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.
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.
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.
Trickle Down, acrylic painting incorporating original hand-painted paper on stretched canvas, 30â€x 40†(Blazing)
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.
Hope Springs Eternal, acrylic painting incorporating original paper (hand-painted & monoprint) on stretched canvas, 15″x 30″ (Blazing)
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, 30â€x 40â€(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.
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.
Jellyfish bloom
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.
Penelope Davis’ studio at Carlton Connect, LAB-14 with Sea Change in progress, 2016. Photo by Penelope Davis.
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.
Sea Change, detail. Silicon, nylon thread and plastic, 2017. Photo credit by Simon Strong.
Sea Change, detail. Silicon, nylon thread and plastic, 2017. Photo by Simon Strong.
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.
Blister, silicon, steel and nylon thread, 115 x 115 x 55 cm, 2021.
(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.Â
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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.
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 – Energy, Transport, Nature, Food, Materials.
(Energy, or more specifically the energy transition, has been the cœur 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.â€
The 100 winning photographs will be added to the Climate Visuals library – 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.â€
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.
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.
If you suffer from climate grief, you know what it’s like to feel hopeless, alone, or bewildered by society’s business-as-usual response to our existential threat. Wanting those feelings to go away is normal, but grief can lead to awareness and compassion in ways that actually advance political action and climate solutions. Paradoxically, grief can also provide a kind of strength and clarity when conventional hopes are shaken. As climate activist Tim DeChristopher once said, “In happy times the weight of despair is oppressive, but in stormy times that weight is an anchor that can get you through.†This episode explores the value of grief as a way to overcome collective denial as we move into an uncertain climate future. While most environmentalists are urging us to focus on hope, I point out that grief and hope aren’t mutually exclusive, and for many, grief may even be our best ally in an age of climate crisis.
Facing It is a podcast about climate grief and eco anxiety. It explores the psychological toll of climate change, and why our emotional responses are key to addressing this existential threat. In each episode of Facing It, I explore a different way we can harness despair to activate meaningful solutions.
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Dr. Jennifer Atkinson is an Associate Professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her seminars on Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, the Seattle Times, Grist, the Washington Post, KUOW and many other outlets. Jennifer is currently working on a book titled An Existential Toolkit for the Climate Crisis (co-edited with Sarah Jaquette Ray) that offers strategies to help young people navigate the emotional toll of climate breakdown.
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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.
Beth Dary’s sculptures, installations, and drawings have in common deep layers of meaning, imaginative combinations of materials, and subtle delicacy in form and color. Her insatiable curiosity for exploring diverse materials and processes results in a wide array of formal expressions, ranging from ceramics to photography, and fabric to glass. In this interview, she shares some insights into her work, her process of exploration, and talks about her upcoming projects.
You grew up by the sea and the notion of water and patterns in nature seem to play a central role in all of your work. Can you tell me more about it?
Nature has always been an inspiration and is an integral aspect of my work. I was born and raised on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and remember being acutely aware of the power and beauty of the ocean and the coastal environment, even as a child.
I spent many hours walking the shoreline, beach-combing with my mom. On her daily morning walk, she would clean the beach, picking up the trash that washed ashore while I picked up as many interesting objects as I could carry home – beach glass, seedpods, fishing lures, shells, driftwood. Another visceral memory is of the Nor’easters and hurricanes we weathered and the almost ritual routine we had preparing for and riding out these storms. We would board up the house, light the kerosene lamps, and get out our books. When the storms passed, we would walk the neighborhood to survey the damage. This has left a lasting impression on me and has also played a large role in how I view the natural world.
Moving forward to my adult life, I have always lived near the water’s edge – whether on Cape Cod, New York City, on the Mississippi River in Memphis, and New Orleans. As a result, I have continued to bear witness to the awesome forces of nature and climate, including having experienced Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy first hand.
Please tell me about your project Elements of Ambivalence from 2006.
I was living in New Orleans in 2005, where my family and I had settled after two years of traveling. Less than two months after moving into the house we had purchased, we were on the move again, hitting the road with our then four year-old less than 24 hours before Katrina made landfall. Once it became clear that we would not be able to return home for some time, we resettled in New York City. That fall I was a recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Gulf Coast Residency, which was created in response to the many artists who were displaced by the storm. Being able to go back to work with a community of 12 other artists who had also landed in New York after leaving the Gulf Coast was the first major step in recovering personally and professionally.
Elements of Ambivalence, 10’ x 17’ x 4″, fabric, pins, encaustic, 2006.
The “studios,†located in an empty floor of a Lower Manhattan office building, were separated by fabric walls as they were put together quickly to create an instant work space for the artists. It was during this residency that I began the Elements of Ambivalenceseries. I decided to use one of the 10’ x 17’ fabric walls as a canvas to create a large-scale, double-sided drawing; since I didn’t have any materials to work with at the time, this seemed like a good place to start. The drawing was inspired by the circle maps I was seeing in the newspapers to describe the diaspora of the New Orleans population and communities displaced by the hurricane, as well as the mold patterns that formed in people’s water-damaged homes, including ours.
I chose to use florist pins to create the drawing. On one side of the canvas were thousands of reflective black and white round-headed ball pins; the opposite side revealed only the sharp sheath part of the pin. This duality relates to the simultaneous beauty and danger of the natural world. Also included in this body of work were kinetic sculptures made using steel hoops covered with discarded sections of the wall fabric embedded with pins to make individual pieces that hung in the space at eye level.
You do public art as well. Can you tell me about your project Emerge?
In 2006-2007 I returned to New Orleans with my family after spending a year in New York. It was during this time that I created my first public art project in conjunction with Aorta, a guerilla-style artist group dedicated to placing artwork into areas that were heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Emerge was located in New Orleans City Park. The installation consisted of placing hundreds of cast paper pulp “pods†into the landscape of a low-lying wetland on the grounds in the park. For a casual passerby, the distinction between “artistic†and “natural†phenomenon would blur. The sculptural elements of the piece, which were inspired by objects found in nature like a gourd or seed pod, were created using all organic materials and placed in a way that could be imagined as an integral part of the life cycle of the plants in that area. In this way I used “art†to seed something of potential growth for a landscape that was flooded and badly damaged during the storm. Perhaps these sculptures were even collected as a curiosity by a visitor to the park – maybe a child around the same age I was when trailing behind my mother on the beach.
Emerge, sizes varied, cast paper pulp, 2007
The sculptures, many of them unfinished fragments, were part of an earlier body of work that was interrupted by the hurricane, sitting untouched on my studio work table for over a year. The use of elements of a partially completed work connoted a disruption of a work in progress, much the way so many lives were caught in a moment at the time of the storm and dropped elsewhere out of their intended context.
Let’s talk about your glass work. What is the genesis?
In 2007 we returned to New York, where we have lived ever since. Coming out of my experience with Emerge, a friend told me about “Art on the Beach,†a 1970’s era artist movement in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan on land that was, at that time, a vacant sandy landfill. By 2007, the area had transformed into a dense urban neighborhood where we happened to be living.
Much of my free time was spent along the Battery Park waterfront in the playgrounds with our young son. A favorite spot of mine is the Lily Pool, a duck pond just south of the World Financial Center. Thinking about “Art on the Beach,†and seeing bubbles floating over the pond from the nearby playground where my son was playing, I was inspired to propose Equilibrium as a public art installation made up of bubble sculptures that would float in the Lily Pool.
Equilibrium, sizes varied, blown glass, 2008. Photo courtesy of Steve Gross and Susan Daly (L) and Scott Ferguson(R).
The sculptures were immersed in the water, floating amidst the plant and animal life inhabiting the pond during the summer and fall of 2008. My hope for Equilibrium was to add a bit of curiosity and playfulness to the viewer’s day as the sculptures reflected the natural surroundings including the passersby themselves, as well as alluding to the metaphorical bubble that inspired the installation. The “bubble†has taken on many simultaneous meanings for me as I have worked with the form over the years – including air bubbles of CO2 trapped in Arctic ice that track climate change, and biomorphic forms that relate to metastasizing cells.
As it happened, the installation took place in the fall of 2008 during the height of the subprime mortgage collapse and the fall of Lehman Brothers. At that moment, by its location near the heart of the Financial District, the installation took on the added context and meaning of the financial “bubble,†which was much on people’s minds that fall.
Beth Dary at the Lily Pond in Battery Park City in New York City. Photo courtesy of Steve Gross and Susan Daly.
You are working with diverse materials and processes: paper, glass, drawing, sculpture, video, and ceramics. Tell me a bit about your relationship to materials and media.
My 2010 installation Emersion began with a fascination with barnacles that grow in abundance on Cape Cod. I felt this kind of sea life worked as a metaphor for the resilient and adaptable qualities of humans in a time of global warming and rising tides.
I had begun making barnacle sculptures with oil clay and sticking them directly onto the walls, ceiling, and floor of my studio and I agreed to turn them into a full-scale gallery installation. I spent time at a residency developing ideas for how to realize the installation. Some key reading material that I brought with me included Darwin and the Barnacle, which deepened my understanding of how these crustaceans have adapted to changing environments, and On The Water/Palisade Bay, a book that grew out of “Rising Currents†(a show featuring the work of a friend, Marc Tsurumaki, and his firm LTL Architects at the Museum of Modern Art), which proposed architectural projects along the coastal edge of New York City, exploring strategies to adapt to sea level rise. Using the walls of the studio, I developed the idea of creating wall sculptures hanging in an array that would mirror the topography of marine environments where barnacles thrive.
Emersion, 7’ x 31’ x 4″, porcelain, 2010-present. Photo courtesy of Heriard-Cimino Gallery.
After returning home, I had two months to fabricate work with a medium that I had never used. Enlisting the help of an experienced ceramic artist, and a group of my friends, I had small ‘barnacle parties’ in my studio where we created thousands of hand-built barnacle clusters designed to hang in formation on the wall of the project room of the Heriard-Cimino Gallery. Emersion eventually became an immersive installation that filled the gallery, merging and overlapping the contours of New York Harbor and the Mississippi River, exploring the idea that we are connected through global waterways.
(Top image: Emersion (detail), sculptures range in size from 1″ diameter to 10″ x 12″ x 5″. All photos courtesy of the artist unless otherwise indicated.)
This interview is part of a content collaboration between Art Spiel and Artists & Climate Change. It was originally published on Art Spiel on January 8, 2019 as part of an ongoing interview series with contemporary artists.
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Etty Yaniv works on her art, art writing, and curatorial projects in Brooklyn. She has exhibited her immersive installations in museums and galleries, nationally and internationally. Yaniv founded the platform Art Spiel to highlight the work of contemporary artists through art reviews, studio visits, and interviews with artists, curators, and gallerists. Yaniv holds a BA in Psychology and English Literature from Tel Aviv University, a BFA from Parsons School of Design, and an MFA from SUNY Purchase.
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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.
Indigenous communities all over the world have been caretakers of this land for thousands of years. Many communities created caretaking traditions that worked in tandem with the Earth, never taking more than what was needed, and always giving back. These communities were able to function in both self-sustaining and Earth-sustaining ways, prospering in ways that didn’t put human life above everything else. However, with the spread and destruction of colonization, many of these sustainable practices were forced from tradition. With disease, genocide, and assimilation fueled by ethnocentric attitudes, many of the traditions, cultures, languages, and caretaking practices have been lost… but this does not mean that they were forgotten.
For this installment of the Indigenous Voices series, and in honor of World Indigenous People’s Day, which was on Monday August 9, I want to explore and share a traditional caretaking practice that can guide us toward global climate solutions. The history of Indigenous communities is proof that there is both truth and great purpose to the techniques they used to care for the Earth. And in the wake of our global climate crisis, these caretakers and their knowledge might just be the solution to our dying planet. In the last three years, we have seen the most intense and destructive wildfires decimate parts of Australia and the West Coast of the U.S., and every year that our planet warms, the possibility of these uncontrollable fires destroying entire ecosystems rises as well.
Cultural burning has long been a practice for Indigenous communities around the world. In Australia, Aboriginal tribes practiced cultural burns (cool burns) for the purpose of saving flora and fauna in a wildfire-prone environment. These low-intensity, “cool†burns allow time for animals and insects to escape, are not hot enough to destroy young trees, and keep grass seeds intact for regrowth. On the West Coast of the U.S., tribes would use controlled burns to stimulate forest regrowth, destroy invasive species harmful to the health of the forest, and sustain overall environmental cycles.
Indigenous tribes in both Australia and the U.S. also used controlled burns for cultural practices integral to their long standing traditions. For the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa Tribes of Northern California, traditional burn practices would produce strong hazel stalks that were gathered and woven into baby baskets, traditional dancers hats, and resource gathering tools. The fires help tan oak acorns to drop, and burn invasive plants that suck up rain water, letting more clean, cool water flow down into the Klamath river for the salmon. In a piece on controlled burns written for The Nature Conservancy, Bill Tripp, Director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karuk Tribe, said:
Without being able to freely engage in our cultural burning practices, we lose our culture. We can’t teach someone how to make a basket if we don’t have the materials that are pliable enough to make them. And we can’t access our food resources. We lose our salmon, we lose our acorns, we lose all those things, and we don’t have a culture. We just slowly disappear.Â
The D’harawal Aboriginal people of Western Australia use cool burning to replenish the Earth and enhance the biodiversity that sustains their ways of living. For example, the ash from the burn fertilizes the soil and the potassium from the ash encourages flowering. And soft burning encourages rain: It warms the environment to a particular atmospheric level, and once the warm and the cool meet, rain falls, helping mitigate fires and encourage/sustain agriculture growth. Cool burns protect Aboriginal lands and clear access to areas for cultural uses like hunting, access to fish traps, and ceremony.
In addition to controlled burns being fundamental to the prosperity of the cultures, traditions, and practices of Indigneous tribes, it is clear that without these moderate/low-intensity burns to clear fuel, forests and landscapes quickly become vulnerable and primed for destructive wildfires. Unfortunately, because of the U.S. government’s interference with this practice (paired with the destructive effects of climate change), fire is now seldom connected with its life-giving and revitalizing qualities. Fire-suppression rules have forcefully stopped the ability of Indigenous communities to conduct traditional burns, and American Indians still face persecution and penalty for using fire for their traditions. However, it seems progress is slowly being made. In Australia, controlled burning is now widely used to mitigate the effects of destructive wildfires, and parts of the West Coast of the U.S. are starting to take advantage of a climate solution that rests in the hands of the very people and cultures they once sought to destroy.
Controlled burns are just one piece of Indigenous land management and caretaking that should be implemented as solutions to the climate crisis. Indigenous communities understand the environment and understand the complexities of how to have a sustainable relationship with nature. I strongly believe that these are the voices that we need to listen to as we work together to save our home. And I strongly believe that the attitude most humans have towards the environment needs to significantly change, because each choice we make that negatively affects the environment will eventually negatively affect us. This Earth has given us a place to grow, learn, explore, and create. Let us save her so that future generations may get the chance to enjoy her as well.
GiGi Buddie is an American Indian artist and student studying theatre, with an emphasis in acting, at Pomona College. Whether it be through acting or working in tech, GiGi has dedicated much of her life to the theatre. In the summer of 2019, her passion for art and environmental justice took her to the Baram River in Malaysian Borneo where she, alongside Pomona professors, researched the environmental crisis and how it has been affecting the Indigenous groups that live along the river. As a result of her experience researching and traveling, she student-produced the Pomona College event for Climate Change Theatre Action during the fall 2019 semester.
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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.
This month, I’m delighted to share with you an interview with novelist Matt Bell, whose latest novel, Appleseed, hit shelves earlier this month. The novel spans centuries, touching upon how climate change, colonialism, capitalism, and other forces have shaped – and re-shaped – the Earth and our societies. Matt’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. His short story collection is called A Tree or a Person or a Wall, and he’s also the author of a non-fiction book about the video game Baldur’s Gate II. He currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
What drew you to the subject of climate change, and what inspires you to explore it in your work?
I think there was a time when climate change and all the problems associated with it were so overwhelming that I felt a kind of nihilistic paralysis whenever I thought about it. But one reason to write a novel is to think and feel your way through a problem, and I do feel like writing Appleseed made me feel productively engaged (in my own way) in necessary learning and thought instead of indulging in further avoidance or denial.
Your novel spans more than 1,000 years. Please discuss this artistic decision. What are you hoping to show readers?
I began with the 1799 storyline, with the idea to retell Johnny Appleseed as a half-human, half-animal faun or satyr, but as I continued writing about the wilderness of that time (and about that era’s settler colonialism), I began drafting parts set in the future as well. One of my fascinations is the inexhaustibility of myths and fairy tales and folk tales, the way retelling them in no way diminishes them – there’s an immortality to such stories, and so maybe also to their characters, who can often be put in stories set in different times and different places than they originally did without any lessening of effect. I was also thinking about Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, one of the most useful ideas I’ve come across in the last ten years: for anyone reading this who hasn’t heard the term before, it’s essentially any event or phenomenon that is massively dispersed through space and time, impossible to know in its entirety from any one place or moment. Obviously, climate change is one such hyperobject, as are unlimited growth capitalism, manifest destiny, settler colonialism, industrial agriculture, the fossil fuel economy, and other topics Appleseed touches on. Writing a longer time span lets me show those forces as they appeared in different times and places, linking their different manifestations to each other.
It was also, of course, fun to write a thousand-year-long book! It was an exciting problem to tackle, and hopefully it makes for an entertaining read.
You’re originally from Michigan but live now in Arizona. Has living in the Southwest shaped how you think of nature or humanity’s relationship to the environment?
When we moved to Arizona, I had to relearn the seasons, the plants and animals, even how just to be outside during the day. Living near Phoenix changed my whole routine: in the summer here, I get up at 4am to go running in the dark, something I never would’ve done in Michigan, which means I’ve probably seen more sunrises in seven years in Arizona than in the rest of my life combined. But the real shaping happened when my wife Jessica and I started spending a lot of time in the Sonoran Desert, trying to learn as much as we could about the plants and animals here. At first, it was as much about trying to feel at home here as anything, but we quickly discovered how the more you learn to see about a particular landscape, the more you see: as you learn the names of the most obvious plants and animals, you start to see the next layer, and then the next and the next. Jess is a birder and a certified master naturalist, and getting to spend time in the desert alongside her particular form of attention and knowledge has helped me see more of it too. Later, when we returned to visit Michigan, we found that our newly trained attention came home with us, and made additional things visible even in the places we’d spent most of our lives. It’s been a transformative experience, and I’m so glad to continue to get to know both of these landscapes I think of as home.
Do you think about climate change beyond what you write in your novels?
I don’t know how anyone alive in this moment could honestly avoid thinking about climate change. Where I live in Arizona, there’s been a wildfire burning more than fifty miles away for weeks now, filling the air with brown smoke: I smell it when I go out running, even though it’s so dark out I can’t see the smoke yet. How could I not think about it? Living in Phoenix the past few years has been an obvious place to think and write about climate from, because causes and costs are so apparent here, but being back home in Michigan for part of the summer didn’t mean getting to avoid it. I’m writing this from my in-laws’ place in Michigan’s Thumb, where a tornado last week hit a lakeside town that has never had tornado damage before: afterward, I watched the fire chief on the news talking about how they would change the way they prepared and responded to extreme weather in the future. That’s climate change too, even if no one involved says the words.
Appleseed also touches on genetic engineering of food. As someone from Kansas who protested Monsanto in high school, I understand the issue is complex. What did you learn about this subject while writing the novel? Did writing Appleseed change how you think of genetic engineering?
You probably knew more as an engaged high schooler than I did starting out: I had a lot of things I thought I knew, but it was a jumble of news stories, things people I grew up with said back in Michigan, and scattered bits of reading. I’ve been a vegetarian for a little over a decade now, a decision I made because I decided I no longer wanted to eat factory-farmed meat, but for a long time I didn’t look into where the plants or processed products I was eating instead came from.
In the year before I started Appleseed, I started reading a lot more about industrialized agriculture in general, research that eventually provided a good chunk of the plot and the political worldbuilding in the near-future storyline. Among other questions, I earnestly wondered how companies might try to drastically engineer crops or even animals to survive in the future we were making, because it seems so likely that it has been done and will be done to greater degrees in the future. So maybe now I know more than I did when I started, but I think there are still a lot of complexities I don’t see easy answers to, especially as the climate crisis brings new challenges to agriculture everywhere. All those complexities, however, don’t change how angry I feel about companies like Monsanto trying to be sure they control the future, in effect deciding these questions for everyone else.
I realize this is a funny question for someone whose book is just hitting shelves, but what’s next for you?
Next up for me is a craft book on novel writing, rewriting, and revision titled Refuse to Be Done, which will be out from Soho Press in March 2022. After that? Hopefully the novel I’m writing now, if all goes according to plan.
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.
She designs “Fitbit for the planet†apps that help social impact entrepreneurs and sustainability professionals implement powerful data, game design, and behavior-change techniques that create real and measurable change. She is the co-founder of Energy Lollipop and Urban Canopy in San Francisco – startups that are devoted to bringing down the peak CO2 released by the electricity grid.
If you think a gamified Earth sounds fun, you might enjoy joining these Fitbit for the Planet video hangouts Katie organizes each month with our community of world-changers and a special expert guest.
Next month: Elli Sparks, a climate change activist, wrote a story to encourage and comfort herself. After reading the story and sharing it with family, friends, colleagues, and at public events, we have turned it into a radio play.
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.
Is reason or emotion more important in driving climate action? Will solutions to mass extinction come from the head or the heart? Or are these binaries themselves part of the problem? While some climate activists argue that we should focus on facts instead of feelings, others know that our intense emotional response to climate chaos is far from irrational. Moreover, feelings like anger, hope, anxiety, and fear profoundly shape our perceptions of the world, and can motivate us to act or shut down and retreat. To better understand how those mental and emotional states relate to environmental crisis and public perceptions of risk, this episode explores why emotions matter in the climate battle.
This segment also looks at the work of Rachel Carson to explore how narrative can rouse the public to action, and draws on insights from evolutionary psychology to examine the ancient relation between mind and environment as expressed in feelings of love and wonder toward the natural world.
Facing It is a podcast about climate grief and eco anxiety. It explores the psychological toll of climate change, and why our emotional responses are key to addressing this existential threat. In each episode of Facing It, I explore a different way we can harness despair to activate meaningful solutions.
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.
