By Etty Yaniv

Throughout her highly imaginative multidisciplinary projects, Jessica Segall has been engaging with a wide range of fragile ecological sites, frequently with animals as her collaborators – for instance, swimming with tigers and sculpting with live bees. In this interview, Segall shares some of her work and thought processes, and talks about her upcoming projects. 

You are a multidisciplinary artist using a diverse range of media, some most unconventional – lemons, refrigerators, tigers. How do you choose your media? Can you give me a couple of examples?

The media in each work is chosen for its utility or ability to best answer a proposition. There also has to be a transformation. Usually one of the material questions is: Will this work? Sometimes half of the proposition hangs in the air for a while until I find its material counterpoint. Fugue in B Flat started that way, as a material prompt and then a proposal before it became a sculpture. I had always wanted to work with the free pianos available off of Craigslist – its an unusually available material in our time and place. Pianos once had high enough value in craftsmanship and social meaning that families would pay to have them hauled up flights of stairs. But today, an inherited piano is not worth enough to sell, or pay to have removed, so every day there are new pianos available for free in New York City.

Years later, when I was learning to keep bees, the piano resurfaced. Bees are the last animals we colonized into livestock. In more primitive beekeeping methods, bees formed their own hive structures in skeps, or baskets. But to more efficiently extract the honey without harming bees, the idea of “bee space” was utilized, which determines the size of beehive boxes and frame proximity. While the interior architecture of the beehive is laid out within 3/8 of an inch, the superstructure of a beehive could be anything, which led me to consider the piano as a potential hive, considering the available space in between the soundboard and harp.

There are other reasons to work with pianos and bees of course – I play music, studied Anthroposophy and am invested in ecological futures. But practically, the material has to perform.

In your site-specific work, you seem to be drawn to vulnerable ecological sites. Can you talk a bit on what draws you there?

Yes, the sites I chose to work in have great ecological vulnerability, or speak to human vulnerability. They deal with both the human and geological timescales. The Arctic is a timeless space, a geological era before and after human life on earth. Placing the Global Seed Vault on Svalbard was a way of safekeeping our genetic future, but even there, the permafrost is unreliable, in a big part from our own making. I treated my visit to the agricultural basin of California as disaster tourism – the almond blooms in my photos are often confused for the cherry blossom in Japan. But that beauty is monoculture relying on the major efforts of on-demand water and pollination services. In a way, these are all economic landscapes, shaped by human consumption.

What do you think brought you to art?

Honestly, I was too young to remember! My first painting was on my grandfather’s easel. My family introduced me to art culture and activism from a young age. Growing up, I had a great-uncle who made kinetic Dada sculptures, and my cousin was a performance artist in the East Village in the 90s. Both my parents wrote books. Luckily there was a public arts school where I grew up so I’ve been focused on art for a long time.

I was attracted to the radical criticality of art. Its queer culture and discourse. I never imagined how much time I would spend writing grant proposals.

Tell me about “Nom Nom Ohm,” your installation from 2016. In the list of material I found fruits, root vegetables, and rewired chandeliers.

“Nom Nom Ohm” is in a vein of work examining alternative power sources and degrowth. It is also a modern day vanitas. They are chandeliers that are rewired to be powered by fruits and vegetables. I liked the idea of the chandeliers in the marketplace, powered by the fruits sold there and proposed this work to Cuchifritos in The Essex Market in New York City. The market was about to be relocated and this work was something of a visual for the transition from this long-standing neighborhood market into high rise luxury apartments.

What can you tell me about your 2018 two-channel video installation “Un-common Intimacy” described on your website as “Performance swimming with predators at private wildlife parks in the United States.”

“Un-common Intimacy” was shot in private wildlife reserves in the six US states that allow private ownership of large predators. Today, there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild; strange colonial ecosystems that rely on private property but also voluntary guardians in service to a nexus of entertainment and conservation economies. That’s the setting. What you see in the video work is more of a blank slate as its filmed entirely underwater. I’m swimming with tigers and alligators, capturing the potential intimacies under these conditions.

Performance seems to be a constant in your work. In 2009, you had a performance called Tourist Crisis Center in collaboration with Tourist Artist Collective. I am curious to know more about that.

This was a project in collaboration with several other artists I studied with at Bard College – Anne Cleary, Jess Perlitz, Brigid McCaffrey and Jane Parrot. We were invited, via friend and poet Arlo Haskell, to The Studios of Key West to make a public work. Somehow we resolved to build an offshore public office for tourists in crisis. Symptoms included fugue states, and other crises one experiences when shifting from worker to full-time consumer. We built an office on dock floats, complete with a fax machine, a telephone, office plants and a rolling chair, while Arlo pulled us around the island with his boat, dropping us off at key points for public interface. We took turns manning the office, while dressed in our secretarial finest. Some of us helped tourists write letters home. Key West is the kind of unbelievable community that only gathers in the farthest reaches of land masses. We were stopped by the Coast Guard at one point by a concerned caller phoning in “a lady being dragged on a desk.” We were also stopped by border patrol as we tried to swim from our desk to shore, in the logic that we were a ruse for illegal immigration. That was in 2009. I can’t imagine what the politic would be today.

Where do you think your work is heading now?

On the horizon is a mix of studio work in Brooklyn and opening up my practice to coordinating public events and activism. I am co-organizing a lecture series at my studio in Brooklyn on economy, ecology, and trust, along with other ways of seeing our environment – through queer ecologies and animism. There are several long term projects I’m working on strategizing land art as land conservation; methods to counteract increasing privatization of federal land, and the militarization of our borders.

In the studio I will be working on new multi-species sculptures and a video work making parallels between climate change and BDSM. I will be traveling a bit for site-specific work in Finland, France, and Columbia while keeping a studio base in Brooklyn.

(Top image: Un-common intimacy, video still, 2018. 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 April 10, 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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Susan Hoffman Fishman

New York-based artist and educator Jaanika Peerna grew up in Estonia during the Soviet era. Her drawings, installations, and performances all embody a sense of constant movement and change, either chaotic or orderly, that personifies the elements of water, ice, wind, air, and light. Peerna attributes many of the choices she has made about the materials she uses as well as her working methods to her childhood in her native land of ice and greyscale colors along the Baltic Sea. It was there where her body learned to embrace the movements specific to gliding on ice, where she observed the varied lines that skates made on the surface of ice, and where she mastered the use of the limited art materials available in the local Soviet-style school system – especially drawing with pencils on paper. To this day, she sees all of her work as drawing, “whether it is video or light installations, placing works in a room, drawing in space, leaving lines on paper, traces of movement and now performance.”

Peerna moved to the United States 23 years ago. In 2009, she discovered the polyester film known as Mylar in her father-in-law’s architectural studio. It subsequently became the primary material she uses for her work. With its transparent, durable, and smooth qualities, Mylar reminded Peerna of ice. Around the same time that she adopted Mylar as her material of choice, she came across Stabilo water soluble, pigment pencils and admired the fat, dense lines they made. By chance, she moved one of the black pencils across a sheet of Mylar in her studio and saw how the line glided along the surface of the material without friction, like ice skates on ice. Using these black pencils on Mylar and with broad movements of her body, she began a number of large-scale drawings, which she ultimately called her Maelstrom series.

In 2009, Peerna exhibited her new work in Beacon, New York at the Go North Gallery and then in 2010, exhibited a second series of drawings on Mylar that she called Storms. Looking out of the window at the opening reception for the Storm drawings, she saw her friend Jane Thornquist, a dancer, moving her body outside in response to the drawings. Delighted at her friend’s reaction to her work, Peerna suggested that they develop a performance during which she would draw and Thornquist would then react to the drawing with movement. Based on the success of that effort and Peerna’s growing interest in performance, they collaborated a year later in New York City on a second piece that became a “call and response,” with each responding to what the other was doing. 

Over the following years, Peerna continued to develop large-scale work with Mylar as well as performances at exhibition openings and/or closings. In 2014, she spent a pivotal year in Berlin where there were many more opportunities to practice public performance than had been available to her in the U.S. In 2018, wanting more direct interaction with her audiences, she created her iconic work, Glacier Elegy, an on-going project which incorporates audience members as critical components of the performances themselves. 

Glacier Elegy consists of Peerna herself, one or more large “scrolls” of Mylar or other sculptural elements formed from Mylar, water soluble pigment pencils (or not) and a block of ice (or sometimes more than one), and sometimes other performers. Each performance varies according to the site and ultimately evolves according to the choices that audience members make while they are participating. Although Peerna conducts the performances in silence, the sounds emanating from the movement of the Mylar itself become another element of the creative process.  

For example, in 2019, at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, Peerna performed Glacier Elegy surrounded by drawings of her work on the walls of the large gallery. (See video above.) Slowly entering the space, she moved towards two rolls of Mylar, which were suspended from the ceiling, and unhooked them so that they unrolled and furled down towards the floor. After she moved under and around, interacting with the Mylar herself, she motioned without using words to two members of the audience to do the same. 

As the performance proceeded, Peerna began to make lines on the Mylar with the pigment pencils and invited others to join her. Because the material was in motion, they too moved as they marked. Dozens of individuals filled the Mylar with lines and markings. She then introduced a block of ice, holding and embracing it as if it were the last, precious piece of ice remaining on Earth. Walking to the Mylar with the ice, she rubbed the melting ice over the lines, which began to bleed and run. Once again, with welcoming gestures, she invited others to help her “erase” what they had just made. 

Without words and with simple, accessible materials, Glacier Elegy effectively and viscerally addresses the climate crisis, and more specifically, the demise of glacial ice caused by human interference with the environment. On November 16, 2021, Glacier Elegies, an in-depth book on Peerna’s entire Glacier Elegyproject, will be published by Terra Nova Press. In addition to essays by Robert McFarlane, Janet Passehl, and Celina Jeffrey, the book includes an interview with Joana P. Nevers as well as extensive images of Peerna’s artworks and performances. 

Ice Memory, Peerna’s latest work, which combines both performance and exhibition together into one piece, is currently on view through August 29 at Gallery 222 in Hurleyville, New York. Measuring 12 ft. wide by 20 ft. long, the exhibition consists of a room-size drawing on Mylar, which hangs from the ceiling to the floor in a sloped curve “like a sledding hill.” At the opening for the exhibition, Peerna filled a plastic perforated tube, attached at the top of the work, with ice. As the ice melted onto the drawing over the course of the reception, visitors were mesmerized by the water dripping slowly down the mylar, in much the same way that one might be hypnotized watching waves repeatedly crashing onto the shore. 

Ice Memory will continue to evolve over the course of the exhibition during weekly “Melting Events” hosted by the gallery. With additional ice added to the perforated tube, many of the lines in the drawing will bleed into one another and eventually be erased. As the gallery notes, the process is “not unlike the changes we witness in our natural landscapes.” 

With all of her exhibitions and performances to date, Peerna has deferred from using explanatory text of any kind. For Ice Memory, however, she has provided a quotation from Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane as part of the exhibition because she finds his description of ice to be particularly moving and especially relevant to her work. 

Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terabyte blocks, which are quickly updated or become outdated, ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Once you know how to read its archive, it is legible almost as far back – as far down – as the ice goes. Trapped air bubbles preserve details of atmospheric composition. The isotopic content of water molecules in the snow records temperature. Impurities in the snow – sulphur acid, hydrogen peroxide – indicate past volcanic eruptions, pollution levels, biomass burning, or the extent of sea ice and its proximity. Hydrogen peroxide levels show how much sunlight fell upon the snow. To imagine ice as a “medium” in this sense might also be to imagine it as a “medium” in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene.

Jaanika Peerna interprets our world as it exists today through line and motion. She invites us to join her in engaging with the elements of water, ice, wind, air, and light in all of their conditions. Using simple body movements and drawn gestures, she compels us to consider the transformations that have occurred in the natural environment and to mourn their passage. 

(Top image: Glacier Elegy Brooklyn, performance in public space with three performers and audience members, one block of ice, two sculptural elements, Brooklyn waterfront, New York City, October 20, 2020. All images courtesy of the artist.)

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 climate change. She co-created a national, participatory public art project, The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and has inspired thousands of adults and children of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to protect this vital resource. Her most recent work, called In the Beginning There Was Only Water is a new story about the creation of the world, a re-imagining of the natural world without humanity’s harmful impact upon it.

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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 Joan Sullivan

In the Global North, we do it every day, dozens of times every single day. Mindlessly, without nary a thought about how different life must have been 100 years ago before electricity became widely available. 

A simple flip of the switch, and voilà! Our lives are instantly transformed: night becomes day; air-conditioners offer temporary respite from heat domes; elevators whisk us to the top floors of skyscrapers; emails and text messages race across the globe; and increasingly, portable air purifiers filter coronaviruses and other airborne contaminants from our indoor lives.

Electricity. Our most intimate yet mysterious source of power, according to Barry Lord, author of Art & Energy: How Culture Changes. Most of us take it for granted, using it 24/7 for nearly every aspect of our modern lives, without really understanding what primary energy source produced it.

As a digital photographer, my entire artistic toolbox is 100% dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity. Not just when working in my office but perhaps more critically when I am out on a shoot. The list is endless: recharging batteries (for camera, flash, gimbal, drone); editing photos in Lightroom and Photoshop; storing and backing-up files; maintaining a website and creating online galleries for clients; taking advantage of online training programs and webinars; entering photo contests; applying for photo grants; uploading/downloading images to/from WeTransfer; sharing images on social; writing for this blog; keeping my cellphone charged and updated to communicate via text, email or FaceTime. And now Zoom! 

Access to 24/7 energy is a defining hallmark of our 21st century lives. But as dependent as we all are on a seemingly endless, uninterrupted supply of electrons, very few among us have taken the time to question where all this electricity comes from and/or how it is transported to power our homes, offices, schools, and businesses.

In his new book, A History of Solar Power Art and Design, Alex Nathanson argues convincingly that it’s high time for artists and designers to think seriously about energy in general, and about electricity from solar energy in particular. For me, the big takeaway from Nathanson’s book is that artists are uniquely qualified to help the rest of us think more deeply about electricity: not just where it comes from, but perhaps more importantly what it means to live such energy-dependent lives.

Before diving into Nathanson’s book, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that electricity is not synonymous with energy. Electricity is not a source of energy, but rather an application of other energy sources. These other energy sources are normally divided into two broad types: non-renewables versus renewables. However, there is another way to distinguish between these two types of energy: fuels (coal, oil, gas, nuclear) versus non-fuels (wind, water, solar, geothermal). 

After having photographed the energy transition for more than a decade, I am convinced that many more artists would take a second look at the energy transition if they visualized it as a transition from fuels to non-fuels. And here’s the teaser: non-fuels produce energy that is invisible, i.e., it’s mostly electrons. And who better than artists, poets, and musicians to express themselves through a medium that is invisible as well as infinite?

There’s so much potential here! 

Imagine JMW Turner with a 21st century palette: light, energy, transformation, hope…

Now, back to Alex. Alex Nathanson is a multimedia artist, technologist, designer, and educator. He coined the term “the poetics of photovoltaics”, which I have unabashedly flipped for the title of my post. For his recently completed M.S. in Integrated Digital Media at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, Nathanson’s thesis became the outline for his new book, to be published next week by Routledge.

In an email exchange, Nathanson explained one of the main motivations for writing it:

There is a long history of artists and designers using photovoltaics (PV) for a very wide range of activities. These have included poetic and abstract explorations, critical and conceptually complex artworks, practical consumer devices, and in collaboration with scientists to support cutting edge scientific research initiatives. Up until now, all of these various activities were very isolated from one another. The public, and even many practitioners, have been unaware of the important work going on in this space. By looking at all of this activity in a cross-disciplinary way we can think about the possibilities and challenges of the energy transition differently.

The 211-page book is divided into 10 chapters, the first three of which introduce readers to the basic technical aspects and history of early PV design. I was particularly interested in Chapter 4, “Solar Art Comes Alive.” Here, Nathanson transports us back to the mid-20th century to better understand the enormous obstacles – including the lack of affordable solar components – that the first generation of PV artists had to overcome in order to incorporate some form of solar power into their avant-garde works.

I have bookmarked Chapter 4 for future reference; I will return to it frequently for my own research. Think of it as a Who’s Who of pioneering visionaries whose dogged determination resulted in a new solar aesthetic: Ted Victoria, Max Neuhaus, Joe Jones, Alvin Lucier, Jürgen and Nora Claus, Mark Tilden, Érik Samakh, Ulrike Gabriel, Allan Giddy, Christina Kubisch, Benoît Maubrey, and Joyce Hinterding.

According to Nathanson, these and other artists were motivated to embrace solar for a variety of environmental, political, social, financial, and technical reasons. He cites the three most common ways that artists have utilized PV to date:

1. Artists who have PV technologies as the center of their work because of the unique affordances of the technology. These artists may be attracted to the material because of the precariousness and variability of solar power or other unique attributes of the technology (Nathanson describes this as the poetic attributes of PV).
2. Artists who want to leverage an understanding of the technology to explore ideas relating to climate and the energy transition.
3. Artists who want to use PV to power artworks, but are not necessarily concerned with it being perceived by the viewer. These artists may want to use PV because it is more environmentally friendly or because it allows them to site an artwork in a remote area.

Whatever their motivation for experimenting with and/or incorporating PV into their work, artists and designers have a key role to play in the energy transition, says Nathanson. He writes:

In order to integrate sustainable energy technologies, and PV in particular, into our lives in a way that is equitable, sustainable, and responsive to local needs, it must be accessible to the communities most impacted by the climate crisis and the infrastructure changes this crisis is forcing upon us. Whether it is through making PV more culturally relevant, teaching engineering concepts through STEAM pedagogy, making its electrical functions clearer to the non-engineer, or poetically reframing the way we think about energy infrastructure, there are many crucial roles that artists and designers can play, particularly in the context of energy justice. Sustainable energy art and design is about far more than simply something looking good. It is about building a more equitable future.

Of all the solar artists mentioned in Nathanson’s book, three have left a deep impression on me. I will dig further into each of their lives over the coming months to better understand their respective contributions to the new solar aesthetic.

Allan Giddy is a New Zealand-born sculptor and installation artist based in Sydney, Australia. Originally trained as an electrician, Giddy describes himself as “a pioneer in, and one of Australia’s foremost proponents of, sustainable energy systems, electronic interconnectivity and interactivity embedded in the physical art object.” For more than 20 years, Giddy has collaborated across disciplines to create a wide range of public art that, according to Nathanson, “often makes visible or audible natural phenomena, systems and cultural history through poetic installations rife with symbolism.”

One of Giddy’s solar installations, described in a short paragraph on page 76 of Nathanson’s book, caused me to involuntarily shout out “YES!” while reading. In 1998, Giddy installed Ice Heart on a public beach in Sydney. It featured a heart-shaped ice sculpture that was kept frozen by… you guessed it, solar power. Giddy describes the installation on his website:

A small glass chamber containing a heart moulded from ice sits atop a tiled pyramid. A solar-powered refrigerator unit hidden within the pyramid cools the chamber to freezing. Solar cells lying on beach towels around the pyramid provide the energy with which the ice heart is maintained. 

Yes, yes, yes, yes! More like this please!

I was also excited to read about the fruitful collaboration between two German artists, Jürgen and Nora Claus, now living in Belgium. The couples’ lives and work are centered around their bold vision of biospheric art – a return to art as a vehicle for connecting the viewer to natural rhythms, processes, and environments. In 1984, Jürgen was one of the earliest artists to use solar PV in outdoor public sculpture, starting with his Pyramid of the Sun. In 1993, the Claus duo co-founded the SolArt Global Network to unite artists worldwide using the power of sunlight as a creative medium or, in their own words, using the sun as “a partner and creator of art installations” with the ultimate goal of “sharpening our awareness of solar energy.”

Twenty-six years ago, Jürgen wrote about the importance of this global network; it could so easily have been written today. Nathanson paraphrases below: 

The necessity for the [SolArt Global] network, Claus wrote, was driven by the increasing urgency of ecological issues, awareness of the limits of fossil fuels, the growing desire for decentralization in politics and energy, and the growing demands of disenfranchised people globally to attain a higher quality of life. He argues that ecological stability in the 21st century must be rooted in cultural change and the loose network of artists sharing his vision for a “solar age” was a mechanism to achieve that goal. He goes on to say that this work is needed urgently and must begin immediately in order to address these issues by the year 2025, a call to action that society unfortunately did not hear.

Nathanson’s book introduces us to dozens of other cutting-edge solar artists, including textile artists, sound artists, electronic and multimedia artists. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is what unites them all, as Giddy suggests in the video above. For those artists interested in exploring the energy transition, I encourage you to get your hands on Nathanson’s book (use code FLY21 for 20% off when you purchase through Routledge’s website). It will jump-start your thinking about how to move beyond the blue rectangle of solar PV and, in Nathanson’s words, help you to embrace the poetic precariousness and variability of both the weather and solar power.

As the provocative creators of Juice Rap News reminded us back in 2014, we are “still living in the dark ages” by ignoring the most obvious fact: that the sun, at the center of our universe, should also be at the center of our energy strategies. Amen.

Top image by Joan Sullivan.

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Etty Yaniv

In her multilayered installations, Babs Reingold brings together drawing, sculpture, found objects, and at times, video, to create potent environments alluding to the body, the environment, and the passage of time. Equipped with a fine-tuned sensibility to materiality and an imaginative approach to spatiality, Reingold’s installations inhabit spaces as an alternate force of nature and take a life of their own.

Your earlier installations seem to explore different materials, such as fabric and light, and thematically they seem to relate directly to social issues, such as in Hung Out in the Projects. Can you tell me about that installation work?

Because of my life circumstances of a young Jewish girl growing up in a tough and unsafe environment in a project on the east side of Cleveland, my main concern at childhood was survival. Hung Out In The Projects relates to this experience. I must confess, however, that decades later, my thoughts on poverty are more complex, more subtle, and, although totally personal, more universal.

Poverty was the 900-pound bag in my life. One exists concealed, fearful of exposure, trapped in a project culture that turns inward on itself to survive, propagating the very issues from which one hopes to escape. It, in turn, engenders shame and secrecy. Skin and hair are the exterior layers of humanity, a fragile boundary between what exists to the outside and what hides away. Clothing further reinforces the boundary, and distances what is truly inside.

In the Hung Out In The Projects installation, clotheslines are strung between structures and populated with odd shapes made from rust and tea stained silk organza and skins, some of which are stuffed with hair. Many resemble everyday apparel, but misshapen and distorted. Washing on the line may bring forth nostalgia for days long past, but here the washing is a semaphoric path to a secret interior. The floor is littered with old pails and objects found and made. Along one wall, a video of text crawls across with words of statistics of poverty and project life.

Viewers observe Hung Out In the Projects from a scaffold platform – in essence, a societal vantage point of superiority and security, where exiting an uncomfortable situation is always an option. Additionally, I invited sound artist Lin Culbertson to create an audio track to present an inescapable in-your-face discordant resonance of urban culture and eerie sounds, which contributes yet another fabric to the experience. The soundtrack is played on a boombox inside an old trashcan.

Your latest series, Hair Nest, is made of 10 works incorporating 10 years of hair loss, bringing together drawings of tree parts, fabricated 3-D or actual branches, a field of stones and other materials, fusing themes you have been dealing with of beauty and the environment. Can you elaborate on that?

I have always loved drawing, the mark making. But it was not until 2005 that drawing took a central role in my work with the series Fallout: Beauty Lost and Found, which is related to The Hair Nest series – out of which three pieces are completed: Hair Nest ’01, Hair Nest ’15, and Hair Nest ‘16. I like the idea of documenting a decade of hair loss, what I thought of personally as my lost beauty. It’s a way of marking time and its passage. The series fuses my themes of beauty and environment. Each contains one 7-foot-high drawing of a tree part, and a cast or fabricated 3-D branch or actual branch. The branches are cast of glass, wax, or bronze, and fabricated of silk organza over wire mesh or paper. Each work contains a nest constructed from a year of my daily hair loss. It either sits on the branch or in a field of stones and other materials at the base of the drawing.

Aside from their aesthetic beauty, you may be interested to know scientists record 22 benefits trees provide related to air quality, climate change, erosion, and food, as well as numerous other comforts. Tree markings – scars and burns – and tree-ring dating provide yearly climate history. The markings speak of an existence affected by elements beyond their control, such as drought, fire, disease, and of course, humans. Yet, they endure. It is hardly a reach to blend tree drawings and limb sculptures with my signature component, human hair. Hair contains our complete DNA and lives beyond death. The perseverance of trees and the permanency of hair inspire the work and carry it forward.

Let’s dwell a bit longer on hair as it seems to be central in your work and you have been working with it since early on. How has the use of this material evolved for you from early sculptures such as Elizabeth (1998) to Hair Nest (2020)?

The use of hair began in 1995. I was looking for a way to simulate skin and came up with the concept of stuffing human hair into forms constructed of encaustic-coated silk organza. The hair protruded through the mesh of the organza, simulating the tiny hairs on the skin’s surface. Around the same time, I came upon a catalog for a wonderful exhibition on hair. Something about the pieces in that show inspired the box portrait series. Elizabeth is one piece from that series. The stuffed objects became larger, more complicated, and the staining process of the silk organza changed over the years as well.

I first began collecting my hair in 1998 because I was experiencing an unusual amount of hair loss due to a thyroid condition. At that time I had no idea how I would use it in my art, but that didn’t matter. Hair is a signature in my work and I use it to signify a number of ideas, including its intrinsic link to DNA. I think you’ll agree, hair is personal, endearing, and we identify with it.

You combine many forms of representation in your work which carry multiple layers of symbolism – tree stumps, roots stuffed with human hair. Curator Midori Yoshimoto stated that your work is “a cautionary requiem for humanity.” Let’s take a closer look at your installation The Last Tree from that material-symbolism perspective.

The stumps in this installation are a symbiotic link to hair living beyond death and perhaps, a collective binder for mortality. The stumps are scarred and stitched and contain multiple textures. They are made of transformed silk organza stained with rust and tea and stuffed with human hair. Metaphorically, surfaces mimic faults, whether human or natures.

The 193 pails holding the stumps are the recognized countries in the world. The lone tree among the enclosed stumps stands tall, but will it survive? That is the question facing us, isn’t it?

You mentioned that concerns about the environment have turned you from primarily painting to owning space via installations. Can you tell me more about that transition?

I am concerned about issues that focus on poverty as well as the environment. Both drove my work toward installation. My first room size installation was La Longue Durée at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2003. Once on this path, I didn’t look back. My largest installations to date are Hung Out In The Projects and The Last Tree. The transition began earlier though. I gravitated towards sculpture in the mid-90s. Up to that point I was making large paintings of women bodybuilders. The nineties was the height of installation art in New York. Women artist were creating monumental sculptures and installations. I thought it was the most exciting art happening within that milieu. It became the art for me.

In the early 90s, three-dimensional objects crept onto my paintings until, in an almost inexplicable yet irresistible momentum, installation and sculpture replaced painting. I believed this transformation allowed me to more fully occupy space and manipulate time. I became increasingly aware of contemporary female artists who were producing exciting and provocative three-dimensional and site-specific installations. Among them, were large cell sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, the incredible Light Sentence by Mona Hatoum, monumental pieces by Ursula von Rydingsvard, and the visceral wax pieces by Petah Coyne. Further, I delved back into the 60s and 70s and reacquainted myself with Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, and others. All these women artists were utilizing materials in new and different ways. It was experimentation that inspired new visions and I wanted to be a part of it.

I began experimenting with unique materials to create new spaces, moving far beyond my sculptural pieces constructed of fiberglass and dry pigments. I developed a unique signature, utilizing a bath of rust and tea combined with an encaustic process to stain silk organza and paper.

I continue this path today. It is an evolving process and experimentation continues with an expanded palette of materials – cast wax, iron, and glass, repurposed materials and recycled in the progression.

(Top image: Babs Reingold in the studio with Hair Nest ’01, Hair Nest ’16, and Hair Nest ’15. All photos courtesy of the artist.)

This interview is part of a content collaboration between Art Spiel and Artists & Climate Change. It was originally published on Art Spiel on March 2, 2021 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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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This month, I have an interview with author Neus Figueras, whose children’s book Lorac is beautifully illustrated and written. Inspired by the coral reefs near Myanmar, where Neus spent time doing restoration, this story is aimed toward the younger generation but immensely enjoyed by adults as well.

About the Book

Lorac didn’t set out to be the voice of the ocean, but when the future is at stake, being a hero is the only choice. Lorac, the youngest of a family of sea nomads, suffers a series of unfortunate events and has to seek refuge in the heart of the sea. The transition isn’t easy, and unexpected difficulties arise. But helped by his new friend Zoe, Lorac joins a family of centenarian creatures and discovers the secrets of the coral reef – his real home. A threat that affects the marine world, however, makes him depart to the place he once knew and now knows no more, in a daring mission to save the ocean – and the planet. Lorac will have to make difficult decisions, live in worlds where he doesn’t belong, and prove his worth for the good of all. Science and fantasy come together in an adventure of hope and courage that transmits an important message to protect our environment.

Chat with the Author

Tell us about yourself – your life so far and how you got started in writing. Have you published anything before Lorac?

I started writing at an early age because I am a highly sensitive person and crafting stories helps me to project the great amount of stimulus I perceived from my surroundings ― and as I grew up, from the world. I remember that I wrote my first “unofficial” novel at the age of ten and that my friends begged me to tell them stories that I improvised as I went along (yes, we grew up without mobile phones).

Since then, I have taken several courses in creative writing, won six local and regional literary contests, and only stopped writing when I went to the Canary Islands to study Marine Sciences. I must admit that it was difficult to choose science over the humanities, but my insatiable curiosity and passion for nature won out and I knew that I could always continue my career as a writer on my own.

To be honest, my scientific career has helped me as a writer because writers tell truths for the world and science has allowed me to know our world on another level.

Lorac is my first novel. Before it, I wrote countless short stories and one novelette.

Tell us something about your novel. Who is the intended audience, and what’s going on in the story?

The story follows the life of Lorac, which begins with the traditional way of living of an Indigenous community of sea nomads – I personally met them while I was restoring coral reefs in Myanmar. Then, Lorac suffers a series of unfortunate events and has to seek refuge in the heart of the sea along with his new friend Zoe, the book’s most fantasy character although “she” actually exists. Finally, climate change and pollution come into play, sending Lorac out into our world on a mission to restore the balance of his true home, the ocean.

It is recommended for adults and teens eleven and older as it deals with the value of family and friendship, death, growing up, and global Earth issues. But, as anything related to art, nothing is rigid, and so far I’ve heard of an 8-year-old girl who devours books and read Lorac in two days, and of a retired man who loves historical literature but gave Lorac a try and it got him so hooked that he read it in one sitting.

What sorts of ecological themes does your novel have, and how were you inspired to write about them?

It has very interesting information about marine life, deals with how our impacts on the ocean have increased over time, especially due to climate change, pollution, and overfishing, and shows what we need to do to reverse this.

I was inspired to write about these things because I was working with coral reefs. And unless there is global action on climate change, our reefs are projected to be almost completely lost at 2ºC warming, a threshold that will be reached within the lifetime of many of us.

So I wanted to create a story that would convey, in an exciting and clear way, the need to conserve our planet. For the first time in my life, I wrote not because I needed to, but because it was necessary. Everyone’s contribution, however small, is vital to maintaining the planet that sustains us – a message that the book supports in a positive and inspiring way.

After publication, did you do any book fairs or talks? How would you describe the reaction to your book? Is it hard to market during the coronavirus?

Yes, I have done many, until we had to stop because of the coronavirus, but I kept doing online events.

Marketing is difficult with or without the coronavirus. I am much better at and prefer to write, but for Lorac I make the effort to do marketing because all the proceeds go towards spreading awareness of the book to help the urgent task of preserving life on Earth.

Readers’ most common reactions to Lorac is that they find they can relate to the characters and they feel the need to protect our environment. Some even have gone “Wow!” and laughed at the bantering. It has even managed to capture the attention of one reader who is not into sea-based books. Others think it would make a nice animated film, and many point out how it highlights the issues around ocean conservation in a impactful and empowering way.

Personally, I have seen Lorac succeed in changing people’s attitude towards the environment – people who, after several years of trying, I thought would never change.

Are you working on anything else right now, and do you want to add other thoughts about your book?

I’m editing a novelette I wrote some time ago, and I’m “baking” the structure of a story (so I haven’t started yet, and I’ll just write it if it turns out the way I hope) that will use some “seeds” I scattered in Lorac to create a sequel: a second book whose theme will be how biodiversity loss makes us more susceptible to pandemics.

We are also translating Lorac into French and Portuguese (it is currently available in Spanish and English).

This all sounds so incredibly cool. Thanks, Neus!

(Top image: Detail of one of Lorac’s illustrations by Evan Piccirillo.)

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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By Peterson Toscano

Mary Kathryn Nagle is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She is a partner at Pipestem and Nagle Law, P.C., where she works to protect tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. She is also a successful playwright who has been using the stage to raise awareness about land sovereignty issues and the epidemic violence against women. 

From 2015 to 2019, she served as the first Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. Nagle is an alum of the 2013 Public Theater Emerging Writers Program. Productions include Miss Lead (Amerinda, 59E59), Fairly Traceable (Native Voices at the Autry), Sovereignty (Arena Stage, Marin Theatre Company), Manahatta (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre), Return to Niobrara (Rose Theater), and Crossing Mnisose (Portland Center Stage). She has received commissions from Arena Stage, the Rose Theater (Omaha, Nebraska), Portland Center Stage, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Yale Repertory Theatre, Round House Theater, and Oregon Shakespeare Theater. 

Many thanks to Climate Citizen’s Lobby volunteer Melissa Giusti for introducing me to Mary Kathryn Nagle.

Next month: Environmental engineer and game designer Katie Patrick reveals the Big Mistake many artists make when taking on climate change.

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 Amy Brady

In this month’s issue I have for you my second interview with artist Katie Holten. We first spoke back in 2019, when she created the NYC Tree Alphabet to draw greater attention to the threats that New York-area trees face. Now she’s created an alphabet for the trees of Ireland, her home country. In our interview below we discuss what inspired her latest alphabet, how she’s developed an accompanying tool for use in schools, and what to expect from Learning to be Better Lovers, her forthcoming exhibition about learning to love all creatures on the planet.

Last time we spoke, you had just completed the NYC Tree Alphabet. Now you’ve created the Irish Tree Alphabet. Please tell us about this project and what inspired it.
 
Love! The Irish Tree Alphabet is about love. It’s about sharing a love of language, landscape, and learning. The project had been germinating inside me for years, at least since 2005 when I made my first tree drawings. Ireland’s entwined language and landscape history is deeply entangled with layers of language invention (reaching back to the medieval Ogham, known as a tree alphabet, through Irish myths shared by Seanchaí’s) and language repression (British colonial forces banished Irish, inspiring the creation of hidden hedge schools). Activists like Manchán Magan are rewilding our words with a reappraisal of the Irish language/landscape.
 
When I was invited to have a solo exhibition at VISUAL Carlow, Ireland’s largest gallery space, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally make the Irish Tree Alphabet: there was funding for a research residency, curatorial support to connect me with the wider community, and a sense of urgency as Ireland had just declared a Climate Emergency. But obviously, everything was turned upside down due to the pandemic. I ended up quarantined in California. Developing the work there during lockdown wasn’t easy! But the need to make it felt even more urgent. There was so much fear and uncertainty. I wanted to create something beautiful that we could use to write love letters to the Earth.
 
I feel it’s my duty as an artist, as a human being, to create work that speaks to this moment. Our disconnect from the living world created the pandemic. Our species is literally gobbling the planet alive, devouring forests and mountains, damaging every biological system. We urgently need to think beyond the human. Trees can help us heal.
 
Your Irish Tree Alphabet comes with an “Explorer’s Guide.” What does this guide do, and what do you hope readers/users take away from it?
 
My heart is bursting for what we are losing. I offer the Irish Tree Alphabet â€“ a new ABC – as a way to reforest our imaginations, suggesting a way forward by looking backward through our branches of knowledge. Right now, I feel the most important thing that I can do is share my work with children. We need to create fruitful and fun ways to connect people with themselves and the land, ways to introduce kids (and adults) to the beauty of communicating across time and species. Translating thoughts into Trees lets us share our vulnerabilities in this time of extinction, while offering a simple way to engage with human-induced environmental change. It’s about helping children to be informed citizens of planet Earth.  
 
The Explorer’s Guide to the Irish Tree Alphabet is a simple teaching toolkit in the form of a coloring book. It offers the very youngest members of our communities, and their families, an introduction to the joy of exploring their local landscapes through drawing, collecting, coloring, making, and growing, while learning through play. Growing from earlier projects like Tree Museum and Tree School, it uses city streets, parks, gardens, and public space as a classroom, inviting individuals and communities to learn by living, looking, listening to the street trees. Children are natural explorers. It doesn’t take long to realize that everything’s connected. Trees breathe out, we breathe in. A coloring book seemed like a nice, easy way to quickly reach families during lockdown. I started with the first three letters/trees; A (Ailm), B (Beith), C (Coll). I hope to expand it to the complete A-Z. It’s vital kids learn truth and empathy; trees can teach us that. If 2020 has shown me anything, it’s that we are living, breathing, and writing a whole new story for our species. Children need to be part of that.

You’ve been so busy this past year. You’ve even developed a curriculum for schools! What age group will be using your curriculum, and what does it teach?

I felt compelled to make the Explorer’s Guide to the Irish Tree Alphabet as accessible as possible. COVID-19 restrictions have changed our ways of teaching, moving people online and outside. I don’t have kids myself, but my sister has seven-year-old twins, so I can only imagine the desperation for alternative home-schooling material. VISUAL shared the Explorer’s Guide with local primary schools and hopefully, the expanded version will be made available to all Irish schools. It’s for children aged 7-14. I also hope to make an A-Z for younger kids.

Coincidentally, while I was working on it I was invited to develop a few other courses for older children and adults, including a course for Stanford University based on my book About Trees. Stanford’s expansive campus will be our classroom – we’ll learn while walking, with lectures by guest speakers, tree tours, and an academic exploration of all things trees.

The New School of the Anthropocene in the UK invited me to develop a seven-week course. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to do something like this, so I decided to get straight to the heart of the matter! I’m calling it Learning to be Better Lovers: Forest Thinking for a Forest City. I’m excited to work with teenagers and young climate activists to explore what I believe are the urgent topics of our time: What is the language we need to live right now? How can we learn to be better lovers of the world? The city of London, a forest city, will be our classroom, our playground. I’m not sure where the trees will lead us, but I know it’s going to be a fruitful, exciting adventure!

Maynooth University has invited me to be a writer-in-residence to help develop a “Writing/Righting” project for Literature Declares Emergency. We’re working with Culture Declares Emergency on a few things, including a Letters to the Earth anthology for Ireland.

It’s about inviting people to slow down for the world’s most urgent issue! During this long year of COVID-19, haven’t we all seen how lovely – how important – it is to slow down? Let’s remember that. Our human heartbeat has been thumping too fast, at the speed of instantaneous text messages and emails; we need to breathe deeply and slowly, fall into tree time.

Your exhibition Learning to be Better Lovers opens in August. Please tell us about it, and why you’ll be handing out seeds!

I just love the idea of us all “Learning to be Better Lovers!” Honestly, it feels like the single most important thing that might get us through this dark time – learning to love ourselves, each other, and the creatures we share our home with. So this is the title for a few of my current projects. The show at Snug Harbor in Staten Island opens late August so right now I’m busy meeting people out there, visiting the Native Plant Center and the Heritage Farm. Their motto is to feed, inspire, and educate the local community.

In that spirit, and guided by my teaching/courses that I already mentioned, I’ll be sharing seeds – inviting visitors to PLANT LOVE and seed stories. Together, let’s reforest NYC with LOVE. I hope to give away care packages: seeds/seedlings of the four trees that spell LOVE in the NYC Tree Alphabet.

After 15 months of quarantine, it’s been wonderful to get on the Staten Island ferry and walk around the beautiful grounds at Snug Harbor and meet people working the land. At the heart of my project is a desire to look back at what was here before we (white people) came along. What was growing here? What stories can the land share? Will we listen? What will we leave behind?

You’re deeply involved in climate and environmental action beyond what you explore in your art. For example, I know you’ve been working to save a bog in Ireland. Why is the bog at risk, and what motivates you to try and save it?

Ardee Bog is a rare gem, the most easterly raised bog in Ireland. It’s at risk in the same way so many precious places around the world are – the government wants to build a road. I grew up there, on the edge of the bog. Bogs are Ireland’s rainforest, representing the largest store of carbon in the Irish landscape.

The plans for the road – if you can call them that: zero planning went into the project – date to almost twenty years ago. No Environmental Impact Assessment was ever carried out. It’s obvious they had no idea there was even a bog there; they thought it was just “empty” land – they drew a straight line with a ruler between point A and point B. But it’s a living, breathing ecosystem that entire communities call home, both human and non-human communities, including curlews which are in danger of going extinct in Ireland within the next five to ten years. The whole project stinks of corruption and petty politics. That’s why a group of us locals got together and formed Friends of Ardee Bog. We love the place, it’s our home and if we don’t protect it, no one will.

Ireland declared a climate emergency in May 2019. So why are we building a road through a bog? Eamon Ryan, the new Minister of Transportation (technically in charge of this road project) is also the Minister for the Environment, Climate, and Communications. The irony! If you’d like to help us protect Ardee bog, please sign our petition. I’ll be hand delivering it to elected officials when I get home. Hopefully we’ll have reached 10,000 signatures by then.

People cause great damage, but we can also create powerful change. We know the problems – and we also know the solutions. But we’re running out of time! A road can be relocated, but a bog can’t. The bog has been here for 10,000 years and is defenseless. How can we live with ourselves knowing the harm we’re causing? It eats at my soul.

What’s next for you? 

More of the same! Shouting in the streets! Demanding action! The Explorer’s Guide and Ardee Bog will keep me busy for quite a while yet, hopefully leading to real change in Ireland.

Work makes work so, of course, these projects lead to others. I’m currently developing This Was Once Forest / This Will Be Forest Again, a text-based work for the Irish Arts Center’s new building in New York City, opening in November. On June 10, I chatted via Zoom with the West Cork Literary Festival about the new anthology Women on Nature. During lockdown, I started making a series of drawings called Love Letters using inspirational quotes and calls to action from women through the ages. I think I might have to make a book. In fact, I’ve got ideas and sketches for about twenty book projects. Anyone want to make a book with me?

Then there are the projects that got put on hold last year. I was invited to Hamburg to work with printmakers, looking forward to that. I’ve been invited to develop work for a new project space in Dublin. I can’t say more about it just yet, but I can’t wait to get home and hug my mother and walk the bog road. 

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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By Tessa Teixeira

I recently read the article “As the Climate Crisis Grows, a Movement Gathers to Make ‘Ecocide’ an International Crime Against Humanity” from Inside Climate News. The authors state that “international lawyers, environmentalists, and a growing number of world leaders say that ‘ecocide’ – widespread destruction of the environment – would serve as a ‘moral red line’ for the planet.” French President Emmanuel Macron and Pope Francis add that ecocide is an offense that poses a similar threat to humanity as genocide. And Pope Francis describes ecocide as “the massive contamination of air, land and water” or “any action capable of producing an ecological disaster.” The Pope has proposed making ecocide a sin for Catholics, endorsing a campaign by environmental activists and legal scholars to make it the fifth crime before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

My art practice has always focused on consciousness and what it means to be a sentient being, exploring ideas around the self, identity, and life and death. This naturally led to narratives addressing collective consciousness. Over the years, tipping points that affected my own consciousness led me towards wanting to change my personal behavior and increased my interest in the power of collective consciousness to effect bigger policy shifts to address the challenges we face for our future on planet Earth.

I started focusing on climate change and biodiversity loss in 2015 when I was faced with the possibility of Johannesburg, where I live, and other major cities in South Africa and nearby regions, experiencing a prolonged drought brought on largely by El Nino. On January 17, 2018, the city of Cape Town announced that it had reached “a point of no return” in its water supplies – something that most of us never thought possible. In Johannesburg, we watched the daily news daily in disbelief, while our own supply of water continued to dwindle. Then our local municipal water supplier declared, “Johannesburg is under Level 2 water restrictions.” Suddenly, we had to face this strange and unsettling situation where our water taps weren’t running. The possibility of having no water at all hit our consciousness, and there was a slight underlying unease as everyone rushed to fill up water tanks and buy water. The thought “the next world wars will be based on access to water” crept into my consciousness. The current El Nina weather pattern is bringing the opposite to drought –now it brings more frequent cyclones. Neighboring state, Mozambique, already struggling with extreme poverty, and a lack of adequate infrastructure and clean water supply, has in the past three years experienced three severe cyclones.

In 2016, I went to Iceland and saw snow, glaciers, and water like never before. A year earlier, the headline of a magazine article, “Land of fire and ice,” caught my eye and ignited a desire to go there. I was deeply affected by this experience, which has informed my artwork ever since. I wrote about it in my blog and posted images I took with my cellphone. The melody of Iceland is harmonized with its many waterfalls. Everywhere I looked, there were waterfalls gushing from the interior, cascading, and thundering down volcanic mountains towards the sea. The sheer power of the Gullfoss, the thundering Sejalandsfos, and the exuberant Skogafoss waterfalls, the majestic picturesque floating ice sculptures of the Jokulsarlon glacial lagoon on the south eastern coast, and the Isgongin glacier tunnel on the Langjokull Glacier were beyond comprehension. I kept asking myself: What can I, an individual, do to contribute to collective behavioral change? Can my artwork add to the awareness of and conversation around climate change in a meaningful way?

An article published in Frontiers in Conservation Science in January 2021 found that “future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity, is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.” The article also states that “the science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak.”

My current work explores these challenges and is influenced by biologist David George Haskell’s statement: “We are all – trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria – pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved.” This work responds visually to scientific research around increased temperatures and its effect on oceans, coral reefs, forests, extreme floods, droughts and wildfires, and mass internal and external migration. The writer Oliver Sacks wrote: “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure!” And poet Mark Strand’s memorable words come to mind: “It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.” He said: “We are only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, I mean, we are – as far as we know, the only part of the universe that is self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell, I think being alive is responding.”

That pretty much sums it up for me.

(Top image: Scream (detail), 150 x 158 cm, mixed media drawing, 2020)

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Tessa Teixeira was born in South Africa. She graduated from WITS University in 1991 with a BprimED, majoring in Art. She has worked in access for housing projects for lower income sectors, started a NGO and raised the money to build two schools for primary school children, and worked for The Mineworkers Development Agency, addressing rural development needs in South Africa. In 2006, she started her art practice and in 2010, she participated in short art courses in the US and UK. At the end of 2011, she returned to Johannesburg and developed her artwork focused on philosophy, climate and ecology.

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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 Patricia Hanlon

Twelve years ago, my husband, Robert, and I began swimming the creeks and channels of the Great Marsh, the largest continuous stretch of salt marsh in New England. Its 25,000 acres of cordgrass marshes, barrier beaches, and mudflats extend from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Seabrook, New Hampshire. We have lived near its southeastern corner since 1978, and over the years explored these waterways with our three children: first in an eighteen-foot sailboat, then a fourteen-foot motorboat, and, later, ocean kayaks. But it wasn’t until the children were grown and had become visitors in our lives that we started regularly swimming the estuary’s creeks and channels. Over the years, our boats had become smaller and smaller, until finally our own bodies were our most frequently used watercraft.

We made a pact with each other to swim every time we possibly could. After a summer idyll of blue skies and marsh lawns as lush as Kansas cornfields, we swam later and later into the fall, matching the dropped temperatures with thicker and thicker layers of neoprene. We took it for granted that we’d eventually hit a wall that would stop the swimming until the ocean warmed up again the following year. But as we swam in rain, darkness, and slushy water just above freezing, we discovered that walls are relative. “Walls have doors,” Robert said one evening after a December swim, peeling off his “6/5” wetsuit (six millimeters of neoprene at the core, five at the extremities). Even the coldest and stormiest conditions were navigable with the right gear and the mutual desire to be there

Humans are story-telling creatures. Early on I began jotting down notes about where and how long we swam, along with tidal and weather conditions. It was pretty basic stuff at first, largely concerned with “suiting up” for cold-weather swimming. But over time, the journal entries evolved into a series of essays exploring what happens when you immerse yourself in the same ecosystem over and over, through the daily changing of the tides and the yearly rotation of the seasons.

You get to know the non-human inhabitants of a tidal estuary, along with their routines. Great blue herons, white egrets, and banded kingfishers hunted for minnows in the same channels where we gathered mussels for our own dinner. Turkey vultures circled above us in Eben Creek (named for a 19th century boatbuilder, Ebenezer Burnham), looking for carrion. Once, floating downstream on a perfect July day, I was surrounded – for a minute or so that seemed much longer – by a school of silvery minnows. Perhaps they thought I’d be good camouflage.

You also look more closely at the salt-marsh environment itself. Because marsh cordgrasses (Spartina alterniflora and Spartina patens) have adapted to handle immersion in salt water, they dominate the coastal marshes, converting enormous amounts of solar energy into grass. Though few creatures directly eat the grass, as it decomposes it becomes a vast, nutrient-rich environment for bacteria, algae, and fungi. These organisms, in turn, are food for snails, shrimp, oysters, clams, and hermit crabs – and so on up the food chain to muskrats and foxes and humans.

Even aside from their roles as feeders and protectors of species, salt marshes are also shock-absorbing barriers to storm surge. Break open a hunk of marsh wall and you’ll see dark, peaty stuff bound together with the pale-yellow gnarls and filaments of cordgrass roots, a structure that answers the question of how marsh walls can be so relatively lightweight and yet hold their shape so well, how spongy and soft can also be strong. You can see exactly how it traps and binds together plant remains, silts, and clays, forming spaces and interstices – habitats – for life-forms ranging up and down the size spectrum.

It’s interesting to me that the word “habit” is derived from the Latin habitare: to live, dwell, stay, remain. By the time we’d swum full circle into the following summer, our practice had become what Wendell Berry has called a “journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

Over time, the series of essays was slowly becoming a book. I would eventually title it Swimming to the Top of the Tide. (My publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, would add the subtitle: Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet.) More and more I understood – not just with my mind but with my body – that the daily tides and routines of a salt marsh are embedded within much longer tides, much more consequential narrative arcs. The turkey vulture is shadowed by the 747. The Jet Skis that disturb the peace of perfect summer beach days are just noisier versions of our own daily commutes. When you swim a saltwater creek as the tide nears high, you have a visceral sense of what could happen if the tide just kept on rising.

Increasingly I saw myself as part of a much larger wave of anthropogenic alterations to the Earth. I was, in fact, born in 1954, during the post-World War II “Great Acceleration,” when fossil-fuel consumption increased exponentially and wartime technologies were reengineered to produce consumer products. Increasingly, the Earth’s carbon reserves were not just being burned as fuel but spun into a stunning array of new materials, structures, and containers. These innovations both extended the natural reach of the human body and narrowed the gap between human desire and its fulfillment.

The book, and those that may follow it, is my small contribution to what will surely be an ongoing conversation and reckoning.

Adapted from Swimming to the Top of the Tide: Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet. Copyright © 2021 by Patricia Hanlon. Published by Bellevue Literary Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

(Top image: Aerial view of the Great Marsh in Massachusetts. Photo by Doc Searls.)

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Patricia Hanlon lives with her husband, Robert, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the edge of New England’s Great Marsh. As a visual artist, she has painted this beautiful ecosystem. In Swimming to the Top of the Tide: Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet (Bellevue Literary Press, 2021), she has switched to narrative mode, focusing on the story of the marsh – its past, present and possible futures. She is now working on another book, Watershed.

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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 Etty Yaniv

Painter Joyce Yamada grew up on the West Coast. She spent her childhood vacations in the beautiful national parks of the US and Canada where pristine forests and the Pacific coast were imprinted in her visual memory. Although as a teenager she realized that art was what she wanted to do, struggling to survive on minimum wage led her to medical school, which she completed. She subsequently became a diagnostic radiologist. 

This science background has fed her mind and artwork ever since. Yamada says she is a painter because she conceptualizes in images rather than in words: “When puzzled, my mind juxtaposes or fuses unexpected images, often leading to new work.” An early series, Body, Earth, came to her in art school. While she was looking at the hills across the bay from San Francisco, she saw the low rounded hills as the reclining body of a woman. The juxtaposed imagery meant to her that we are intimately and indivisibly part of earth and nature, that what we do to the earth we do to ourselves. She has subsequently seen this idea expressed in Indigenous cultures, and it became central in her work.

Let’s start with the impact of science on your artwork. What drew you there and how is science reflected in your process and imagery?

Science is a way of understanding how the physical world actually works. Its methods of review and verification appeal to me strongly. I also love the exploration of the natural world that science spearheads; I am inspired by imagery from space and from the deep oceans. My interest in ecology and the environment began in earnest in the early 1990s after pivotal trips to the temperate rainforests of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Flying over Oregon on the approach to Seattle, and then driving from there to the rainforests revealed how utterly rapaciously we are destroying our forests. From that experience came the first body of work, Truncated Landscapes, that felt deeply personal. The process that birthed that series is typical of how I work. I was struck by the geometric patterns of logging – huge rectangles of forest had been cut out of still intact forest growing on steep hillsides. The first painting in the series was Shado-nine forest, which closely mirrored the actual landscape. This evolved into cubical cut-outs of forests that were deracinated, literally cut off from their roots, floating in a human-induced wasteland and dripping blood while at it. This was from my Cassandra period of quiet environmental protest.

Images of trees are recurrent throughout your work. Let’s take a look at two images, one from 2003, Rainforest – Green Stream, and the more recent one from 2018, Green Burial. Can you tell me about the genesis of each? What were your ideas and how do the two images differ?

Green Stream came directly from a visit to the Hoh National Forest in Washington. A beautiful, complex stream meandered through old growth forest, the entire scene a beautiful green, the air clean and enlivening. This painting was a straightforward celebration of a specific place, though the details were entirely invented. After being inspired to read about temperate rainforest ecology, I also understood it as a demonstration of how old growth forests filter water through intact fallen tree branches, which also provide excellent nurseries for baby fish. Green Burial had a longer conceptual genesis that includes numerous recent drawings and paintings; it was inspired by a photograph of a huge tree in Ireland that toppled over, revealing a human skeleton embedded in its enormous roots. This felt mythological to me – an image of the human animal entwined in the roots and the very substance of the World Tree, a contemplation of the human in relation to nature. Recent related paintings include Yorick Root, Communicant, and Wood-wide Web.

Your paintings can be read as landscapes. How do you see them in the context of art history?

I made a decision during art school to stop conceptualizing my work in terms of art history because doing so was messing up my art-making process. This enabled me to stand outside of current trends without caring too much. I can’t therefore speak very knowledgeably about art history. I rarely paint actual locations. I often paint trees because they are the non-human, non-animal life form to which I relate most strongly. Trees and forests tend to be my shorthand for Nature. For many years, I also played with tree and human anatomy – trunks and limbs – to make our interconnections literal. I also use landscapes as evidence of human misuse, abuse, and ignorance of how to survive sustainably. Every place on Earth is a current or near-future ruin though if we act quickly enough, much can still recover. I have been contemplating the place of humans within nature, and therefore within the landscape.

Tell me about your series Hominidae.

Over the past 15 years, I have invented two different symbolic humans. The first was Waterhuman, a human made entirely of water, prone to evaporation and shimmering as it walks through the world; examples include Heaven’s Net and W.H with Furfish. My current version is Yorick, a living skeleton who will journey through natural scenes on Earth as well as through imaginary scenes in the wider cosmos. A symbolic human is a storytelling stratagem – a way of contemplating the human species in the wider world. Hominidae is the scientific nomenclature for the family that contains us humans – Homo sapiens. Using the term emphasizes our intimate connection with other creatures. Science reveals that we are a very young species evolved from related animals, not de novo Masters of the Universe. The family Hominidae includes the Great Apes and the various ancient hominids, of which only our species now survives. The other members of the family include orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos.

We have been through a rough time period globally. How has your work been affected by the pandemic?

Early on I did several pandemic paintings – APRIL 2020 and Corona â€“ by way of coping. Since then I have been painting favorite animals for solace. The pandemic’s associated social unrest, our weird violent weather, and melting polar icecaps indicate that human civilization and climate will be changing ever more cataclysmically on a global scale. I am inspired to forge ahead with new work while I still can.

What are you working on now?

I am curating an environmental group show for January 2022, as well as preparing a solo show in November 2022, both at the Amos Eno Gallery in New York City. I have been wanting to paint Yorick wandering about like a character in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, mostly on Earth (which is truly wondrous and odd if you look closely at its creatures), but possibly also in outrageous outer space scenarios. It should be fun.

(All photo 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 December 21, 2020 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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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