with how ecological language (surge, spike, wave, etc.) has worked its way into news reports’ descriptions of large phenomena such as crowds, pandemics, and political movements. They recently closed a show at the A.P.E., Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts titled WAVE/SURGE/SPIKE.

In our interview below, we discuss what inspired this exhibition, why ecological language is so powerful, and the roles that art can play in discourses surrounding the climate crisis.

Your exhibition WAVE/SURGE/SPIKE, which explores how ecological language is often evoked to describe various crises and political currents, is fascinating. Please tell us what inspired it!

Jessica: This show was conceived before a lot of things happened in this country, so prior to the pandemic, in the summer of 2019.

Amanda: We wanted to get feedback on each other’s works, and so we visited each other’s studios. So, it didn’t start out as a show.

Jen: Jess, I remember you coming downstairs to my studio and saying, “Wow, there’s this woman, Amanda, and it feels like we have a lot in common somehow; we’re thinking about the landscape in critical ways that have a thread of conversation within them.” We decided, “We should set up a studio visit.” And then we decided to do a show together.

Jessica: And because we were in conversation with each other, I noticed that we were using similar language to describe the work and to talk about each other’s work. We had a different president at the time, and also saw the language and metaphors used to describe our work in things that were happening nationally. 

Amanda: Also, during the buildup to the 2020 election, there was a lot of election language used in the media [related to landscape] and a lot of angry, angry words.

Jen: We clocked into the idea that abstract ideas and conversations are absolutely embodied by the media in terms of landscape analogies and metaphors.

Jessica: The pandemic ultimately postponed the show, but gave us time to reflect on what was happening, to suggest books to each other that we could read and then discuss. Our work didn’t really change [through this period], but the show’s context changed. For example, I was always making images of the crowd and studying the crowd, but thinking about the crowd before the pandemic was so different. Now, I feel a little bit nervous when I see a group of people, like a crowded bar in a movie or TV show and they’re not wearing masks. But there’s also the positive meaning of crowds as in the protest movements against police violence. The work hasn’t changed, but the readings of the work have multiplied because so many things have happened in the country since this show was first proposed.

Why do you think ecological language is so often used to describe large-scale events like a pandemic or a political movement? Does it communicate something that perhaps other metaphors can’t?

Amanda: When I think about this question, the words that immediately come to mind are acts of God: all these weather events, things people couldn’t explain in the past have been thought to be deities, the gods punishing you, or even gifts from gods. And so I’m thinking about how we have no control over natural disasters. Using this language of things that we can’t control, that’s where that language comes from.

Jen: It’s a threat.

Amanda: It’s not always a threat. It’s just not something we can change. We can only respond to it. To me, that’s the thread running through a lot of the ecological language I’m thinking about, like eruptions, avalanches, storms. 

Jessica: Also, we live in a time where things feel so extreme, and the language needs to match that. When we first started thinking about this show, there was a lot of inflammatory and strong language describing the election and then later on, the pandemic. These are really intense moments. It felt like the only words to describe them were things associated with extreme landscape. It’s not enough to say that someone won the race by a large margin.  Instead, headlines tend to describe a candidate as having won “by a landslide.” Or it’s not just that COVID cases have gone up. The cases were described as daily climbing new “peaks.” Or the idea that we might be looking off of “a cliff” of financial ruin. It had to be extreme because the situation felt extreme. I also don’t think that this is the first time in history that people have felt this way. It just currently feels that the middle ground doesn’t exist. The other thing I think about is how language is about interconnection, about connecting people. Ecological language is about interconnecting things in an environment. I think that it’s useful to describe large-scale events, like pandemics or political movements, that are so much about relationships.

Jen: Explorations of the relationship between humans and landscape has been everywhere, whether it’s the Eurocentric idea of ownership or whatever other cultural relationship. But that exacerbation, exactly how you’re talking about it, Jess, is so important. There is the Eurocentric version of “how do we conquer the landscape,” but it’s phrased as though the landscape is unconquerable. So if it is a landslide, it couldn’t have happened any other way. Years ago, I researched the national park system in America. It really would be more appropriate to call it the national garden system of America because a lot of the national parks were just, “Let’s clear this so that we can see this vista better.”

Amanda: “Let’s make an aesthetically pleasing landscape, and worse, call this ‘nature.’”

Jen: It’s a constant relationship between colonizers and how they relate to the landscape. To hear this dialogue completely and consistently erupt in our media…. 

Amanda: It’s ingrained into our vocabulary and shapes how we look at the world. We don’t even notice that we’re doing it.

Jen: It’s normalized. It goes back to George Lakoff, The Metaphors We Live By. These are now metaphors we live by.

Let’s dig in deeper. What is so powerful about ecological words, phrases, metaphors?
 
Jessica: With my work, I’m interested in eliciting a range of responses. I hope that my work can be gross and funny, unsettling and inspiring, and that these feelings can happen simultaneously. Different emotional registers can happen at the same time by interconnecting abstraction with the work. And maybe that can be linked back to the ecological, interconnecting language and how it’s used to discuss abstract ideas.
 
Amanda:  Yes, I agree. When I think about awe, fear, and jubilance in context with the works that we have put together for this show, the word that comes to mind is “overwhelming,” which goes back to thinking about ecological acts as acts of God. These are all emotions that spill out and overcome. When I was creating the work, I was thinking a lot about “too much.” Things that are too much, too close. You know, we figure it out, we muddle through, but everything feels like too much.
 
Jen: I regret using this next word, but we all made “walls.” We made walls of something, like a wall of people, a wall of temperature, of news text, and a wall of bittersweet. When I think of our work, yes, I see “surge” and “spike,” but I feel like “wave” is really the one that resonates the most for me right now.
 
Amanda: This is the first time I’ve thought of this work in context with the word “walls.” It’s interesting because walls can have both positive and negative connotations. I remember one of the events we were thinking a lot about when we conceived of the show was the media’s description of waves of migration and the southern border wall. It was one of the metaphors we noticed a lot cropping up in the news. It’s interesting, we’re creating walls, and walls can block you from things you need. But they also can protect you from things and create a barrier. There can be good and bad barriers. It’s interesting that we’ve all created these walls of work. Are we creating the work to come to terms with the past two years?
 
Jen: Even more, thinking back to Katrina and the levees? 
 
Jessica: I think you’re implying that the scale increased, right? Because when you talk about walls, you’re talking about work that’s gotten so big that it can be seen as a barrier, or bigger than a person, and it might be overwhelming. But I am reminded of the old idea of a painting as a window. We’re creating work that offers a way to transform the walls that the work is hanging on. For instance, I have one painting that has a lot of hairy arms. And I really like that Amanda said, “This is an upsetting painting, but I like it.”  I thought, “That’s perfect because, you know, it is meant to be a tangle of vines or something, a very thickly grown garden of hairy arms. It could be turned into a wall or a barrier, but it also could be something that you can kind of see through.”
 
Jen: With photography, you don’t start with a size. You frame something, but then you have the ability to make it any size you want. When you print a photograph, you can make it a personal experience for only one person who’s holding a book to see it. Or you can make it an experience where it’s on the wall and two people can stand in front of it, and maybe jockey for position. Or it can be so big that you just feel like you can walk into it. I like the idea of the window and what you’re saying, Jess, because imagining Amanda’s piece installed, I wonder, “Wow, what will it feel like? Will we feel like we’re part of Jess’s crowd? Will we walk into the bittersweet?” We’re thinking about that context of size, considering the way people view the work, interact with the work, and experience it.
 
Jessica:  That applies to our collaborative piece, which is meant to surround people who enter the space. We collaborated on a vinyl drawing made of news headlines that use ecological words and phrases to describe current events. It starts from the front window and then traces of it move into the space in a way where you might happen upon it in a corner of the room or see shadows of it layering over another artwork. The text is almost growing and moving through the space, and creating a kind of landscape.

What do you hope viewers will take away from your exhibition?

Amanda: We’ve been thinking about language. And then we started to notice news headlines’ use of language and think critically about how the media filters information through language. I hope that our viewers will start to think about that or notice it if they haven’t already.

Jessica:  Yes, we talk about the fact that so many strong and tense words are used in headlines to grab our attention that we’ve become numb to them. They’ve kind of lost their meaning because they have become empty clichés. The idea for the collaborative project is that these words are repeated, and then become noise that turns into mark-making that becomes really dense. Language has a presence, but it takes on a different type of meaning. The meaning is going to change. And I hope our exhibition can show that you can look at things from a different perspective. We can show that art can do many things at once. 

Amanda:  When I was making my work, I was hyper-aware of how I was absorbing information. I think the word “doom-scrolling” came up a lot, like “COVID doom-scrolling.” So it’s not only the way we’re getting fed the news, it’s also how we’re ingesting it. At the time, my life was a lot about scrolling down and reading all the really dire, confusing, dramatic headlines. How many of the articles did I actually read? I just kept reading the headlines and feeling sicker and sicker to my stomach. Is that how we’re supposed to ingest the news? I don’t think so, but that’s how a lot of us do it.

Thinking beyond the scope of your respective work to art more generally, what role might art play in discourses surrounding the climate crisis and environmental disaster?

Jen: I can’t help but think about how a lot of art is already an environmental disaster. For instance, as a photographer, what do I do? I don’t use chemicals in film anymore. But what about the cartridges that go in the printer? They’re ostensibly recyclable, but how much plastic is made and shipped and disposed of to create the stuff I use to make art?

Amanda: As a printmaker, I get asked this question a lot. It’s a little bit like the-corporations-versus-the-individuals question, but it’s not entirely, so I don’t want to excuse myself. You can do your best to make your practices as environmentally friendly as possible, but sometimes you reach a point where it’s not possible anymore. However, if you’re making work about the environment, there is value in how your work is changing opinions and bringing these issues into the public view. I guess my hope is that the trade-off is worth it.

Jessica: We’re talking about materials. It’s related. The materials we use are actually contributing to some of the environmental issues we’re trying to bring attention to. And yet we’re destroying the environment as we make the work. The vehicle is part of the problem. But about the role of art in the discourse about climate crisis…. 

Amanda: Art makes these really large, almost unimaginable problems relatable and observable by someone just in their everyday life. I see art as a document of our time, a reflection on where we are now – and I think that’s really important. But also, art is a way to share different points of view and perspectives. Climate change is happening on a global scale – that’s why it’s taken us so long to come to terms with it, if we even have come to terms with it as a society. That’s still debatable, but I hope that a lot of art is making these issues relatable, understandable, and absorbable.

Jessica: It’s also related to what you said, Amanda, about how these issues are so huge and there’s just so much data. Journalists report these facts, but art can help connect the dots.

Jen: As artists, our superpower is “weird synthesis.” We take seemingly disparate ideas and then somehow we spin them into a thing. I really love what you’re saying, Amanda, about the idea that art is a reflection of what’s happening right now. The more artists make work, the more artists show work, hopefully the more people will engage with these ideas. I wonder a lot about who our audiences are. Are we preaching to the choir? I think in Northampton, Massachusetts, we are. But I’ve had exhibitions where the work engaged with national memorial, with death, and it did spark conversations on both sides of the political spectrum, which was hopeful.  

Jessica: I like that idea that the work can be a catalyst to spark these discussions. Jen, you mentioned “weird synthesis.” In order to get people to engage in this conversation, I think “weird” is the key word. It suggests something unexpected in an almost neutral area. It’s possibly something uncomfortable or something really interesting. The work makes you want to question that reaction, and you want to talk about it with someone.

Jen: We’re in a world where everything is so reactionary. Some of my favorite work is the kind of work that, hours after you’ve encountered it, it’s still developing in your head. As a photographer, I think a lot about the latent image, like in the darkroom days when you exposed an image under an enlarger. The image was latent until you put it in the chemicals and it developed on the page. I translate that into a hopeful “additive quality” of art. I know that’s why I value engaging in this process with the two of you; I am so looking forward to putting up this exhibition and laying it out and seeing what happens when the work is next to each other. 

What’s next for you three? Anything you’d like my readers to watch for?

Amanda: We would like to keep developing the show; keep making work for it and keep showing it. One of our original dreams was to have more artists involved. Because of the pandemic and all of these other things, that show got postponed, and it just became the three of us. It was what felt manageable at that time. We want to keep thinking about these ideas and we want to get other artists involved. We also talked about more activities in the gallery, or something to activate the gallery space with actual people, which is not possible right now. In short, we’re interested in expanding this body of work ourselves and with other people.

Jessica: I’ll add that we don’t know how it will expand. My hope is that is will grow and develop organically from this one. It’s the way I normally work anyway. I don’t start off with preconceived ideas – it’s really about the painting and the process of exploration and invention. Also, we don’t have control over the world we live in, so we don’t really know what will affect our thinking next.

Amanda: Yes, we thought this was all going to be about the election and it ended up all being about COVID.

Jen: It’s crazy to think about how the work has evolved. Language has continued to develop, our lives have evolved, and our experience of the media has evolved throughout the period of us trying to figure out this show. We were riding a wave and then it just fell apart because of lockdown and not being able to go anywhere. And then we gently tried to make work, and here we are on the other side, or maybe not the other side, but at least another side. 

(Top image: Tip of the Iceberg by Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, Jessica Tam, dimensions variable, vinyl on glass and wall, 2021)

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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Joining us in the Art House is Dr. Krista Hiser, with the first in a series of occasional features called The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club. The purpose of the book club is to look at climate-themed literature and consider how it can help us engage differently with interdisciplinary topics and existential threats related to the planetary predicament of climate change.

In this episode, Krista reflects on the cli-fi novel Blaze Island by Catherine Bush, and lets her imagination run wild as she pulls together some of the greatest minds in climate fiction.

Dr. Krista Hiser is Professor at Kapiʻolani Community College. She has a PhD in Educational Administration from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has published on community engagement, service learning, organizational change, and post-apocalyptic and cli-fi literature.

You can read a written version of Krista’s essay at The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for Sustainability in Higher Education on Medium.

Next month: Marisa Slaven and the young adult, cli-fi novel, Code Red.

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 Susan Hoffman Fishman 

For Brooklyn-based printmaker Florence Neal, water has always been a dominant presence in her life. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, near the Chattahoochee River, which straddles the southern half of the Alabama and Georgia borders. There she developed an appreciation for the Native American stories about the river as well as first-hand knowledge of the negative impact that the cotton and iron mills of the past and the pervasive industrial pollution had had on its health.   

Providentially, when Neal moved from Georgia to Brooklyn, New York in 1977, she lived first on Water Street in Dumbo and then in Red Hook, twelve feet from where the flood waters stopped rising in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy. The enormous destruction to property and land in her neighborhood from that major water event still haunts her to this day.

Fifteen years ago, as a result of her on-going interest in water, Neal began studying the traditional Japanese wood-block printing method called mokuhanga (moku = wood; hanga = print), whose origin dates back to the Edo period (1603-1867) in Japan. Unlike their Western counterparts, mokuhanga prints are made with water as a primary element: water-based pigments, a wet wood block and handmade Japanese paper moistened by water. Most of Neal’s printmaking and public art projects that she has completed since she adopted mokuhanga have incorporated this printing method.

With her life-long attachment to the Chattahoochee River and a desire to bring attention to its history and importance, Neal returned to her Columbus, Georgia hometown in 2010 as an artist-in-residence at Columbus State University. While she developed her work for the residency, which she called The River Project, she established a relationship with Roger Martin, the local River Warden who was advocating for increased efforts to clean the river. (The title of River Warden harkens back to the early 1600s and refers to people who guarded rivers and streams throughout England. They protected anything associated with the river – drinking water, fish or land use – and knew that rivers were extremely important to the health of their community.) As River Warden for the Chattahoochee, Martin supported the long-term continuation of Neal’s River Project. 

After a period of closely documenting the Chattahoochee through drawings and photographs, Neal began cutting an 8-foot linoleum block print on the banks of the river over a number of days and invited the public to observe the process and relate their own stories about the river to her. The stories, which were recorded for posterity, helped participants understand that the river is a living entity that existed long before the borders divided the land into states, as well as the centuries-old subject of human stories like theirs.

In 2011, Neal was invited to participate in a seminal, large-scale exhibition titled Value of Water at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Curated by American painter Fredericka Foster, the six-month exhibition included 200 works of art that could stand on their own in the Cathedral’s extraordinary space. Notable artists in the exhibition included, among many others, video artist Bill Viola, conceptual artist Jenny Holtzer, multi-disciplinary artist Robert Longo, and painter/printmaker Pat Steir. Neal’s contribution to The Value of Water was a linoleum print titled Reverberations that she had completed before turning to the mokuhanga printing process. Her intention in the piece was to highlight the fragile line that exists between water’s intrinsic beauty and its destructive potential.

Neal’s positive experience engaging the public in The River Project and her desire to incorporate an educational component into her artwork prompted her to consider creating addition public art projects. In 2018, when her Waters of the Future proposal was accepted for an artist’s residency at the Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil, she jumped at the opportunity. Sacatar was an ideal setting for Neal, who fully embraced the program’s goals of presenting public programs, performances and educational opportunities and becoming immersed in the culture of Bahia. 

Using a similar format to what she had developed for The River Project, Neal set up a working station at the local library and other public sites where she asked local residents to consider what the color of water would be in the future and why. She then carved a wood block designed to represent both water and the swirls of a fingerprint. The mokuhanga prints that she created from the wood block reflected the colors suggested by participants. (See installation detail above)

Calling the project, Ãguas do Futuro (Waters of the Future), Neal installed the prints in her studio at Sacatar as a series of scrolls and hung the answers completed by participants as a vertical floor-to-ceiling kinetic sculpture.

After her residency in Brazil was completed, Neal continued to create additional installations of Waters of the Future with different wood block designs and with contributions from both Brazilian and American participants: at the Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, its first American iteration (2019); at the Fulcrum Gallery at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia with a sound component developed by composer Michael Kowalski (2021); and at the Galeria Gravura Brasileira in Sâo Paolo, Brazil. (upcoming 2022). 

In addition to being a prolific artist, Neal is the co-founder and director of the Kentler International Drawing Space, a non-profit gallery in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. The gallery, whose focus is on drawing and other works on paper, is located in a historic structure built in 1877 by the Kentler family to house a men’s haberdashery. Established in 1990, Kentler offers exhibitions, events, an extensive educational program and flatfiles containing the work of over 290 local, national and international artists. 

As the world’s waterways and oceans continue to be impacted by manmade pollution and the disastrous effects of climate change, Neal joins the long list of artists around the world who are calling attention to our responsibility, like the River Wardens of old, to protect the waters that are so critical to the health of our communities and to serve as stewards for these precious resources. 

(Top image: Ãguas do Futuro, detail, mokuhanga on washi scroll (handmade Japanese paper), installed in Bahia, Brazil, 2018)

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 reframing of the biblical creation myth. In 39 panels, it speaks to the importance and beauty of all living beings and what we stand to lose as a result of climate change. This fall, she is participating in an artist’s residency at Planet, an international company providing global satellite images, where she is focusing on the proliferation of sinkholes caused by climate change. 

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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 Mary Woodbury

I had a wonderful talk with Michael Mohammed Ahmad, editor of the anthology After Australia, founding director of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, author, and so much more. Our conversation opened up doors for me to explore the promotion of literacy around the world. Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney. The movement provides research, training, mentoring, and employment opportunities for emerging and established writers and arts practitioners from Indigenous and non-English speaking backgrounds.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This interview explores Dr. Ahmad’s novels, but focuses primarily on After Australia(published by Affirm Press, in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia and Sweatshop Literacy Movement).

In this unflinching anthology, twelve of Australia’s most daring Indigenous writers and writers of color provide a glimpse of Australia as we head toward the year 2050. Climate catastrophe, police brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule, and the erasure of black history provide the backdrop for stories of love, courage, and hope.

The anthology features Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Ortiz, Roanna Gonsalves, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law, and Hannah Donnelly. It is edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The  original concept is by Lena Nahlous.

A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

First, I would love to know more about the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, of which you are the founding director. How did this movement come about and what kind of success has it had?

Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney, devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing, and critical thinking. Over the past decade, Sweatshop has mentored an ongoing ensemble of emerging and established writers from the region who have come to be known as the Sweatshop Writers Group. Sweatshop has also facilitated writing workshops and residencies in schools and universities, produced publications, podcasts, and short films, and we have presented book launches, seminars, readings, and performances at writers’ festivals across Australia.

It is difficult to know exactly how successful we have been in meeting our goals, but it always brings me great joy to think about the thousands of young and emerging writers whom we have supported over the years – witnessing their intellectual development and providing them with public platforms to share their stories. I am particularly proud of the ground-breaking anthologies Sweatshop has produced in recent memory, such as Sweatshop Women, which is Australia’s first publication produced entirely by Indigenous women and women of color, and Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Bigotry, which features 39 short stories and poems about the real-life experiences of racism faced by Australians on a daily basis.

You have also written some novels: The Tribe,  The Lebs, and The Other Half of You. What are these stories about?

The Tribe was the first novel I wrote in a collection of works on Arab and Muslim Australian identity. It is told from the perspective of Bani Adam, a fictional version of myself as a child. The book details Bani’s domestic experiences within a large Lebanese-Australian family.

The second novel I wrote in this collection is The Lebs. The book follows on from The Tribe, only this time the stakes are much higher. Bani is now a teenager and he is dealing with many of the usual issues teenage boys face – coming to terms with his gender, sexuality, race, and class while also trying to obtain an education. This is complicated for any normal teenager, but for a ‘Leb’ growing up in the post-9/11 era, what I am describing is a war zone. Bani faces a political climate that is dominated by news headlines in Australia and around the world, which have demonized and homogenized young men like himself as criminals, gangsters, sexual predators, and terrorist suspects.

I wrote The Tribe and The Lebs with very clear intent: I was young and idealistic and genuinely believed that I could improve the global perception of Arabs and Muslims through my stories. But when it came to my most recent novel, The Other Half of You, writing it was like crying – the book just fell out of me involuntarily. I remember the night my son was born; his mother was asleep in her hospital bed as I sat in the darkness before her. I was cradling Kahlil in my right arm and writing on my phone in my left hand. At the time, I did not know why I had suddenly felt this tremendous urge to write; the words were just pouring from me. Later, when I read over what I had typed, I discovered that I was reliving the surreal and mystical scenes I had witnessed during Jane’s labour and Kahlil’s entrance into this world. These words ultimately became The Other Half of You. If there is such a thing as a soul, and if it’s possible that your soul can somehow be transferred onto a page, then my soul now exists inside this one book.

I found you by way of a Discord community called Rewilding Our Stories, where one of our community members gave the After Australia anthology a really nice review. You edited the anthology, whose authors are Indigenous and writers of color, writing mostly speculative or modern urban fiction and prose. How did this anthology come about?

In 2019, I was asked to develop a new anthology which imagined Australia in the year 2050. Originally conceived by the executive director of Diversity Arts Australia, Lena Nahlous, the publication would bring together Indigenous writers and writers of color from every state and territory in Australia. Together, they would create a collection of short stories and poems in the literary form called “speculative fiction.” In the aftermath of the Black Summer Bushfires and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the #BlackLivesMatter protests, I could never have speculated that by the time the publication was complete, it would look more like a picture of our current reality, rather than our inevitable future.

As the editor of the anthology, I pictured a book that would imagine a world after empires, after colonies, and after white supremacy. So I called it After Australia. However, the writer of Martu ancestry, Karen Wyld, sent me a story that intertwined three historical timelines, disentangling the complexity of contemporary Indigenous identity. And award-winning author, Roanna Gonsalves, wrote a love letter to the printing press, which examined the Governor’s Order in 1814. All at once it occurred to me that Australia’s future could only be written on the foundations of our past and present.

As with a lot of fiction that explores environmental losses, some of the stories deal with climate change and intersect directly with oppression in the form of racism and bigotry. What are your thoughts about the intersectionality of ecological and socio-economic tragedies? Do you think things will ever get better?

Firstly, with regards to the question on the relationship between ecology and socio-economic tragedy, I strongly recommend the book, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, written by one of Australia’s greatest anthropologists and intellectuals, Professor Ghassan Hage.

Secondly, with regards to the question of whether things will get better, let me take it back to After Australia: I think by far the most unique aspect of the anthology is the way in which all the stories and poems converge into a unified voice, speaking for our past, present and future as a whole. Wiradjuri writer Hannah Donnelly guides us on this journey with her collection of stories titled “Black Thoughts.” In spite of the challenges we currently face as a nation, Hannah’s words remind us that there is hope as the world continues to unravel: Our time is a loop. We’ll find our way back, before, after…

What power do stories and art have in bringing about a more just world, and what other projects is Sweatshop doing right now to expand that goal?

More broadly than just “stories” and “art,” I believe in the power of literacy to bring about a just world. The entire Sweatshop movement was inspired by the work of African-American civil rights activist, feminist, and writer, bell hooks, who argues that, “All steps towards freedom and justice in any culture are dependent on mass-based literacy movements, because degrees of literacy so often determine how we see what we see.”

In terms of other projects Sweatshop is doing right now – thank you, this question presents a perfect opportunity to announce that Sweatshop, Affirm Press, and Diversity Arts are currently developing a follow-up to After Australia, called Another Australia. This time I have taken a backseat as the sub-editor, and the wonderful Tongan-Australian writer and general manager of Sweatshop, Winnie Dunn, is at the helm as the editor.

Another Australia will feature a new cohort of super-talented and award-winning First Nations and POC writers, including: Osman Faruqi, Declan Fry, Amani Haydar, Jamie Marina Lau, Shirley Le, L-Fresh the Lion, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Sisonke Msimang, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Sara Saleh, and Nardi Simpson, and poetry and linocut illustrations from Omar Musa.

Definitely keep an eye out for Another Australia, which will be hitting bookshelves in July 2022!

I am so excited about that! Did you want to talk about any of the writers or experiences in After Australia in more depth? Do the stories all take place in Australia?

From the groundwork laid-out by the writers I’ve already discussed in this interview – Hannah, Karen, and Roanna – the other contributors each interpreted the theme of the book in their own unique and personal way: Zoya Patel detailed a dystopian (not-too-distant-and-kind-of-already-here) future where bushfires have ravaged the ACT and our neighboring islands have drowned. As the brown people are trying to get in throughout Zoya’s story, in screenwriter Michelle Law’s story, the brown people are trying to get out, while under the occupation of a fascist society that makes 1984 look like The Little Mermaid. Meanwhile, Noongar author Claire G. Coleman introduces us to the Ostraka Law of 2039; her story subverts the notions of systemic institutions, and explores both the physical and psychological prisons that manifest in a racialized society. Newcomer Sarah Ross re-writes her experiences as the child of an interracial same-sex couple amidst the rubble of the Taj Mahal; and emerging poet Kaya Ortiz plays out our future as a lyrical exercise in multiple choice. Multi-award-winning author and illustrator Ambelin Kwaymullina sends Australia 2020 a dire message from the Ngurra Palya of 2050; and writer and cultural critic Khalid Warsame depicts an environment that will likely feel the most mundane and safe among all the stories in After Australia, until you realize it isn’t.

Perhaps the most controversial contribution in After Australia is written by the poet Omar Sakr. In his short story, titled ‘White Flu,” Omar dissects the vivid texture of multicultural suburbia against a global pandemic that will be frighteningly familiar to readers at this moment in time, only this particular virus has selected “white” people as its primary casualty.

And lastly, in an equally prophetic story, the playwright and author originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Future Destiny Fidel, lays bare the tragic future and destiny of so many young black men. Future’s story, “Your Skin is the Only Cloth You Cannot Wash,” recounts an incident in which he was going from door-to-door selling solar panels to the residents of Mount Ommaney, Brisbane. Suddenly, he is confronted and arrested by a group of white police officers, after a complaint had come through from a concerned citizen about a strange black man wandering the neighborhood. Future’s story arrived on my desk at the same time that protests throughout the United States and the rest of the world had erupted, following the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer; and a lesser known incident in which an innocent African-American man from Georgia, named Ahmaud Arbery, was violently gunned-down by two white vigilantes that claimed he looked like a suspect in several break-ins in their area.

Reflecting on all these stories now, I’m remembering what a truly special collection After Australia is, and I really hope people take the time to read it.

Do you have any other thoughts to share or any personal stories you are working on now?

As a matter of fact, something kind of odd happened yesterday while I was praying at Auburn Mosque: The ghost of Christopher Hitchens appeared before me and said, “Stop wasting your time, there’s no afterlife.”

Anything else to add?

In a country where Indigenous people are regularly assaulted and killed by police; where young African men are demonized as â€œgangsters” by our news media and politicians; where Pacific Islanders are overrepresented in our prisons; where Muslims cannot conduct their Friday prayers without ever wondering if an Australian-born white supremacist is lurking outside with a machine gun; and where we cannot go into self-isolation without blaming four-and-a-half billion Asians; solidarity between all Australians – black, brown and white – is central to our survival.

I can’t thank you enough for this brilliant insight into your wonderful work with literacy, people, and our planet. It’s truly inspiring.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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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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