Joining us in the Art House this month is Marissa Slaven. I featured Marissa in an earlier episode to talk about her young adult climate-themed novel, Code Blue. Now she is back with the squeal, Code Red. She was inspired by her daughter to write this series of eco-fiction thriller, where a teenage girl and her friends battle climate change.
I sat down with Marissa to talk about the new book and to hear her read an excerpt. To learn more about Marissa and her books, visit Stormbird Press. You can also follow her on Twitter.
Next month:Dr. Krista Hiser reflects on Deena Metzger’s novel A Rain of Night Birds for The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club.
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.
Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that creates a new dialogue between the body and the earth.
What is your favorite choice of materials, why do you use them, and how did you come about them?
I have always shared an affinity with materiality and processes. For example, as a kid, I made flower drawings on paper by squishing up flower petals and using them like crayons. My practice allows me to explore a material like clay, for instance, and be curious about its tendencies, abilities, and embedded meaning. I started working with clay through the advice of my graduate professor, Jon Kessler, and that’s when I realized a material could open up meaning, curiosity, both challenging and speaking to my ideas in many different ways. Clay has the wonderful ability to record and capture time and human existence. We rely on ceramic artifacts to tell the stories of ancient peoples. That led me to think about human and non-human expression, and about a relationship to a material that allows emotion and presence to come through.
Movement at the Edge of the Land, installation of exhibition, 2021. Photo by Nash Baker. Courtesy of The Moody Center for the Arts and albertz benda gallery.
In regards to the nature of your work, how would you explain your connection to the environment?
We have sculpted this planet so much that we think it belongs to us, but really, we belong to it. I foreground the inherent relationship between the body and the earth in my work. When I spend time in the desert, I begin to see the way that the marks, mines, roads, and infrastructure reveal the movement of people, the way we both depend on and take from the earth. These marks of movement reveal human desire. This record of movement – both the human and geologic traces of the passage of time – is fundamental to my work.
What are your favorite books? Have any of these inspired any of your work?
To name a few – Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche by Luce Irigaray, poetry by Mary Oliver and Ocean Vuong, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Savage Dreams by Rebecca Solnit, Where I Was From by Joan Didion. They have all inspired my work. I think that for a lot of artists, all experiences, including intellectual, filter through us into our work.
Black & Blue Expanding, 130lbs, 84 x 80.5 x 2.5 inches, pigmented and glazed stoneware, hardware, 2021. Courtesy of albertz benda gallery.
Could you elaborate on your experience planning and executing your exhibition “Movement at the Edge of the Land†at the Moody Center for the Arts?
This was my first time really collaborating with a curator. Frauke V. Josenhans was wonderful to work with, and in an early studio visit I showed her some performance videos I was excited about and new work that was specifically inspired by my corporeal relationship to two geographies of investigation: namely, the shoreline of the island of NYC, and the very remote Great Basin desert in Nevada. Using two gallery spaces, one that had a wall of windows and sliding glass doors that opened onto the university lawn, and the other which was an enclosed white box space, I was able to evoke the feeling of these two environments by creating site specific installations. With Frauke’s support, it was rewarding to work on such a large scale and exhibit several facets of my practice for the first time, which included sculpture, video, floor installation, and photography.
What can we expect at your next solo show Some Things I Know About Being In A Body at albertz benda gallery?
I will be showing work that evolved from a performance that developed in a New Mexican clay quarry. I brought these performative gestures into my studio in Brooklyn to make a series of wall works that are evocative of wounds and gashes – much like the quarry itself which is an open pit in the earth. I will also be presenting an aerial video piece that is about the dialogue between the elemental earth and the human body. In my work, the puncture, the wound, and the scar are all records of transformation that hopefully opens onto beauty, clarity, and a sense of embodiment.
Seeing You, 12 x 18 inches, archival pigment print, 2021. Courtesy of albertz benda gallery.
(Top image: Movement at the Edge of the Land, installation of exhibition, 2021. Photo by Nash Baker. Courtesy of The Moody Center for the Arts and albertz benda gallery.)
This interview is part of a content collaboration between Art Spiel and Artists & Climate Change. It was originally published on Art Spiel on December 2, 2019 as part of an ongoing interview series with contemporary artists.
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Marley Massey Parsons (b.1998, Berlin, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work advocates for acknowledging and unearthing the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds. Marley received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Salisbury University in 2019 and will earn an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2022. Her body of work ranges from landscape responses, recordings, and observations of humans interconnectivity with the environment using photography, painting, drawing, foraged materials from the earth, writing, and video. Marley’s work has been exhibited across Maryland and in Pennsylvania. In the Summer 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA. She is currently a Visiting Artist Coordinator and Student Life Assistant at PAFA.
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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.
2021 was an exciting year for artists, poets, and musicians inspired by energy and the energy transition.
Art of Energy, the world’s first virtual art gallery dedicated to all things energy, was launched in February 2021 during the inauguration of the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Founded and directed by Dr. Mette High, Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at St Andrews, the Centre for Energy Ethics is an interdisciplinary research center that provides a platform for innovation and collaboration across the arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences. Its goal is to shift conversations about our complex relationship with energy – how it is produced, distributed, and consumed – in new directions.
In its inaugural year, the Centre for Energy Ethics hosted a whirlwind of art-related events that underscores its commitment to creating diverse and inclusive spaces in which students, researchers, artists, and the public can embrace uncertainty, ask questions, and push boundaries.
“From the very beginning, art was absolutely fundamental to the creation of the Centre for Energy Ethics,†explained Dr. High during a recent conversation via Zoom. “Art was not an afterthought.â€
So while the Centre’s staff and colleagues take a well-deserved rest over the winter pause, I encourage readers to peruse the Centre’s website to fully appreciate its broad mandate and nurturing ethos of collaboration and inclusivity.
For this post, I simply want to highlight two of my favorite artistic collaborations organized by the Centre for Energy Ethics in its first year. I’m looking forward to discovering new energy-inspired art in the Centre’s second year. And there’s already a hint of great things to come: an artist-in-residence for emerging artists will be announced in the coming months for a targeted launch in September 2022. Get your C.V.’s ready!
Art was not an after-thought.
– Mette High
As a visual artist, I was pleasantly surprised that out of the diversity of the Centre’s inaugural artistic events, I was singularly attracted to two energy-inspired artworks that involve sound.
I was also captivated by the world-premiere of four musical compositions during the Fringe of Gold concert in November 2021. In collaboration with the University’s Laidlaw Music Centre, the Centre for Energy Ethics launched an international competition to commission original musical compositions inspired by artworks in the Art of Energy collection.
Composers were challenged to create new works as a form of musical ekphrasis, a term of Greek origin that I had to look up: the “phrasing†or re-interpretation of a visual artwork into words or music.
In response to its call for composers, the Centre received 152 submissions from around the world. Of these, a jury selected the following four winning compositions, each of which earned a £500 commission fee:
Gaia, Mother Earth, by Emma Arandjelović – inspired by artwork by Katerina EvangelouÂ
Pylon, by Neil Tomas Smith – inspired by artwork by Ted Leeming
Terra Cycles, by Sarah Horick – inspired by artwork by Natasha Awuku
The world premieres of these four compositions were performed by St Andrews music students during the Fringe of Gold music festival (see video above). According to the Centre for Energy Ethics’ website, this concert was “a celebration of music, collaboration and coming together to consider and address big societal questions about how to create a better energy future for us all.â€
Collaboration. I can’t think of a more positive vision to usher in the new year. If we have learned anything from the global polycrisis of the first two decades of the third millennium, it is that collaboration across disciplines, across cultures, and across political and organizational divides, is at the heart of a just transition. Not just an energy transition. But more importantly, a human transition towards a new era of resilience and stewardship.
Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer and writer focused on the energy transition. She is a member of Women Photograph. In her monthly column for Artists and Climate Change, Joan explores the intersection of art and the energy transition. She is currently experimenting with abstract photography as a new language to express her eco-anxiety about climate breakdown and our collective silence. You can find Joan on Twitter and Visura.
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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
This month, I have a wonderful interview with three artists for you. Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, and Jessica Tam are all visual artists working in different mediums. However, they share a fascination with how ecological language (surge, spike, wave, etc.) has worked its way into news reports’ descriptions of large phenomena such as crowds, pandemics, and political movements. They recently closed a show at the A.P.E., Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts titled WAVE/SURGE/SPIKE.
In our interview below, we discuss what inspired this exhibition, why ecological language is so powerful, and the roles that art can play in discourses surrounding the climate crisis.
Your exhibition WAVE/SURGE/SPIKE, which explores how ecological language is often evoked to describe various crises and political currents, is fascinating. Please tell us what inspired it!
Jessica: This show was conceived before a lot of things happened in this country, so prior to the pandemic, in the summer of 2019.
Amanda: We wanted to get feedback on each other’s works, and so we visited each other’s studios. So, it didn’t start out as a show.
Jen: Jess, I remember you coming downstairs to my studio and saying, “Wow, there’s this woman, Amanda, and it feels like we have a lot in common somehow; we’re thinking about the landscape in critical ways that have a thread of conversation within them.†We decided, “We should set up a studio visit.†And then we decided to do a show together.
Jessica: And because we were in conversation with each other, I noticed that we were using similar language to describe the work and to talk about each other’s work. We had a different president at the time, and also saw the language and metaphors used to describe our work in things that were happening nationally.
Amanda: Also, during the buildup to the 2020 election, there was a lot of election language used in the media [related to landscape] and a lot of angry, angry words.
Jen: We clocked into the idea that abstract ideas and conversations are absolutely embodied by the media in terms of landscape analogies and metaphors.
Jessica: The pandemic ultimately postponed the show, but gave us time to reflect on what was happening, to suggest books to each other that we could read and then discuss. Our work didn’t really change [through this period], but the show’s context changed. For example, I was always making images of the crowd and studying the crowd, but thinking about the crowd before the pandemic was so different. Now, I feel a little bit nervous when I see a group of people, like a crowded bar in a movie or TV show and they’re not wearing masks. But there’s also the positive meaning of crowds as in the protest movements against police violence. The work hasn’t changed, but the readings of the work have multiplied because so many things have happened in the country since this show was first proposed.
Wave/Surge/Spike by Amanda Maciuba, 12 ft x 12 ft, gouache, ink & colored pencil on 365 individual drawings, 2021
Why do you think ecological language is so often used to describe large-scale events like a pandemic or a political movement? Does it communicate something that perhaps other metaphors can’t?
Amanda: When I think about this question, the words that immediately come to mind are acts of God: all these weather events, things people couldn’t explain in the past have been thought to be deities, the gods punishing you, or even gifts from gods. And so I’m thinking about how we have no control over natural disasters. Using this language of things that we can’t control, that’s where that language comes from.
Jen: It’s a threat.
Amanda: It’s not always a threat. It’s just not something we can change. We can only respond to it. To me, that’s the thread running through a lot of the ecological language I’m thinking about, like eruptions, avalanches, storms.
Jessica: Also, we live in a time where things feel so extreme, and the language needs to match that. When we first started thinking about this show, there was a lot of inflammatory and strong language describing the election and then later on, the pandemic. These are really intense moments. It felt like the only words to describe them were things associated with extreme landscape. It’s not enough to say that someone won the race by a large margin. Instead, headlines tend to describe a candidate as having won “by a landslide.†Or it’s not just that COVID cases have gone up. The cases were described as daily climbing new “peaks.†Or the idea that we might be looking off of “a cliff†of financial ruin. It had to be extreme because the situation felt extreme. I also don’t think that this is the first time in history that people have felt this way. It just currently feels that the middle ground doesn’t exist. The other thing I think about is how language is about interconnection, about connecting people. Ecological language is about interconnecting things in an environment. I think that it’s useful to describe large-scale events, like pandemics or political movements, that are so much about relationships.
Jen: Explorations of the relationship between humans and landscape has been everywhere, whether it’s the Eurocentric idea of ownership or whatever other cultural relationship. But that exacerbation, exactly how you’re talking about it, Jess, is so important. There is the Eurocentric version of “how do we conquer the landscape,†but it’s phrased as though the landscape is unconquerable. So if it is a landslide, it couldn’t have happened any other way. Years ago, I researched the national park system in America. It really would be more appropriate to call it the national garden system of America because a lot of the national parks were just, “Let’s clear this so that we can see this vista better.â€
Amanda: “Let’s make an aesthetically pleasing landscape, and worse, call this ‘nature.’â€
Jen: It’s a constant relationship between colonizers and how they relate to the landscape. To hear this dialogue completely and consistently erupt in our media….
Amanda: It’s ingrained into our vocabulary and shapes how we look at the world. We don’t even notice that we’re doing it.
Jen: It’s normalized. It goes back to George Lakoff, The Metaphors We Live By. These are now metaphors we live by.
Bittersweet by Jen Morris, 10 in. x 15 in., archival pigment print, 2021
Let’s dig in deeper. What is so powerful about ecological words, phrases, metaphors?
Jessica: With my work, I’m interested in eliciting a range of responses. I hope that my work can be gross and funny, unsettling and inspiring, and that these feelings can happen simultaneously. Different emotional registers can happen at the same time by interconnecting abstraction with the work. And maybe that can be linked back to the ecological, interconnecting language and how it’s used to discuss abstract ideas.
Amanda: Yes, I agree. When I think about awe, fear, and jubilance in context with the works that we have put together for this show, the word that comes to mind is “overwhelming,†which goes back to thinking about ecological acts as acts of God. These are all emotions that spill out and overcome. When I was creating the work, I was thinking a lot about “too much.†Things that are too much, too close. You know, we figure it out, we muddle through, but everything feels like too much.
Jen: I regret using this next word, but we all made “walls.†We made walls of something, like a wall of people, a wall of temperature, of news text, and a wall of bittersweet. When I think of our work, yes, I see “surge†and “spike,†but I feel like “wave†is really the one that resonates the most for me right now.
Amanda: This is the first time I’ve thought of this work in context with the word “walls.†It’s interesting because walls can have both positive and negative connotations. I remember one of the events we were thinking a lot about when we conceived of the show was the media’s description of waves of migration and the southern border wall. It was one of the metaphors we noticed a lot cropping up in the news. It’s interesting, we’re creating walls, and walls can block you from things you need. But they also can protect you from things and create a barrier. There can be good and bad barriers. It’s interesting that we’ve all created these walls of work. Are we creating the work to come to terms with the past two years?
Jen: Even more, thinking back to Katrina and the levees?
Jessica: I think you’re implying that the scale increased, right? Because when you talk about walls, you’re talking about work that’s gotten so big that it can be seen as a barrier, or bigger than a person, and it might be overwhelming. But I am reminded of the old idea of a painting as a window. We’re creating work that offers a way to transform the walls that the work is hanging on. For instance, I have one painting that has a lot of hairy arms. And I really like that Amanda said, “This is an upsetting painting, but I like it.†I thought, “That’s perfect because, you know, it is meant to be a tangle of vines or something, a very thickly grown garden of hairy arms. It could be turned into a wall or a barrier, but it also could be something that you can kind of see through.â€
Jen: With photography, you don’t start with a size. You frame something, but then you have the ability to make it any size you want. When you print a photograph, you can make it a personal experience for only one person who’s holding a book to see it. Or you can make it an experience where it’s on the wall and two people can stand in front of it, and maybe jockey for position. Or it can be so big that you just feel like you can walk into it. I like the idea of the window and what you’re saying, Jess, because imagining Amanda’s piece installed, I wonder, “Wow, what will it feel like? Will we feel like we’re part of Jess’s crowd? Will we walk into the bittersweet?†We’re thinking about that context of size, considering the way people view the work, interact with the work, and experience it.
Jessica: That applies to our collaborative piece, which is meant to surround people who enter the space. We collaborated on a vinyl drawing made of news headlines that use ecological words and phrases to describe current events. It starts from the front window and then traces of it move into the space in a way where you might happen upon it in a corner of the room or see shadows of it layering over another artwork. The text is almost growing and moving through the space, and creating a kind of landscape.
Untitled (人山人海: People Sea) by Jessica Tam, 40 in. x 73 in., ink on paper, 2021
What do you hope viewers will take away from your exhibition?
Amanda: We’ve been thinking about language. And then we started to notice news headlines’ use of language and think critically about how the media filters information through language. I hope that our viewers will start to think about that or notice it if they haven’t already.
Amanda: When I was making my work, I was hyper-aware of how I was absorbing information. I think the word “doom-scrolling†came up a lot, like “COVID doom-scrolling.†So it’s not only the way we’re getting fed the news, it’s also how we’re ingesting it. At the time, my life was a lot about scrolling down and reading all the really dire, confusing, dramatic headlines. How many of the articles did I actually read? I just kept reading the headlines and feeling sicker and sicker to my stomach. Is that how we’re supposed to ingest the news? I don’t think so, but that’s how a lot of us do it.
Thinking beyond the scope of your respective work to art more generally, what role might art play in discourses surrounding the climate crisis and environmental disaster?
Jen: I can’t help but think about how a lot of art is already an environmental disaster. For instance, as a photographer, what do I do? I don’t use chemicals in film anymore. But what about the cartridges that go in the printer? They’re ostensibly recyclable, but how much plastic is made and shipped and disposed of to create the stuff I use to make art?
Amanda: As a printmaker, I get asked this question a lot. It’s a little bit like the-corporations-versus-the-individuals question, but it’s not entirely, so I don’t want to excuse myself. You can do your best to make your practices as environmentally friendly as possible, but sometimes you reach a point where it’s not possible anymore. However, if you’re making work about the environment, there is value in how your work is changing opinions and bringing these issues into the public view. I guess my hope is that the trade-off is worth it.
Jessica: We’re talking about materials. It’s related. The materials we use are actually contributing to some of the environmental issues we’re trying to bring attention to. And yet we’re destroying the environment as we make the work. The vehicle is part of the problem. But about the role of art in the discourse about climate crisis….
Amanda: Art makes these really large, almost unimaginable problems relatable and observable by someone just in their everyday life. I see art as a document of our time, a reflection on where we are now – and I think that’s really important. But also, art is a way to share different points of view and perspectives. Climate change is happening on a global scale – that’s why it’s taken us so long to come to terms with it, if we even have come to terms with it as a society. That’s still debatable, but I hope that a lot of art is making these issues relatable, understandable, and absorbable.
Jessica: It’s also related to what you said, Amanda, about how these issues are so huge and there’s just so much data. Journalists report these facts, but art can help connect the dots.
Jen: As artists, our superpower is “weird synthesis.†We take seemingly disparate ideas and then somehow we spin them into a thing. I really love what you’re saying, Amanda, about the idea that art is a reflection of what’s happening right now. The more artists make work, the more artists show work, hopefully the more people will engage with these ideas. I wonder a lot about who our audiences are. Are we preaching to the choir? I think in Northampton, Massachusetts, we are. But I’ve had exhibitions where the work engaged with national memorial, with death, and it did spark conversations on both sides of the political spectrum, which was hopeful.
Jessica: I like that idea that the work can be a catalyst to spark these discussions. Jen, you mentioned “weird synthesis.†In order to get people to engage in this conversation, I think “weird†is the key word. It suggests something unexpected in an almost neutral area. It’s possibly something uncomfortable or something really interesting. The work makes you want to question that reaction, and you want to talk about it with someone.
Jen: We’re in a world where everything is so reactionary. Some of my favorite work is the kind of work that, hours after you’ve encountered it, it’s still developing in your head. As a photographer, I think a lot about the latent image, like in the darkroom days when you exposed an image under an enlarger. The image was latent until you put it in the chemicals and it developed on the page. I translate that into a hopeful “additive quality†of art. I know that’s why I value engaging in this process with the two of you; I am so looking forward to putting up this exhibition and laying it out and seeing what happens when the work is next to each other.
What’s next for you three? Anything you’d like my readers to watch for?
Amanda: We would like to keep developing the show; keep making work for it and keep showing it. One of our original dreams was to have more artists involved. Because of the pandemic and all of these other things, that show got postponed, and it just became the three of us. It was what felt manageable at that time. We want to keep thinking about these ideas and we want to get other artists involved. We also talked about more activities in the gallery, or something to activate the gallery space with actual people, which is not possible right now. In short, we’re interested in expanding this body of work ourselves and with other people.
Jessica: I’ll add that we don’t know how it will expand. My hope is that is will grow and develop organically from this one. It’s the way I normally work anyway. I don’t start off with preconceived ideas – it’s really about the painting and the process of exploration and invention. Also, we don’t have control over the world we live in, so we don’t really know what will affect our thinking next.
Amanda: Yes, we thought this was all going to be about the election and it ended up all being about COVID.
Jen: It’s crazy to think about how the work has evolved. Language has continued to develop, our lives have evolved, and our experience of the media has evolved throughout the period of us trying to figure out this show. We were riding a wave and then it just fell apart because of lockdown and not being able to go anywhere. And then we gently tried to make work, and here we are on the other side, or maybe not the other side, but at least another side.
(Top image: Tip of the Iceberg by Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, Jessica Tam, dimensions variable, vinyl on glass and wall, 2021)
This article is part of the Climate Art Interviews series. It was originally published in Amy Brady’s “Burning Worlds†newsletter. Subscribe to get Amy’s newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.
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Amy Brady is the Deputy Publisher of Guernica magazine and Senior Editor of the Chicago Review of Books. Her writing about art, culture, and climate has appeared in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, the New Republic, and other places. She is also the editor of the monthly newsletter “Burning Worlds,†which explores how artists and writers are thinking about climate change. She holds a PHD in English and is the recipient of a CLIR/Mellon Library of Congress Fellowship. Read more of her work at AmyBradyWrites.com at and follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x.
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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
Joining us in the Art House is Dr. Krista Hiser, with the first in a series of occasional features called The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club. The purpose of the book club is to look at climate-themed literature and consider how it can help us engage differently with interdisciplinary topics and existential threats related to the planetary predicament of climate change.
In this episode, Krista reflects on the cli-fi novel Blaze Island by Catherine Bush, and lets her imagination run wild as she pulls together some of the greatest minds in climate fiction.
Dr. Krista Hiser is Professor at KapiÊ»olani Community College. She has a PhD in Educational Administration from the University of Hawai‘i at MÄnoa. She has published on community engagement, service learning, organizational change, and post-apocalyptic and cli-fi literature.
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.
For Brooklyn-based printmaker Florence Neal, water has always been a dominant presence in her life. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, near the Chattahoochee River, which straddles the southern half of the Alabama and Georgia borders. There she developed an appreciation for the Native American stories about the river as well as first-hand knowledge of the negative impact that the cotton and iron mills of the past and the pervasive industrial pollution had had on its health.
Providentially, when Neal moved from Georgia to Brooklyn, New York in 1977, she lived first on Water Street in Dumbo and then in Red Hook, twelve feet from where the flood waters stopped rising in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy. The enormous destruction to property and land in her neighborhood from that major water event still haunts her to this day.
Fifteen years ago, as a result of her on-going interest in water, Neal began studying the traditional Japanese wood-block printing method called mokuhanga (moku = wood; hanga = print), whose origin dates back to the Edo period (1603-1867) in Japan. Unlike their Western counterparts, mokuhanga prints are made with water as a primary element: water-based pigments, a wet wood block and handmade Japanese paper moistened by water. Most of Neal’s printmaking and public art projects that she has completed since she adopted mokuhanga have incorporated this printing method.
Chattahoochee River, 18†x 96,†linoleum block print on Japanese paper, 2010
With her life-long attachment to the Chattahoochee River and a desire to bring attention to its history and importance, Neal returned to her Columbus, Georgia hometown in 2010 as an artist-in-residence at Columbus State University. While she developed her work for the residency, which she called The River Project, she established a relationship with Roger Martin, the local River Warden who was advocating for increased efforts to clean the river. (The title of River Warden harkens back to the early 1600s and refers to people who guarded rivers and streams throughout England. They protected anything associated with the river – drinking water, fish or land use – and knew that rivers were extremely important to the health of their community.) As River Warden for the Chattahoochee, Martin supported the long-term continuation of Neal’s River Project.
After a period of closely documenting the Chattahoochee through drawings and photographs, Neal began cutting an 8-foot linoleum block print on the banks of the river over a number of days and invited the public to observe the process and relate their own stories about the river to her. The stories, which were recorded for posterity, helped participants understand that the river is a living entity that existed long before the borders divided the land into states, as well as the centuries-old subject of human stories like theirs.
Florence Neal working on Chattahoochee River on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, 2010
In 2011, Neal was invited to participate in a seminal, large-scale exhibition titled Value of Water at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Curated by American painter Fredericka Foster, the six-month exhibition included 200 works of art that could stand on their own in the Cathedral’s extraordinary space. Notable artists in the exhibition included, among many others, video artist Bill Viola, conceptual artist Jenny Holtzer, multi-disciplinary artist Robert Longo, and painter/printmaker Pat Steir. Neal’s contribution to The Value of Water was a linoleum print titled Reverberations that she had completed before turning to the mokuhanga printing process. Her intention in the piece was to highlight the fragile line that exists between water’s intrinsic beauty and its destructive potential.
Reverberation, detail, 12†x 96â€,linoleum block print on Japanese paper, 2006
Neal’s positive experience engaging the public in The River Project and her desire to incorporate an educational component into her artwork prompted her to consider creating addition public art projects. In 2018, when her Waters of the Future proposal was accepted for an artist’s residency at the Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil, she jumped at the opportunity. Sacatar was an ideal setting for Neal, who fully embraced the program’s goals of presenting public programs, performances and educational opportunities and becoming immersed in the culture of Bahia.
Using a similar format to what she had developed for The River Project, Neal set up a working station at the local library and other public sites where she asked local residents to consider what the color of water would be in the future and why. She then carved a wood block designed to represent both water and the swirls of a fingerprint. The mokuhanga prints that she created from the wood block reflected the colors suggested by participants. (See installation detail above)
Calling the project, Ãguas do Futuro (Waters of the Future), Neal installed the prints in her studio at Sacatar as a series of scrolls and hung the answers completed by participants as a vertical floor-to-ceiling kinetic sculpture.
Ãguas do Futuro installed in Sacatar’s studio, Itaparica Island, Bahia, Brazil, 2018
After her residency in Brazil was completed, Neal continued to create additional installations of Waters of the Future with different wood block designs and with contributions from both Brazilian and American participants: at the Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, its first American iteration (2019); at the Fulcrum Gallery at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia with a sound component developed by composer Michael Kowalski (2021); and at the Galeria Gravura Brasileira in Sâo Paolo, Brazil. (upcoming 2022).
Waters of the Future, detail, installed at Fulcrum Gallery, Columbus, Georgia, 2021
In addition to being a prolific artist, Neal is the co-founder and director of the Kentler International Drawing Space, a non-profit gallery in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. The gallery, whose focus is on drawing and other works on paper, is located in a historic structure built in 1877 by the Kentler family to house a men’s haberdashery. Established in 1990, Kentler offers exhibitions, events, an extensive educational program and flatfiles containing the work of over 290 local, national and international artists.
As the world’s waterways and oceans continue to be impacted by manmade pollution and the disastrous effects of climate change, Neal joins the long list of artists around the world who are calling attention to our responsibility, like the River Wardens of old, to protect the waters that are so critical to the health of our communities and to serve as stewards for these precious resources.
(Top image: Ãguas do Futuro, detail, mokuhanga on washi scroll(handmade Japanese paper), installed in Bahia, Brazil, 2018)
This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate disruption a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.
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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and photographs have addressed water and the climate crisis. Her most recent work, called In the Beginning There Was Only Water is a visual reframing of the biblical creation myth. In 39 panels, it speaks to the importance and beauty of all living beings and what we stand to lose as a result of climate change. This fall, she is participating in an artist’s residency at Planet, an international company providing global satellite images, where she is focusing on the proliferation of sinkholes caused by climate change.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.
I had a wonderful talk with Michael Mohammed Ahmad, editor of the anthology After Australia, founding director of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, author, and so much more. Our conversation opened up doors for me to explore the promotion of literacy around the world. Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney. The movement provides research, training, mentoring, and employment opportunities for emerging and established writers and arts practitioners from Indigenous and non-English speaking backgrounds.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This interview explores Dr. Ahmad’s novels, but focuses primarily on After Australia(published by Affirm Press, in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia and Sweatshop Literacy Movement).
In this unflinching anthology, twelve of Australia’s most daring Indigenous writers and writers of color provide a glimpse of Australia as we head toward the year 2050. Climate catastrophe, police brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule, and the erasure of black history provide the backdrop for stories of love, courage, and hope.
The anthology features Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Ortiz, Roanna Gonsalves, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law, and Hannah Donnelly. It is edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The original concept is by Lena Nahlous.
A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR
First, I would love to know more about the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, of which you are the founding director. How did this movement come about and what kind of success has it had?
Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney, devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing, and critical thinking. Over the past decade, Sweatshop has mentored an ongoing ensemble of emerging and established writers from the region who have come to be known as the Sweatshop Writers Group. Sweatshop has also facilitated writing workshops and residencies in schools and universities, produced publications, podcasts, and short films, and we have presented book launches, seminars, readings, and performances at writers’ festivals across Australia.
It is difficult to know exactly how successful we have been in meeting our goals, but it always brings me great joy to think about the thousands of young and emerging writers whom we have supported over the years – witnessing their intellectual development and providing them with public platforms to share their stories. I am particularly proud of the ground-breaking anthologies Sweatshop has produced in recent memory, such as Sweatshop Women, which is Australia’s first publication produced entirely by Indigenous women and women of color, and Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Bigotry, which features 39 short stories and poems about the real-life experiences of racism faced by Australians on a daily basis.
The Tribe was the first novel I wrote in a collection of works on Arab and Muslim Australian identity. It is told from the perspective of Bani Adam, a fictional version of myself as a child. The book details Bani’s domestic experiences within a large Lebanese-Australian family.
The second novel I wrote in this collection is The Lebs. The book follows on from The Tribe, only this time the stakes are much higher. Bani is now a teenager and he is dealing with many of the usual issues teenage boys face – coming to terms with his gender, sexuality, race, and class while also trying to obtain an education. This is complicated for any normal teenager, but for a ‘Leb’ growing up in the post-9/11 era, what I am describing is a war zone. Bani faces a political climate that is dominated by news headlines in Australia and around the world, which have demonized and homogenized young men like himself as criminals, gangsters, sexual predators, and terrorist suspects.
I wrote The Tribe and The Lebs with very clear intent: I was young and idealistic and genuinely believed that I could improve the global perception of Arabs and Muslims through my stories. But when it came to my most recent novel, The Other Half of You, writing it was like crying – the book just fell out of me involuntarily. I remember the night my son was born; his mother was asleep in her hospital bed as I sat in the darkness before her. I was cradling Kahlil in my right arm and writing on my phone in my left hand. At the time, I did not know why I had suddenly felt this tremendous urge to write; the words were just pouring from me. Later, when I read over what I had typed, I discovered that I was reliving the surreal and mystical scenes I had witnessed during Jane’s labour and Kahlil’s entrance into this world. These words ultimately became The Other Half of You. If there is such a thing as a soul, and if it’s possible that your soul can somehow be transferred onto a page, then my soul now exists inside this one book.
I found you by way of a Discord community called Rewilding Our Stories, where one of our community members gave the After Australia anthology a really nice review. You edited the anthology, whose authors are Indigenous and writers of color, writing mostly speculative or modern urban fiction and prose. How did this anthology come about?
In 2019, I was asked to develop a new anthology which imagined Australia in the year 2050. Originally conceived by the executive director of Diversity Arts Australia, Lena Nahlous, the publication would bring together Indigenous writers and writers of color from every state and territory in Australia. Together, they would create a collection of short stories and poems in the literary form called “speculative fiction.†In the aftermath of the Black Summer Bushfires and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the #BlackLivesMatter protests, I could never have speculated that by the time the publication was complete, it would look more like a picture of our current reality, rather than our inevitable future.
As the editor of the anthology, I pictured a book that would imagine a world after empires, after colonies, and after white supremacy. So I called it After Australia. However, the writer of Martu ancestry, Karen Wyld, sent me a story that intertwined three historical timelines, disentangling the complexity of contemporary Indigenous identity. And award-winning author, Roanna Gonsalves, wrote a love letter to the printing press, which examined the Governor’s Order in 1814. All at once it occurred to me that Australia’s future could only be written on the foundations of our past and present.
As with a lot of fiction that explores environmental losses, some of the stories deal with climate change and intersect directly with oppression in the form of racism and bigotry. What are your thoughts about the intersectionality of ecological and socio-economic tragedies? Do you think things will ever get better?
Firstly, with regards to the question on the relationship between ecology and socio-economic tragedy, I strongly recommend the book, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, written by one of Australia’s greatest anthropologists and intellectuals, Professor Ghassan Hage.
Secondly, with regards to the question of whether things will get better, let me take it back to After Australia: I think by far the most unique aspect of the anthology is the way in which all the stories and poems converge into a unified voice, speaking for our past, present and future as a whole. Wiradjuri writer Hannah Donnelly guides us on this journey with her collection of stories titled “Black Thoughts.†In spite of the challenges we currently face as a nation, Hannah’s words remind us that there is hope as the world continues to unravel: Our time is a loop. We’ll find our way back, before, after…
What power do stories and art have in bringing about a more just world, and what other projects is Sweatshop doing right now to expand that goal?
More broadly than just “stories†and “art,†I believe in the power of literacy to bring about a just world. The entire Sweatshop movement was inspired by the work of African-American civil rights activist, feminist, and writer, bell hooks, who argues that, “All steps towards freedom and justice in any culture are dependent on mass-based literacy movements, because degrees of literacy so often determine how we see what we see.â€
In terms of other projects Sweatshop is doing right now – thank you, this question presents a perfect opportunity to announce that Sweatshop, Affirm Press, and Diversity Arts are currently developing a follow-up to After Australia, called Another Australia. This time I have taken a backseat as the sub-editor, and the wonderful Tongan-Australian writer and general manager of Sweatshop, Winnie Dunn, is at the helm as the editor.
Another Australia will feature a new cohort of super-talented and award-winning First Nations and POC writers, including: Osman Faruqi, Declan Fry, Amani Haydar, Jamie Marina Lau, Shirley Le, L-Fresh the Lion, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Sisonke Msimang, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Sara Saleh, and Nardi Simpson, and poetry and linocut illustrations from Omar Musa.
Definitely keep an eye out for Another Australia, which will be hitting bookshelves in July 2022!
I am so excited about that! Did you want to talk about any of the writers or experiences in After Australia in more depth? Do the stories all take place in Australia?
From the groundwork laid-out by the writers I’ve already discussed in this interview – Hannah, Karen, and Roanna – the other contributors each interpreted the theme of the book in their own unique and personal way: Zoya Patel detailed a dystopian (not-too-distant-and-kind-of-already-here) future where bushfires have ravaged the ACT and our neighboring islands have drowned. As the brown people are trying to get in throughout Zoya’s story, in screenwriter Michelle Law’s story, the brown people are trying to get out, while under the occupation of a fascist society that makes 1984 look like The Little Mermaid. Meanwhile, Noongar author Claire G. Coleman introduces us to the Ostraka Law of 2039; her story subverts the notions of systemic institutions, and explores both the physical and psychological prisons that manifest in a racialized society. Newcomer Sarah Ross re-writes her experiences as the child of an interracial same-sex couple amidst the rubble of the Taj Mahal; and emerging poet Kaya Ortiz plays out our future as a lyrical exercise in multiple choice. Multi-award-winning author and illustrator Ambelin Kwaymullina sends Australia 2020 a dire message from the Ngurra Palya of 2050; and writer and cultural critic Khalid Warsame depicts an environment that will likely feel the most mundane and safe among all the stories in After Australia, until you realize it isn’t.
Perhaps the most controversial contribution in After Australia is written by the poet Omar Sakr. In his short story, titled ‘White Flu,†Omar dissects the vivid texture of multicultural suburbia against a global pandemic that will be frighteningly familiar to readers at this moment in time, only this particular virus has selected “white†people as its primary casualty.
And lastly, in an equally prophetic story, the playwright and author originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Future Destiny Fidel, lays bare the tragic future and destiny of so many young black men. Future’s story, “Your Skin is the Only Cloth You Cannot Wash,†recounts an incident in which he was going from door-to-door selling solar panels to the residents of Mount Ommaney, Brisbane. Suddenly, he is confronted and arrested by a group of white police officers, after a complaint had come through from a concerned citizen about a strange black man wandering the neighborhood. Future’s story arrived on my desk at the same time that protests throughout the United States and the rest of the world had erupted, following the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer; and a lesser known incident in which an innocent African-American man from Georgia, named Ahmaud Arbery, was violently gunned-down by two white vigilantes that claimed he looked like a suspect in several break-ins in their area.
Reflecting on all these stories now, I’m remembering what a truly special collection After Australia is, and I really hope people take the time to read it.
Do you have any other thoughts to share or any personal stories you are working on now?
As a matter of fact, something kind of odd happened yesterday while I was praying at Auburn Mosque: The ghost of Christopher Hitchens appeared before me and said, “Stop wasting your time, there’s no afterlife.â€
Anything else to add?
In a country where Indigenous people are regularly assaulted and killed by police; where young African men are demonized as “gangsters†by our news media and politicians; where Pacific Islanders are overrepresented in our prisons; where Muslims cannot conduct their Friday prayers without ever wondering if an Australian-born white supremacist is lurking outside with a machine gun; and where we cannot go into self-isolation without blaming four-and-a-half billion Asians; solidarity between all Australians – black, brown and white – is central to our survival.
I can’t thank you enough for this brilliant insight into your wonderful work with literacy, people, and our planet. It’s truly inspiring.
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.
Today we talk with Dr. Peter Brennan, whose first novel, Iceapelago, was inspired by his keen interest in climate change. He chaired the Climate Change Research Group at the Institute for European and International Affairs for almost a decade. He was an advisor to the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) Committee on Climate Change and Energy. He lectured on climate change as part of the Masters Programme on Sustainable Finance and is a Director of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. Peter has authored Behind Closed Doors: the EU Negotiations that Shaped Modern Ireland (2008), Ireland’s Green Opportunity: Driving Investment in a Low-Carbon Economy (2012), and Public Procurement: Rules of the Road (2016). He has also researched many reports on climate change. Peter has travelled to the Arctic, the Antarctic, and La Palma as part of his research into Iceapelago.
Tell us about yourself – your life so far and how you got started in writing. What have you published previously, before Iceapelago?
I live by the sea at Sandycove in South Dublin with my wife Margaret. Although I am 67, and have had a career for over fifty years, I still run a business consultancy. I abide by the maxim for indie authors: Don’t give up your day job, yet. Having worked in Ireland and Brussels, including seven years with our Foreign Service, I have professionally written countless memos, articles, and reports over the past decades. After my doctorate in 2007, I published my first reference book, Behind Closed Doors: the EU Negotiations that Shaped Modern Ireland. It sold well in academic circles. When I was invited to lecture in a Masters Programme on climate change, I decided to write the course textbook, Ireland’s Green Opportunity: Driving Investment in a Low-Carbon Economy. And four years ago, I wrote Public Procurement: Rules of the Road as a textbook for my clients. Writing nonfiction, especially academic books, is a completely different skillset compared to writing fiction, and making the transition was not easy. That said, writing defines me. I truly relax when I write.
Tell us something about your Iceapelago. Who is the intended audience, and what’s going on in the story?
Iceapelago, which describes a network of iced islands near Ireland, opens with a pair of Arctic foxes walking over sea ice to an island to make a lair in an elevated area with prospect of food. The prologue paints the picture of a devastated landscape. How the Arctic foxes arrived in Iceapelago is a consequence of three story lines that have one outcome: a series of natural disasters that transform life and living. The first storyline is based in La Palma in the Canary Islands where Spanish students witness the re-awakening of a dormant volcano. In Greenland, atop the Ice Shelf, scientists try to measure the flow of melt water through the glaciers. Marine researchers use a submersible to investigate reports of seafloor seismic activity off Ireland’s Continental Shelf. The story builds slowly as the characters are introduced, but quickly gathers pace as dramatic and page-turning events unfold. La Palma explodes, the glaciers fracture, and offshore earthquakes drive tsunamis to the coast. Those who have read Iceapelgao say the narrative is scarily plausible. Anyone who has an interest in climate change should enjoy the novel. It opens up scenarios that make it a compelling read.
What other ecological themes does your novel have, and how were you inspired to write about them?
I’ve been involved in climate action policy for almost two decades. For example, I chaired the Climate Research Group of the Institute of European and International Affairs for 10 years. I also advised the Irish Parliament on climate change. I get the science. I don’t need to be convinced. In fact, I believe the tipping point has already been reached and my grandchildren will be living in a quite different world, but hopefully not in the conditions described in Iceapelago. During a cruise to Antarctica some years ago, I was challenged to use my knowledge and insights about climate issues to write a novel. I traveled to Greenland and witnessed the melting of the glaciers, visited La Palma on the Canary Islands and walked among the dormant volcanoes, and got access to a marine research vessel that did seismic surveys deep off Ireland’s continental shelf. The natural events that researchers and scientists witness are brought to life in Iceapelago with a dystopian finale.
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?
With one exception, I have received great reviews from the likes of Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, All Authors, Readers Favorite, and many independent reviewers. However, positive reviews, newspaper coverage, and the wide use of social media have not translated into huge sales for this indie author. With bookshops on restricted opening hours, book festivals cancelled, book awards postponed, and all promotional activity impossible on grounds of social distancing, it is a bit discouraging, to be honest. But I did not write Iceapelago to make money. I wrote for the sheer enjoyment of the experience. I will be a bit wiser with the sequel and will try harder to find a publisher as without such a connection it is nigh impossible to get a profile in what is a highly competitive market. I am also conscious that fiction about climate change is a niche genre. Because I am an optimist by nature I have written my acceptance speech for the Oscars. I am told Iceapelago, the movie will cost $110m to produce! Great value to a smart investor.
Are you working on anything else right now, and do you want to add other thoughts about your book?
I hope to have the sequel, Iceapelago: the Aftermath, completed by the end of the year. The writing style is quite different; there is far more dialogue and far less by way of context detail. The story is about human survival on Iceapelago, which goes into total lockdown once winter arrives. It is set in the near future after the collapse of all basic infrastructure and public services, including currency, healthcare, and government systems. The flood waters around Iceapelago allow river cruisers to provide essential supplies. But Iceapelago, in common with other areas in the North Atlantic region, resembles the Middle Ages rather than a developed economy in the late 21st century. The Arctic foxes who thrive in tundra conditions are hunted by the humans as living conditions worsen. The community leaders try desperately to avoid chaos, loss of life, and destruction as another winter season approaches. The arrival of marauding polar bears is not a good omen. The crescendo destroys the status quo and at the same time starts a new beginning. I also have an outline, just two pages, of the final book in the trilogy. I will use the team from Design for Writers when I decided to self-publish.
Thanks so much, Peter! It all sounds interesting, and I already have a love for Ireland that I’d like to revisit in your new series.
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.
Amy Talluto’s paintings and collages depict landscapes, ranging from representational wood-scapes to more abstracted forms reassembling a hybrid of landscape and still life. Darren Jones wrote in Artforum that Amy Talluto’s series of oil paintings from 2017 produce “symphonic arrangements of green, ranging from deepest phthalo to honeyed laurel. Dashes of pink, crimson, and yellow also crop up, to shimmering effect. The technical proficiency of her sumptuous compositions, based on forests around the artist’s Catskills home, parlays them into sites of ethereality.†(Darren Jones, Artforum). Recently, during the pandemic, the artist started exploring collage, resulting in bold cutouts, and then paintings, where the previously hinted pinks, yellows, and crimsons become central alongside the blues and greens.
You were born in New Orleans, studied art in Washington University in St. Louis, and later at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Tell me a bit more about yourself and what brought you to landscape painting and specifically woodland?
When I was a kid in New Orleans, my parents got divorced and my mom moved across the street from an abandoned field. I remember pouring all my teenage angst into making images of that place and it was the first time that I realized that the landscape could be a receptacle for psychology and emotion.
I continued in that vein at Washington University and found that St. Louis had these beautiful farmlands outside of the city. In the fall, the grasses would turn pale blonde or rust-colored and almost look like the fur of an animal spreading out over the fallow fields. I was also drawn to the clumps of trees popping up sporadically in the vast whiteness of snow-covered golf courses in the winter. These odd landscapes were largely human-made and I got very interested in representing them in painting. Later, after I moved to Brooklyn, I went to graduate school at SVA and visited Prospect Park for inspiration. I also loved the scarred beech trees in Cadman Plaza Park in D.U.M.B.O.
I’m drawn to landscape because it jumps out at me in an insistent way. Trees especially have always startled me with their eccentricity. They can look very bizarre and personified to me, and I feel moved to note and represent them.
I am looking at Measured and Divided (2017) and Snake in the Garden (2020). What draws me to these paintings is the sense of a specific light element and interplay of gravity/movement upwards. What can you share about the genesis of these paintings and your process of making them?
The body of work that produced Measured and Divided was loosely inspired by Eudora Welty’s story Moon Lake and features landscape scenes from Upstate NY. In the story, orphaned children are camping in the Mississippi woods and the nature around them is described with rich metaphors. For example, one of the camper’s hands flops out of her tent in her sleep and she cradles “[night’s] black cheek.†Also, the night sky is described as being like “grape flesh†or the “grape of the air.†It got me wondering how a body of work might look if you viewed nature through a grape, or through an emerald glass.
After that series, I began making my oil paintings alongside smaller gouache studies on paper, and the vividness and quickness of the gouache started to seep into my oil painting style. Snake in the Garden is such a work. An old beech forest in Aquidneck, RI, that was originally a Rockefeller estate, inspired the painting. Beech trees are smooth and white so they change color constantly depending on shadows and where they are in a forest. Some looked like they had tiger stripes, some were blue or pink and covered in knobs, and this one seemed to be an Eden-like snake guarding its sacred garden.
Measured and Divided, 24 x 30 in.,oil on panel, 2017Snake in the Garden, 34 x 40 in., oil on linen, 2020
Your collages often integrate gouache and oil into playful compositions. When I look at them, I see a sense of adventure and improvisation. This is evident, for example, in At the Edge of the Sea. Can you elaborate on the relationship between your collage and painting?
I began making collages during the pandemic when I was at home with my son doing remote school. Collage felt fun and low-pressure at a very scary and high-pressure time. All you needed was a table, scissors, glue and some small bits of time. I made several works that way and was really excited by the results. Later, I got an opportunity to spend a long weekend at the Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, NY.I dumped a suitcase full of collage scraps over all of the tables in my room and worked for 48 hours straight, becoming what I jokingly refer to as a “collage goblin.â€
Most of the works in that group evoked my visit to Taughannock Falls Gorge, an area that I stopped at on the way. Deep in the gorge, the light was dim, and heavy clouds only allowed short bursts of intermittent sunlight. The moments of light would illuminate parts of the forest and suddenly you would see things (like the tip of a branch or a part of a trunk) that had been previously hidden by the gloom. Approaching Storm was one of the paper collages that grew out of that experience. When I returned home, I was curious to see how the image would look blown up as a large painting. I’ve always felt that landscape painting lends itself to big sizes as we’re used to experiencing nature as grand and vast. I think that the large Approaching Storm painting functions a bit like a totem, memorializing the alchemical process of its source collage.
Approaching Storm, 50 x 64 in.,oil on linen, 2021
Your graphite drawings are meticulous, precise, and seem to be consistently small in scale. What is your drawing process and what is the role of drawing in your work?
Drawing is my way of understanding the visual world around me, especially trees and natural forms. Trees are built kind of like the body so you’ll see limbs that kind of bulge in and out like an arm or a torso or a knee, and you need to feel those forms with the line. After I moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley in 2010, I used drawing to understand my new home. I drew quarries that were down the road, a hollow mining mountain in Rosendale and a frozen waterfall in a cave along the Ashokan Reservoir, among many others. It was all sort of a way to claim this territory as my own.
The Edge of the Sea, 80 x 60 in., oil on canvas, 2021
What is happening in your studio these days?
I’m currently working on large oil paintings based on collages I have made this past year. I am also working towards a two-person exhibition at the Art & Culture Gallery at the Albany Airport opening in November.
(Amy Talluto in her studio in Upstate New York, 2021. 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 December 2, 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.
THE EQUUS PROJECTS FILMING OF IMPRINTED, APRIL-OCTOBER 2021
October 2021. It is a bright, sunny, crisp October morning and the cast and production crew for our documentary film, Imprinted – three dancers, two equestrians, our sound technician, our second camera person, and our filmmaker Stefan Morel – are on a forest walk. As we pass under a canopy of magnificent autumn foliage, we pause to gaze upwards, noting the height of the huge tulip poplar and oak trees in this small New Jersey forest, nestled between suburban homes. Our forest guide is Roger Smith, a forest ranger and lifetime lover of forests and tress.
Roger’s passion for trees is evident as he describes the stunning intelligence nature displays: the interdependence of root systems and ground cover, waning chlorophyl leaving brilliant orange leaves on the sassafras trees and scarlet on the dogwoods. The seeds of the trees, acorns of the oaks, and nuts of the hickory and beech feed the squirrels and deer. If uneaten, they may sprout new trees for the future.
I am struck by the staggering intricacy of this ecosystem, the intelligence of nature going about its business despite human interference. It is the same intelligence I feel in the presence of the horses. These large animals give birth to babies that can stand and nurse within 20 minutes of emerging from their mothers’ wombs. Nature has created an elegantly calibrated creature of flight in this equine, its offspring poised to flee within moments of being born. The elegant interconnectedness of our animal and plant ecosystems is ever-present in my mind as I direct a dance company – The Equus Projects– which creates performance works that bring dancers and horses into shared landscapes. Equus has created works sited in urban and rural parks and even in a National Park – Pullman National Monument in far south Chicago. The company has performed in equestrian arenas, on museum grounds, on hillsides and in urban parks. We shot a full-length documentary film deep in a Swedish forest. The Equus Projects’ work has been commissioned by arts and equine presenters throughout the United States.
For most performance projects the company creates the works with local equestrians and their horses. For every project, the physical and emotional well-being of the animals comes first. The equine choreography is calibrated to showcase the individual animals’ strengths and personalities. The rehearsals are planned to keep the horses curious and engaged… which means no tedious repetition and drilling.
In October 2021, the company was in the final stretch of filming Imprinted, a documentary about how three dancers co-create a shared language with two mares and their young foals. The two mares in Imprinted – Roxy and Pegasa – are horses that we have been training and dancing with for well over two years. One of the mares is owned by our trainer, Carrie Christiansen. The other mare is owned by her close friend Terry Smith, Roger’s wife. Friends since they were teenagers, Carrie and Terry have shared their mutual love of horses through multiple phases of their lives and these two mares have been integral to that history. In the early summer of 2020, the women had Roxy and Pegasa inseminated, and a plan was hatched to investigate how the dancers might kinetically imprint ourselves on the young foals. While not hoping to literally imprint on the foals, we thought of this imprinting process as a gradual co-creation of a movement language with them. Carrie wondered if perhaps the foals would naturally take to the dancers, seeing as their mothers had been dancing with them in utero. I thought this entire idea was magical!
In January 2021, I decided that our foal research would offer rich material for a documentary film, and I set about finding a compatible filmmaker. Within a week I had found the perfect candidate: Canadian filmmaker Stefan Morel is a passionate equestrian, known for his equine films. I assembled a small cast of dancers and a production team, and we began filming in April 2021. We first filmed dancers-in-training with the pregnant mares, and by end of June we filmed our company dancing with the foals. The staging ground for our film was Roger and Terry’s small horse farm in Cookstown, NJ. We took a huge leap of faith and propelled ourselves into truly uncharted territory.
Stefan was determined to capture the birth of both foals – not an easy feat. Mares tend to give birth at night out in a pasture. To make sure the births were captured on film, Roger and Stefan engineered a lattice of soft lights which they suspended above a small paddock next to the barn, and Terry introduced Roxy to this dimly illuminated paddock as her nighttime space well before her delivery date. Carrie followed this strategy with Pegasa. Both mares gave birth in that paddock, with the humans gently assisting when needed but otherwise watching this miraculous process in silent awe.
Are we humans interfering with nature? The question continuously occurred to me throughout our filming.
Kat and Roxy
For thousands of years, horses have played pivotal roles in human societies, helping early farmers plow their fields, and giving warriors a competitive edge in battle. Over 4,000 years ago, horseback riding allowed people to travel farther and faster than ever before, spurring migration throughout Europe and Asia. Human domestication of these animals is evidenced in archaeological finds in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, indicating that the domestication of horses began approximately 6,000 years ago.
Today horses are used for sport. For some owners, horses are expensive possessions – much like sports cars – used for competition, fox hunting, and eventing. For others, horses are companions, cared for as members of the family. For folks like Terry and Roger, horses are part of a vision for environmental stewardship. Roger has a strong vested interest in keeping the forest adjoining his farm healthy and vibrant, protected from developers. His equine pasture thrives in part because it is adjacent to a thriving forest ecosystem.
Terry and Carrie take care of their mares and new foals with vigilant attentiveness. They provide on-going physical training for the mares and gently teach the foals to respect the human space. Like all equines, the foals began to test our human leadership early on by crowding and barging into our space. Our objectives as dancers are different from the objectives of a horse owner. An equestrian is most likely hoping that their foals will grow into ride-able horses. Carrie and Terry must make sure that their foals’ playful behavior does not become dangerously aggressive as they enter puberty. Our desire as dancers is about finding shared moments of engagement, perhaps co-creating a movement language. I fully acknowledge that our goals occupy the rather privileged position of simple curiosity. We are seeking synchronous movement conversations, an exchange of information rather than a desire to shape the horses’ behavior.
A human-equine conversation beyond simply hanging out together requires an understanding of equine behavior and the non-verbal language of equines. To reallydance with a horse calls for a fair amount of dedicated horsemanship training. Imprintedwill include many interludes of dancers engaged in horsemanship ground skills training. All three of us are experts in our own field, dance. We are relative beginners in the world of equine training. The journey is a humbling one.
Improvising with foals
Roger is deeply committed to preserving the natural balance of the ten acres of forest bordering his property. He works hard to be a good steward for this ecosystem, and the horses on his small southern New Jersey horse farm are part of that ecosystem. They play a role in Roger’s grand plan for ecological stewardship. Whether the forest is a few acres or a few thousands, he believes that he has been tasked to care for this plot of earth and leave it in an improved state. He manages the native trees and shrubs as well as the resident wildlife or those plant species just passing through. He uses the forest for products to improve his life – firewood to keep the home warm, lumber to build with, or the sap from the maples which yields “liquid gold,†aka maple syrup. Foremost, is the privilege of simply walking among these trees. As I walk through the forest, listening to Roger’s narrations about buds and nuts, ground cover and forest canopy, I feel a sense of awe for how powerfully efficient and intelligent nature is. It is the same sense of awe I felt watching Pegasa give birth to a jet-black filly, Lyra. The filly’s legs are still inside her mother when she opens her eyes, ears immediately tuning to her surroundings. Within 15 minutes of being born, Lyra is standing on her long spindly legs, gingerly walking around her mother. Within 20 minutes, she has found her mother’s nipples. We sit quietly, witnessing in awe the gentle and gradual bonding of mare and her newborn foal: Nature functioning magnificently, without human intervention.
As dancers, we use our improvisation skills to create a kind of shared physical language with the foals. In truth, the foals mostly choreograph us. Their movement gently carries us along next to them, their object of interest – mostly grass – directs our gaze as well. We shape the angle of our arm to drape gently over their backs, as our fingers pick up the tempo of their biting and chewing. Occasionally, we offer a flexed foot or wiggling fingers, actions that capture their attention momentarily.
Stefan, JoAnna, Lorenzo
I explore simply freezing, holding a shape like a human statue. Lyra finds this unusual behavior for a human fascinating – and she touches her nose to my elbow. I move just my elbow. She touches my chin and I shift the position of my chin. Lyra is curious. I hope that she is enjoying this, if only for a moment. These inventive improvisations with the foals alternate with lots of scratching itchy places on their haunches and withers. Throughout the filming process, our foal interludes gradually integrate some basic natural horsemanship communication: I flap my arms to say “do not crowd me please;†a gentle guiding with our hands is a polite request to back up; a small rhythmic shooing motion sends them away.
Perhaps with this film, we will find new ways of interacting with young horses that gently shape their behavior. Our team of filmmaker and dancers have been a constant presence in these young equines’ lives. Who knows, perhaps our foal dancing will bring some magical innovation to the horse world. To be sure this journey has transformed each one of us.
Lyra and Stephan
(Top image: Peg in birthing paddock.)
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JoAnna Mendl Shaw has been choreographing performance works for stage, rural and urban landscapes since the 1980s. Artistic Director of The Equus Projects, Shaw tours throughout the States and Europe creating site-specific performance works that often bring dancers and horses into shared landscapes. Shaw has taught on faculty at NYU, The Juilliard School, Ailey BFA Program, Marymount, Princeton, Mount Holyoke and Montclair State. Shaw is the recipient of NEA Choreographic Fellowships and multiple National Endowment for the Arts grants for Interdisciplinary Performance.
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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.
