By Joan Sullivan

While some of us taught ourselves to bake sourdough bread or to mend socks during the pandemic, the American painter and arts writer Susan Hoffman Fishman plunged herself into her studio and emerged, a year later, with a revised creation story.

The result: a magnificent, nearly 50-foot (15 meters) opus entitled In The Beginning There Was Only Water. 

Currently on exhibit at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut through December 19, 2021, In The Beginning There Was Only Water reframes the biblical creation myth – in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – into a new, non-human-centric story.

Comprised of 39 mixed media paintings on paper, each 30 in. x 15 in., the work is hung without any space between the panels. The extended horizontal format of the piece creates a dramatic running narrative that begins approximately 3.8 billion years ago, when our fiery planet started to cool and the rains began to fall, and fall continuously, for centuries â€“ filling up the basins that eventually became the primeval ocean.

In the beginning, there was only water. Not a human being or apple tree in sight.

According to Fishman, the narrative is “an abstract and liberal interpretation of what scientists have determined really happened at the creation of the planet and for the billions of years that followed.” 

In the Beginning There Was Only Water grew out of Fishman’s providential participation in a group of eight female eco-artists who met virtually on a regular basis during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They assembled to read and discuss the newly published book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. The group’s enthusiastic reaction to this seminal eco-anthology was a collective decision to create individual paintings, sculptures, installations, and new media that responded to specific essays in the book. 

While reading All We Can Save, Fishman was “viscerally struck” by Kendra Pierre-Louis‘ essay, ‘Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs.’ In particular, Pierre-Louis’ cri de cÅ“ur for new stories galvanized her – new stories to replace the biblical creation myth that cast humans as separate from and, worse, superior to nature. Such a colonialist worldview justified – no, condoned – our species’ relentless appetite to use and abuse the Earth’s resources in any way we choose, without regard to the impact of our actions on non-human beings – including the rivers, oceans, forests, land, and atmosphere – upon whom we depend for our own survival. 

According to Pierre-Louis, this creation myth set humans on an inherently destructive path that evolved, over millennia, into our “innate tendency to destroy the environment” ever since “Eve, allegedly, took a bite of that damn apple.”

Fishman spent the majority of 2021 working on In The Beginning There Was Only Water. Prior to developing the framework for the series, she conducted extensive research about the origins of the earth itself, including the geological formation of land, volcanoes, mountains and bodies of water; the emergence of single-cell organisms; the appearance of algae that eventually led to the creation of the first plants and the birth of animal life.

Meanwhile, as Fishman worked to complete her narrative, the reading group developed plans to create a traveling exhibition of their work, entitled Climate Conversations: All We Can Save, which was curated by member artists Leslie Sobel and Laura Earle. For her contribution to the group exhibition, Fishman created two large-scale (5 ft. x 5 ft.) mixed-media paintings on paper and the first six panels of what was to become her opus. These paintings served as a warm-up for her 39-panel narrative, a massive project that would soon outgrow her Connecticut studio. 

During the summer of 2021, Climate Conversations was installed at the 22 North Gallery in Ypsilanti, Michigan (July-August 2021). In early 2022, it will travel to the Janice Charach Gallery in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (January-March 2022) and then to the Nurture / Nature Center in Easton, Pennsylvania (April-May 2022). 

The images accompanying this text, as engaging and seductive as they are, do not do full justice to Fishman’s extraordinary creation. In the Beginning There Was Only Water is a work of art that demands to be seen up close, in person. Walking the full length of this nearly 50-foot piece in the Five Points Gallery, visitors sense the primal energy associated with the violent origins of our blue planet and the teeming life forms created in its aftermath.

In this story, the entire world is Eden.

While Fishman chose to execute the first six panels as monochromatic interpretations of the primordial rains, she introduces color gradually as the narrative unfolds, beginning with blue and sepia and concluding with a full color palette. To mark the passage of time, each panel carries over at least one color from the previous one, an artistic sleight of hand that reminds us that all living organisms are related; they are, as Darwin pointed out, “descended from a common ancestor with striking anatomical similarities between species.” 

Fishman admits that she completed the paintings for In The Beginning There Was Only Water in multiples of two, four and six. But in ordering the narrative, she often reversed the sequence of the panels or, in many cases, turned the finished ones upside-down to enforce the abstract nature of the narrative. 

Incorporating collage materials such as gauze and hand-made papers to the surface of the panels, her paintings are highly textured. Her use of line and linear forms are especially effective in emphasizing movement and invites the viewer to travel along physically and intellectually with the story across time from panel to panel.

Because water is essential for all living beings on Earth, Fishman made a conscious decision to include visible references to it throughout the series, using brilliant cobalt blue starting in panel 7. In fact, the topic of water is central to Fishman’s artistic practice. Since 2011, her work has focused almost exclusively on water and the climate crisis: rising tides, plastic oceans, the threat of water wars, and rampikes – dead trees along our shores whose roots have been exposed to salt water from rising tides. 

Although all of Fishman’s previous works present a narrative relating to the nature of water in our time, they are in no way didactic. Instead, her paintings are scenes on paper that she creates using bold, vivid colors, abstract shapes contrasting with recognizable images, often with skewed perspective.

In addition to being a painter and public artist, Fishman is a prolific arts writer who pens the popular monthly column, Imaging Water, for this international blog. Her monthly articles highlight artists, projects, and exhibitions that address the increasingly critical issue of water in the context of climate disruption. 

While the planet continues to warm and the seas to rise as a result of misguided decisions and actions that human beings have made since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it is powerful artwork like Fishman’s In the Beginning There Was Only Waterthat reminds us of the innate beauty of our world and what we stand to lose.

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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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, artists and the energy transition. For the first time this month, Joan is a guest writer for the monthly series, Imagining Water. 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.

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By Jennifer Atkinson

Eco-anxiety and climate grief are sometimes framed as “disorders,” but in fact these feelings typically arise from an accurate perception of our ecological crisis. It may be more appropriate to identify eco-anxiety as a “moral emotion” – a sign of compassion, attachment to life, and desire for justice. And so paradoxically, we can take some encouragement from the global increase in eco-anxiety and climate grief, since our very existential discomfort affirms a desire to live in a more just and sustainable world.

Because the fight for climate solutions is filled with such contradictions, this episode explores some ways we are strengthened by challenging easy assumptions about climate distress. Our future remains unwritten, and by embracing the unknown we are better able to reframe our thinking in empowering ways. So-called “negative” feelings that arise in response to ecological disruption (grief, anxiety, anger) can be seen as signs of emotional health, while “undesirable” states like uncertainty are potential doorways to transformation. Climate anxiety might even be seen as a kind of superpower – a signal that alerts us when something’s wrong and needs to be addressed, especially while others are sleepwalking through the crisis. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.” The time has come for the maladjusted to rise.

This episode includes extended excerpts from Rebecca Solnit and Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

(Top image by Callum Shaw via Unsplash.)

Facing It is a podcast about climate grief and eco anxiety. It explores the psychological toll of climate change, and why our emotional responses are key to addressing this existential threat. In each episode of Facing It, I explore a different way we can harness despair to activate meaningful solutions.

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Dr. Jennifer Atkinson is an Associate Professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her seminars on Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, the Seattle Times, Grist, the Washington Post, KUOW and many other outlets. Jennifer is currently working on a book titled An Existential Toolkit for the Climate Crisis (co-edited with Sarah Jaquette Ray) that offers strategies to help young people navigate the emotional toll of climate breakdown.

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury

This month we travel virtually to Alberta, the home of Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author Premee Mohamed, and also where her novella, The Annual Migration of Clouds (ECW Press, September 2021), takes place. I admit to being drawn to this book because I often search for fiction about fungi, and Premee’s novella has some of that, along with a glimpse into the future if we continue on the route we’re on. I was so happy to be able to talk with her about her book. You can find more about Premee at her website and on Twitter. Waubgeshig Rice, another favorite Canadian author (Moon of the Crusted Snow), said of Clouds: “A riveting look at a dire future. The climate crisis is real, and The Annual Migration of Clouds is a must-read fiction.”

ABOUT THE BOOK

From ECW Press: 

The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away – to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society – but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?

I found the novella unique and refreshing, written with wit and in the style of a lyrical polemic.

A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

I see that you are in Alberta, Canada so hello from Nova Scotia! How did you get started in writing, and did you have any favorite childhood memories of nature and/or fiction about environmental issues?

I’ve always written as a hobby. I think the earliest “book” I wrote was when I was eight or nine, using drafting supplies from my dad’s job (super-smelly alcohol markers, letraset text, etc.). I didn’t decide to get into publishing until a few years ago because I didn’t see the point of monetizing my hobby, but a friend talked me into starting with short fiction, which pays right away, and from then I started to get the idea of trying to publish longer form work. As a child, my favorite nature memories were playing in the forests around my house near the Sturgeon river; I’m sad that that area is being filled up with McMansions now. I loved Watership Down and The Wind in the Willows because they were about a nature that didn’t include humans, but I wasn’t very interested in reading about environmental issues back then. I knew from the news, from school, and from our family subscription to National Geographic that everything was in decline and the decline was accelerating, and I felt so sad about it and, unable to deal with the sadness, my response was just to try not think about it, even though it was everywhere.

What motivated you to write The Annual Migration of Clouds?

I guess I’m just one of those writers who chases an idea to completion when it comes across my head! I liked the combination of the disease and the “quiet disaster” setting. Books that are set just after disasters, or I guess post-apocalyptic fiction, are great, but that wasn’t what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how boring and tedious and essential it is to rebuild after disaster, when the worst is generally over, and how people might do it differently based on these new constraints.

Can you give new writers a tip about world-building?

World-building doesn’t have to make perfect logical sense for our world, but it does have to make sense inside the internal logic of the story, or else readers will pick up on it right away!

Thanks for the tip! So what’s going on in the story?

In The Annual Migration of Clouds, a young woman named Reid lives and works at a university campus in Edmonton that is no longer a university, just a sturdy place to which people retreated after numerous climate disasters caused the collapse of technological society decades ago. She’s also infected with a new incurable disease that makes her constantly on edge about whether she’s doing or thinking things or whether it’s the disease doing it – and so is her mother. When she gets a rare chance to study at one of the few remnants of pre-collapse society, at a university far in the mountains, she has to choose between leaving her mother and community or staying with them to help rebuild and work towards a better future.

One of the descriptions I’ve read called your novella â€œhopepunk,” which is a pretty new genre. It seems a lot of readers are calling for more positivity in apocalyptic climate stories. What are your thoughts on that?

I also saw that descriptor! (I would also like to add that I didn’t put it in my description of the novella, because I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.) I do think I would like to see more hopeful post-apocalyptic (or, like this one, post-post-apocalyptic) stories. I have read a lot, like a lot a lot a lot, of hopeless dystopias and disasters scenarios, ones that assume that the worst of human nature will take over and that will be a permanent condition – that we’ll always be scratching out a subsistence living after a disaster, that everyone will become insular, territorial, and homicidal about resources and labour, that we’ll all become monsters. (I’m thinking things like Threads here.) Even just in terms of variety, I would like to see a body of literature that’s slightly hopeful, because I do think that fiction has the power to help introduce new ideas into people’s minds. If they don’t stick, that’s okay; just introducing a wide variety of possibilities is enough, especially when I hear people saying now “What’s the point, why bother? There’s nothing we can do about various issues.”

In times of COVID, everyone in the world is now dealing with disease on a scale that most of us have not seen before. Clouds has a disease, a fungus, also a symbiont, however. What led you to write Cad (the disease) into the story?

Actually, I started with the disease first! I had an idea for a hereditary symbiont disease (which Cad is), and I fell pretty far down the rabbit hole of thinking about transmission, how it would affect people’s minds, their decisions to have children (or not), how people would be pinning their hopes on accurate tests so they could avoid it, how people didn’t know how to not catch it, where it came from, etc. – before thinking, “Well, with today’s technology, why wouldn’t we just cure it? That would be priority #1 if a disease like this – debilitating, painful, fatal, and equally able to affect all populations – came up.” (I should also add that I wrote this in 2019.) So the next idea was actually, “Well, what if we couldn’t.” That led to me setting the story in a future where we had lost the ability to do advanced research and medicine, rather than in the past. And there’s no future I could imagine without climate change, so the two got intertwined together: a plague making people less able to respond to climate change disasters, and the disasters making people less able to respond to the plague. In Reid and her community is where everything kind of shakes out, sixty or seventy years later.

I had that kind of thought too, when COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic, that we would all have been better at curing something right now. Is there anything else that you wanted to add?

Nothing else to add! Just that I hope people enjoy the book.

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 Amy Brady

I’m writing this as a nor’easter batters New York, New Jersey, and our home in New England, and as the Western US experiences record rainfall after prolonged drought. According to the NY Times, these weather patterns, especially those out west, are a “glimpse into the future,” a future brought about by the climate crisis.

As recently as just a few years ago, important media outlets like the Times weren’t making explicit connections between climate change and extreme weather events. Like you I’m sure, I’m thrilled to see these connections finally being made. But there is still so much work to be done in this area. 

As news outlets ramp up their climate coverage (or, at least, I hope they will), artists and writers of all kinds continue to cover the climate crisis, encouraging readers and viewers to consider the complexity of the problem and the variety of impacts experienced around the world. One such writer is Marjorie B. Kellogg, author of Glimmer, a novel about a climate-ravaged New York City.

Marjorie has been writing about the climate crisis for some time in her fiction. She’s also the editor of The New Franklin Register and an award-winning scenery designer for theater on Broadway and Off-Broadway. She taught at Princeton and Columbia and was Associate Professor of Theater at Colgate University from 1995 to 2017. In our interview below, we discuss her latest novel, how she’s seen climate change manifest in her own life, and the role she sees fiction (and all kinds of art) playing in our larger discourse on climate.

Glimmer is a compelling character, who’s driven by survival and a sense of loss. Please tell us where she comes from! Who or what inspired her?

Basically, a who AND a what. The ‘what’ was a technical need: writing about a time that hasn’t happened (quite) yet requires a good deal of backstory and world-building, so that the reader can settle into an unfamiliar future with confidence, not constantly having to ask, “What’s going on and where am I?” But exposition can be static, badly disrupting the narrative flow. I wanted the characters to provide the necessary information through action and dialogue. Thus, Glimmer’s memory loss: if my protagonist can’t remember how the world got to the way it is as the story begins, the people around her must fill in by remembering it for her, gradually and as needed.

Later, as Glimmer regains her past bit by bit, her recollections become much more personal, but by then we have learned the world well enough to fit the personal into the more general Big Picture of flooded Manhattan 2110. But losing your past dislocates your sense of self as well as your place in the world. It leaves you vulnerable to missteps and misunderstandings, some perhaps comical but also potentially fatal. It’s a kind of disability.

I grew up with a handicapped sister. Her disability was not just an obstacle, but a constant source of threat and stress in her life, a physical and emotional vulnerability. Yet she had great stamina and determination. She was both sweet and deeply stubborn, and this combination of strength and vulnerability seemed exactly right for Glimmer as she manages to survive despite the odds.

What inspired you to write about the effects of climate change? Do you see the crisis manifesting in your own life? 

Speaking of vulnerability, I have always been painfully aware of how vulnerable our planet is, perhaps due to reading science fiction from an early age, much of which does focus on humanity’s destructive treatment of the Earth. Even so, anyone who fails to see climate change happening is living under a rock!

Meanwhile, I am fortunate to live in a (so far) blessed place. Here in upstate New York, we have clean air and abundant water, few tornadoes, baby earthquakes, no volcanoes. When hurricanes rage up the coast, we might suffer local flooding but nothing like New Orleans or even New York City. A dry month brings caution and burn bans, but no unquenchable wildfires. We water our gardens without guilt.

Yet, as a gardener, I sense the changes, which is more disturbing than just reading about them. The long falls without a frost, the warmer winters, the earlier springs. The birds that stick around longer, perhaps even winter over. The reduction in their numbers. The steady infiltration of invasive plants and toxic insects from more southerly climate zones. I can grow plants here now that would never have survived the winters of twenty years ago. Often I joke that global warming is my friend. But it’s only a temporary advantage. What it suggests for our future, here and everywhere, is terrifying. That I can see it proves it’s happening way too fast.

Of course, weather is a constant factor in rural life, not just something that happens when you go outside. It can determine the course of a day, a week, a season, or an income. It can be a source of great beauty, of sensual pleasure, even drama.  As such, it’s always had a central place in my fiction. Like a human character, it can be the hero or the villain. My fantasy work, The Dragon Quartet, features dragons born of the four natural elements, Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. My novel Lear’s Daughters, conceived with the scientific support of NASA climate scientist William Rossow, involves using weather as a weapon. (Also terrifying… but a lot of fun!)

Your book makes harrowing connections between dwindling resources and the threat of violent conflict. What do you hope readers take away from these connections?

I hope they will take a longer view and reconsider their actions in the world.  I hope they will see that this is a shared, global crisis – societal as well as climatological – and that the only way for humanity to survive (if indeed we deserve to survive!) is to work together to reverse or, at best, limit climate change. If we do nothing, we’ll be fighting over the ruins. That much is not fiction. Too many people and too few resources equal war. It’s already the root cause of local conflicts all around the globe.

And because parts of the world will fare differently from the effects of climate change, the dichotomy of have and have-not will only deepen. We see it happening in this country already, with the Gulf Coast hurricanes or the western wildfires and water disputes. People forced to flee the hard-hit areas will become climate refugees desperate to move into places where the more fortunate do not want them and will fight not to share what they consider theirs by right.

But this might-makes-right scenario has no happy ending. I don’t claim the wisdom to provide a specific solution, but by bringing a scary but realistically conceived near-future to life in a fictional narrative, I hope to move readers to consider this crisis deeply, to take it on as their own, to take action to prevent that dire future from becoming a reality, while we still have the opportunity to do so.

I love that the people who stay behind in your version of a future climate-ravaged NYC are the people who are already rethinking how to live on Earth: the outsiders, the artists, the people who, because of any number of hardships, have had to scrape and scrap to get by. Do you think that more people should be thinking about different ways of living, of structuring our societies? 

Yes, please! The more we think, the more chance of finding a way out of this!  We need to do Darwin one better and redefine what it means to be ‘fittest.’

Like living creatures, societies evolve over time as they adapt to changing geographical and climatological conditions. In the past, except during cataclysmic events, these changes tended to come slowly enough for most organisms to keep up. But the pace of anthropogenic climate change may be too rapid for humans (or life in general) to adapt in time, especially if we continue to keep our heads in the sand and refuse to recognize how badly we’ve screwed up the natural systems that sustain us.

Still, there’s always a vanguard, often made up of people who have declined a stake in the status quo or have had it taken away from them – yes, outsiders, artists, idealists, visionaries. Conventional society sees such people as a danger, yet they have often been its saviors simply by being willing (or forced) to try something new. 

And I think a lot of young people today are out there in front trying to figure out how we can live on this Earth and not destroy it. They see that the status quo is not working, and that only by sustaining the planet will we be able to sustain ourselves.

What role do you think novels do or can play in the wider discourse on climate?

Not everyone keeps up with the news, or reads non-fiction or the environmental press, especially younger folk busy with getting their lives going or raising kids. They are stressed and exhausted, and want to relax. If a novel (or art in general) can entertain as well as inform and enlighten, it stands a better chance of raising the more… shall we say, resistant or reluctant consciousness to a greater awareness of climate change, its reality, its coming consequences. Climate fiction can be a kind of recruitment device, rousing forces for the battle against climate change.

A story can draw in a reader with sympathetic characters that he/she can identify with. The flood or drought or famine is no longer some distant problem, but one the reader has shared with the characters living through it. Good reporting can do the same, of course, when the writer employs narrative structure and effects such as tension and surprise to tell real people’s stories, but fiction has a license to play with the facts, to add color, conflict, and action, to… I hesitate to say “manipulate,” but that is the goal… to produce the strongest emotional punch possible, to lead to a satisfying catharsis. 

A film, say, provides every last visual detail in living color. But because a novel offers only words, it engages the reader’s imagination more fully, puts it to work filling in the imagery and color using personal references, and creating a version of the story that is the reader’s own.

A science fiction novel is often said to be the answer to the question “What if…?” Climate fiction can project into the future and speculate on any number of possible climate outcomes, depending on the steps taken or turned away from. Bringing these scenarios to life in ways that resonate personally can help us decide what the right steps are and how we might go about taking them.

Finally, I know you have a book that is just hitting shelves, but what’s next for you? Anything you’d like my readers to watch for?

As a break from finishing a long novel, I’ve been working on a series of short stories, linked by place and shared characters (as has become fashionable of late). They explore the very local impacts of climate change on rural farming communities such as my own, where a traditional way of life is being challenged not only by alterations in the weather but by the sudden influx of urbanites fleeing both the pandemic and deteriorating conditions in the cities due to climate events. A clash of cultures as well as the shocks of accelerating climate change. The sociology is complex, potentially violent, and it’s happening all around me. 

So again, the big question to consider – since it seems we can’t find the collective will to address the problem and try to restore Earth’s climate to its pre-industrial state – is how are we going to live with this terrible imbalance we’ve created? 

Who are we going to become?

A question certainly worth writing about. 

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 Peterson Toscano

As a podcaster and radio producer, I listen to many climate change podcasts. Every now and then though, I hear a well-designed podcast that hits me in the heart and the gut. It becomes a transformative audio experience.

This is exactly what happened when I first listened to Claude Schryer’s conscient podcast. As a sound designer, Claude is able to reach deep into listeners’ minds and even bodies. Sound has that power. I chatted with Claude about his podcast and his own journey as an artist addressing climate change. From that recorded conversation, Claude wove in sound effects and personal reflection.  

We encourage you to listen with headphones on. 

The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a bilingual series of conversations about arts, conscience, and the ecological crisis. You will find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Next month, I will feature Dr. Krista Hiser and The Ultimate Cli-Fi Bookclub.

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.

(Top image: Photo by Bruno Bueno from Pexels.)

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 Joan Sullivan

Speaking on behalf of all the amazing artists I’ve interviewed over the past four years for this monthly Renewable Energy series, I think that one of the greatest compliments any of us could ever hope to receive would be to be described as a “superhero” by Olafur Eliasson.

That’s exactly the word that popped into Eliasson’s mind when he first saw Brooklyn-based artist Jessica Segall‘s brilliantly understated, less-is-more performance in Say When, her visually stunning short film about solar energy. 

Say When is currently showing at the #COP26 in Glasglow, along with four other short films from the Fast Forward film series produced by Little Sun, the social enterprise co-founded by Eliasson in 2012 with solar engineer Frederik Ottesen. 

“Little Sun’s Fast Forward film series offers a vital new space for artists to reimagine the future,” according to a quote by Eliasson on Little Sun’s website.

Segall’s Say When is one of those films whose deeply saturated, starkly composed images stay with you long after seeing it for the first time. For me, it’s the bold image of a sequined goddess standing alone on a massive sand-dune, a conduit for the Sun’s rays that she receives and then redirects to the viewer with her magic mirror. 

In Segall’s film, there is no need for words. No need for numbers, statistics, or degrees centigrade. Just a simple technology – a piece of coated glass – that allows us to look in the mirror, reminding us of what we already knew but that we seem to have forgotten: “Human culture is and has always been inexorably connected to the ultimate source of light and warmth, the Sun,” wrote Maria Popova in 2016.

I asked Segall in an email exchange to explain the importance of embodiment in her work. Here is her unedited response:

In my performances, I play with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Ecofeminism identifies the abuse of women and nature as from the same source. Any person with a vulnerable body – people of color, gender non-conforming people, know what it’s like to feel in danger embodied on a daily basis. Non-human beings know it as well. Climate change is an embodied danger that to some is still imperceptible – in the legacy of endurance performance, I embrace that vulnerability.

In a previous post, I wondered out loud if embodiment was “the secret sauce that’s been missing in the artistic community’s response to the climate crisis to date?”

Eliasson mentions it here. Chantal Bilodeau, Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle and founder of this Artists and Climate Change blog, mentioned embodiment six years ago in her essay about theatre in the age of climate change: 

But if we want to be active participants in shaping our future, we need to move beyond writing plays about climate change to writing plays that are climate change – plays that embody, in form, content, and process, the essence of the issues we are facing. Plays where the concept of climate change is so integral to the work that the term doesn’t even need to be uttered. New problems cannot be solved with old solutions. A new consciousness requires new artistic constructs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about embodiment lately, especially after re-reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass about Indigenous wisdom and the teachings of plants. But I was totally unprepared for the visceral, embodied performance by the British contemporary dance artist and choreographer Charlotte Jarvis. Filmed in an empty Globe Theatre, Jarvis embodies the pain and violence that we humans have inflicted upon our non-human relatives with whom we share this planet, as her partner Ben Okri reads aloud his Letter to the Earth. The video ends with a cameo appearance by their daughter, Mirabella Okri, reading her own Letter to the Earth. Brilliant. Masterful. Spellbinding.

Apologies to Jessica Segall! When I sat down tonight to write this post, my intention was to focus on Segall’s inspiration to create a silent film about solar energy. But my pen seems to have had other ideas. I have learned to embrace this tension, allowing my pen to open new doors for me, finding connections that I hadn’t previously considered. 

In this vein, the similarities between Segall’s and Jarvis’ performances become clear. While visually distinct – slow/contemplative versus jarring/gut-wrenching – these two performances share the common language of embodiment. Both artists have become vessels through which they receive and transmit ancient wisdom. Both artists shine a much-needed light in the darkness of this chaotic era. 

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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

 

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Susan Hoffman Fishman

For over fifty years, Philadelphia-based painter, photographer, and activist Diane Burko has translated her love for large open spaces and monumental geological sites into powerful and alluring landscapes. Her current exhibition at the American University in Washington, D.C. (August 28 – December 12, 2021), titled Diane Burko: Seeing Climate Change 2002 – 2021, contains 103 paintings, photographs, and time-based media depicting mountains, oceans, snow and ice, glaciers, volcanos, and fires that address the growing impact of the climate crisis.

In 2006, Burko became one of the first artists to focus her work on the visible changes happening to the environment. That was the year the groundbreaking film An Inconvenient Truth came out, highlighting former president Al Gore’s campaign to raise public awareness on the dangers of global warming. An activist all of her adult life, Burko felt compelled by what she was learning to use her paintings as a way to both bear witness to what was happening to the planet and, at the same time, to show the astonishing beauty of what we stand to lose if we don’t make radical steps to mitigate climate change.

In order to understand her pivotal transition from landscapes without a political message to those with a concentration on environmental devastation, Seeing Climate Change includes paintings that represent Burko’s prior focus. Influenced by French landscape painters from Corot to Van Gogh as well as Manet, Velasquez, the Hudson River School artists, Winslow Homer, Fairfield Porter, and the abstract impressionists, Burko’s earlier works were technically flawless and aesthetically beautiful. Grandes Jorasses at Marguerite, a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif between France and Italy, was created in 1976 and based on an image from a magazine photo (see below).

When Burko first began to address climate change, she was using what she called “other people’s images” and what “other people saw” as the inspiration for her paintings, including photos from Landsat, a satellite program sponsored by NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS), which provided her with an aerial perspective of the world. Ultimately, she committed herself to “being there,” to personally bearing witness to climate change. Beginning her own exploratory journey, she traveled as far away as the Arctic Circle, Antarctica, Iceland, Hawaii, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, and more to document flooding, volcanic activity, melting glaciers, mega fires, and the destruction of coral reefs. The results of these voyages were an astoundingly prolific number of paintings and photographs. 

One of Burko’s first trips was to Grinnelle Glacier in Glacier Park, Montana, where she both climbed the mountain and flew over it. In order to document changes to the area over time, she used repeat photography as one of her initial strategies.

As Burko delved deeper into her explorations, she engaged with scientists and research labs. In her extensive and thoughtful essay for the exhibition catalogue, co-curator Mary D. Garrard noted that Burko acquired scientific knowledge from them and they in turn learned to look at the environment from “her perspective as an artist-explorer.” Garrard goes on to say that 

Burko has gained recognition in scientific circles as a collaborator in dealing with climate change. Scientist colleagues write her into National Science Foundation grants. In 2012, she was invited to her first American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference; in 2018, she organized an art-science panel at the AGU conference in Washington, D.C.  

In 2013, Burko participated in The Arctic Circle’s annual expeditionary residency program for artists and writers, traveling aboard a Barquentine sailing vessel around Svalbard, Norway, an archipelago in the Arctic only 10 degrees south of the North Pole. Svalbard is a region that is warming the fastest within an area of the planet that is already warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. While in Svalbard, she walked on a glacier for the first time and visited the Ny-Alesund Research Station, where she engaged with the research scientists there. 

Showing the overwhelming beauty of nature has always been at the heart of Burko’s work. The megafires she paints, although horrific in reality, are mesmerizing on her canvases; the devastating degradation of coral reefs within the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia are represented in enticing cobalt blue, turquoise, and yellow ochre colors; the Arctic ice, although diminishing, sparkles and shines. Burko admits that her intention is “to say her piece with seductive beauty” – to, as Garrard explains, â€œalert us to the earth’s peril by reminding us of the extraordinary beauty of what we are losing and of nature’s complex, exquisitely subtle operating systems that are being thrown out of whack.”

Over the years, Burko’s working process has evolved and her choice of materials and media has expanded. In addition to paintings and photographs, Seeing Climate Change includes video and lenticular prints. She refers to her more recent paintings as “the most abstract work I’ve done in decades.” Rather than painting on canvases hung from a wall, she now works horizontally, pouring pigment onto the canvas, often mixing the paint with salt, sand, and glitter, and then blowing it across the surface of the canvas with air from a compressor, creating an impression of wind and the elements. She is also adding crackle paint in areas of her paintings to indicate where the breakup of ice is occurring. Ice Melt, 2020, a video in the exhibition, incorporates images from many of her paintings and photographs, along with a soundtrack of crackling ice and eerie music.

The physical layout of the gallery at the American University effectively complements Burko’s work. Configured as a spiral in which visitors can see the beginning and end of the exhibition at the same time, it mimics the circular shape of the world as well as the interconnectedness and global nature of the critical issues being addressed.  

One of the most striking paintings in Seeing Climate Change is Unprecedented, completed during the COVID-19 pandemic (see image at the top). Monumental in scale, it reads from left to right like a narrative of disaster and renewal. Using spheres as metaphors for the virus cell itself and, as in many of her works, for the global community, Burko is telling us that, despite areas where COVID is still raging red hot, there is the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, a time in the near future when we will have survived the virus and when perhaps even the Earth, represented by a green sphere, will have recovered from the damages we have caused.  

Not one to rest on her laurels, Burko has ambitious plans for her next journey and body of work. She intends to explore the Amazon and study the effects of gold and copper mining on water tables and the deforestation and fires impacting millions and millions of trees. The Amazon, considered the lungs of the world, is enormous in scale, crossing nine countries and consisting of 2,700,000 square miles. Its wellbeing is critical to the wellbeing of the planet. In addressing these issues, as she has done in her previous work, Burko will use her art to awaken our emotions and senses to the dangers of man-made climate change. It can be said that Seeing Climate Change and all of Burko’s work since 2006 can be summed up by the quotation attributed to Thomas Lovejoy, a conservation botanist, which she has chosen to display at the entrance to her exhibition: “the most effective alert to the threat of climate change is likely to come from the world of art rather than of science, because art has such an extraordinary way of cutting across human society.” 

(Top image: Unprecedented, 8 ft. x 15 ft., mixed media on canvas, 2021. Photo by Joseph Hu.)

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 will be comparing changes to bodies of water over time. 

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury

I virtually met author Bijal Vachharajani this past summer at Scotland’s CYMERA Festival of Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writing. We talked with host and author Lauren James, along with author James Bradley, about how we were motivated to write stories that focus on climate change. The talk aired on YouTube on June 5, if you’re interested in watching it. Bijal’s work as an editor and children’s book author intrigued me, so I wanted to talk more with her about her newest book, A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue, as well as dig more into her life, creative imagination, and other work. 

I’m so happy to have recently met you at a climate writers’ panel during this summer’s CYMERA festival. I learned that you are a prolific writer of illustrated children’s fiction that is environmentally pressing. What books have you written?

It was so lovely to meet and talk to you as well, and I must confess: your website is a fabulous resource! My middle grade green books include A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue, about a motley crew of tweens and teens who tackle a brown cloud of pollution that’s taken over their city – it won the AutHer Children’s Book Award in 2020; and So You Want to Know About the Environment, a non-fiction book about climate, food, waste, water, and wildlife. Apart from that, I have written three picture books about the environment: What’s Neema Eating Today?, The Seed Savers, and PS What’s up with the climate? I have co-authored two books: The Great Indian Nature Trail with Uncle Bikky with Rohan Chakravarty, and 10 Indian Champions who are Fighting to Save the Planet with Radha Rangarajan. There’s more on my website.

What are your thoughts on the importance of relating to children the planet’s ecological demise? It’s a scary subject, but many authors have found a way to tell the stories in a more positive way.

When I was studying the climate, I came across studies that talked about how climate communication needs to be framed more positively. I was quite fascinated by that because as a children’s author and editor, I do believe in stories that are laced with hope. It does not have to be straight-up giddy hope, but even a glimmer is good. Telling the complexities of the climate crisis with imagination and hope makes for compelling stories – and those are being published more and more. My work with children has led me to believe that children care. The fact is, we protect what we love. And we can see that in the kind of work children are doing across the world, demanding a better future. We need stories that fire their imagination, that give them answers to the ecological crisis, and give them space to ask questions.

When growing up, were you inspired by any particular environmental fiction?

I grew up in 80s India and the only books we had in our libraries were Enid Blyton’s, Nancy Drew’s, Archie’s Comics, and Russian picture books. A lot of Blyton’s portrayals of nature and animals stayed with me, as did the natural landscapes in those picture books. I realize now that perhaps the magical faraway tree is nothing but a metaphor for the marvelous worlds you find when you climb a real tree, with its canopy shyness, its visiting birds and insects and squirrels. But more than that, it was the stories my grandmother and mother told me about sparrows that come visit, and invitations from the moon to visit that influenced me. And of course, Target Magazine, which sadly no longer exists. I used to wait for it every month and read about adventures, and nature facts, and nature stories by Ruskin Bond.

It’s hard to pick one book of yours to focus on since several of your picture books are relevant! But let’s talk some about A Cloud Called Bhura. How did you come up with this story?

I was at The University for Peace, pursuing a Masters in Environment Security in 2012, and I read about the atmospheric brown cloud phenomenon (“bhura” means brown in Hindi). As I researched more, I started to wonder: What if a brown cloud was to come and hover over my home city of Mumbai? I was mostly fascinated with how people respond to climate change. Whether it’s the government, the private sector, civil society, the media – they influence how people think about the crisis more than science does. And so, I began writing a story about the different perspectives of fictional people – scientists, policy-makers, media professionals (and unprofessionals), film stars, industry leaders – who live in this city and how their perspectives inform everyone else, making climate stories more political, more of a trending topic, a matter of contention, rather than decoding the science to find solutions.

What’s going on in the story, and how did you imagine and create the characters?

Amni and Tammy wake up one morning to find the sky taken over by a huge brown cloud. Where did this cloud appear from? Along with their friends Mithil and Andrew, they set out to find out more while their city reels from the changes the cloud brings to the weather. Bhura Cloudus, as the media calls it, contains noxious gases, causes scalding rain to fall, makes birds flee the city, and suffocates every living thing. It’s a book about the changing global climate and the havoc it can cause. It’s also about the forces of friendship, trust, and community, which give hope and can help counter this deadly threat to humanity.

I have always believed in kid power so I decided to let the children of the story do the investigation. The stories are told from the perspective of Amni and Tammy, who are friends but also very different. And that raises questions of social justice and climate vulnerability as well. Mithil is, of course, all of our best friends. We all need someone who will bring a snack when on an adventure. Plus, he has a dog! Andrew is that wise friend who reminds us there is homework to be done while saving the world. In fact, while editing the book, my editor Sudeshna Shome Ghosh made me go back and add more of Andrew – and am glad I did. (Almost always listen to editors.) Then there’s a bunch of politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and twin scientists. And, of course, Bhura is a poor rhymester of a cloud.

I love Aindri’s illustrations (art directed by Maithili Doshi), which give this really distinct view of the cloud, the city, and the world as it unfolds because of this havoc – a microcosm of the spaces that children inhabit today.

Friendship seems to be important in your stories. How does friendship help children overcome frightening reality?

You are so right! I was a painfully shy child, but different friendships helped me change my worldview and the way I navigate this world. Fictional friendships do the same; they help readers seek refuge in an empathetic buddy, see themselves in the fights two pals might have (while, of course, rooting for them to stop being silly), and realize that friendships can be of different kinds. They don’t have to be human friendships. In my chapter book, Kitten Trouble, Rajiv Eipe illustrates the moment when the scared young protagonist finds that a warm kitten can be a friend (and vice versa). In fact, it was my editor Sayoni Basu who highlighted this relationship. Then there are friendships with visiting birds, caterpillars, or dogs that are meaningful in forging future nature relationships.

Are you working on anything else right now?

I haven’t been able to write much in the second wave of the pandemic. However, I just finished the first draft of my book for Hachette about a girl who is dealing with the loss of her father, and finds solace in shared grief and an ancient magical tree. It’s with my editor Nimmy Chacko right now so I am spending sleepless nights hoping she likes it. The book looks at nature and grief, and it’s written in the wake of the loss of my partner, so it’s a bit raw for me. I am just starting work on a book with my editor Smit Zaveri at Puffin, about a boy who thinks his mother is up to something sinister, like perhaps gobbling him up! And I’m waiting for the launch of an anti-plastic book with WWF-India. Phew!

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 Etty Yaniv

Lily Prince makes lush plein air paintings depicting the essence of specific places around the world. By utilizing linear and color vocabularies, she creates pictorial fields which resemble disorienting topographical maps where time is fluid and frozen simultaneously. Lily shares her background, ideas, process, and projects.

Tell me a bit about your background and what brought you to plein air painting.

Just before going to Bard for my MFA, I began painting at a park near my apartment, mostly out of curiosity. It felt like a challenge; it made me nervous. My first painting professor at RISD, Dean Richardson, said to always be nervous when you’re painting and drawing, like you have a plane to catch in a few minutes. So that’s how I knew it was right. And I fell in love with being able to make work while being out in nature. It was a gift to spend time outside and also feel I was accomplishing something. That sense of it being a challenge has never left me. Every new landscape I approach to draw from feels like an almost insurmountable challenge. 

So when I got to Bard, I continued with plein air work, but only painting rather than drawing. I would return daily to the waterfall in the woods on campus, dragging very large canvases that I’d thrown in the back of my 1971 Oldsmobile station wagon, and paint in oils. Bugs love the smell, so I spent a lot of time picking dead ones out of the paint when I returned to the studio at the end of each day. I loved being in the woods at the edge of that waterfall.

During my time at Bard, I went to live for a few months each in both northern and southern California. That is when I began plein air drawing, doing at least one oil pastel drawing a day, mostly black-and-white, for six months. I learned so much about how landscape space is made up of forms of light and dark. Just shapes of light and dark that fit together like a puzzle and change in scale. That was one of the most educational experiences I ever had.

In your statement, you argue that beauty is the greatest form of protest. It’s an intriguing twist. Can you talk more about how you see the relationship between beauty and protest today?

Obviously, there are many forms of protest and these days we need them all. They certainly are not mutually exclusive. Organizing masses of people to demand change is imperative, crucial to our survival, but so is choosing thoughtfully how to live one’s life and making choices that consciously reflect one’s beliefs. Being vegetarian for 38 years is one way I feel I can effect change on a personal level. So is choosing to purchase organic food for decades and now seeing so many major food companies make and offer organic products. Using individual consumer power, which is a form of protest, is so important for change.

I define beauty as a vast term that encompasses consciousness, the pursuit of the making of things that have meaning, the discovery of solutions to problems, personal expression, and the seeking of knowledge. I’m not referring to just the classical sense of beauty. It is more about a sense of devotion to something greater than oneself (not as in organized religion, but rather spirituality: the connection to something greater than oneself and one’s self interests). Something that benefits humanity, nature, all species, the planet. Sounds a bit grand and hyperbolic, perhaps! But I think that the pursuit of beauty, defined as such, is these days a tremendous act of protest.

Scientists and artists who devote their time to being out in nature to record or reflect upon and bring attention to what is most important to our survival – nature – are engaged in an act of real protest. So much of the world has ignored the importance of this for too long and now we see where that has led us. It isn’t the easiest thing to be out in the landscape in difficult weather or uncomfortable surroundings struggling to capture and declare some element of the elements as vital. It certainly isn’t heroic, but I do see it as an act of protest.

Your work takes you to places with diverse landscapes, like New York’s Hudson Valley, Italy, France. How do you choose where to paint and how does your approach to painting “Lago di Como” differ from painting “Arles” for example?

I choose where to plein air work based on some practical considerations, such as where I might be invited to be an artist-in-residence, or where I might want to explore, or where I might be able to plunk myself down and live for a time. Certain landscapes, although I might find stunningly beautiful and inspiring – such as many beach locations, or the woods deep in the mountains – just don’t have what I’m looking for artistically, such as deep space with varied patterns of fertile growth and ample sky. A place must also have what I connect with spiritually and sometimes I have to search that out.

I tend to respond most to certain very cultivated landscapes, land that has been cultivated for centuries like in Europe and has an ordered chaos. But also the rock formations and cacti forms in the southwest U.S. and distant mountains with water in the middle ground in parts of the northwest. The corn fields with hay bales in the Hudson Valley are always with me and enter into my work. So there is a simultaneity; it is never really just one place I’m working from. I carry within me all the places I’ve been most affected by. But give me a view with deep space, fertile fields with a fecundity of random forms and patterns, and distant, echoing mountains and I am ready to get to work.

Can you share one plein air painting experience that you consider formative?

Painting in the woods at the Bard College waterfall every day for 9 weeks during graduate school was truly formative. It was the first time I ever had that kind of continuity, of returning to the same place for 2 months and really exploring a place in depth. It was also my first time working large on site, as well as having fantastic support from mentors.

But more recently, returning to Italy seven years ago on an artist residency, was truly transformative. I had lived on and off for various periods in Italy beginning with my year at RISD in Rome. Returning there had so much sensory intensity for me. And it coincided with my return to plein air, which I had left for many years but always longed to return to. Drawing from the same spectacular view every day at the end of a small street in a tiny Tuscan town overlooking the Crete Senesi landscape was magical. My work is still inspired by those twisting, undulating hills, and the ordered chaos of the distant fields and silhouettes of cypress trees receding in space and dotting distant hills. I carry that with me.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a project called “American Beauty” that is attempting to remind us all about how much beauty still exists in our country. We really need that now. I began a series of small black-and-white and large color plein air drawings on a recent trip to the southwest and northwest. During these times of environmental and societal devastation, it can seem almost impossible to remember how much untouched land and inspiring landscape there is out there/here. It is astounding how much undisturbed nature abounds in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, just to name the places I travelled to this summer.

So I set out on this road trip in August to draw from places of particular interest to me. I tried to avoid drawing in direct sun during the most intense heat of the day, which often was over 100 degrees, but I wasn’t always able to avoid it. It was extremely intense. Sometimes I drew from the back of a rented mini-van, on the side of a highway if there happened to be a view I wanted, so at least I could sit and have the raised back provide some shade. It was hot as hell and definitely a labor of love.

In the past, I’d never made plein air drawings larger than 14” x 15”. That way I could manage standing up to draw while holding the pad in one hand and drawing with the other. And that size allowed me to easily fit the work in a carry-on suitcase. But on this western trip I worked on 30” x 35” 300 lb paper and leaned on large cardboard sheets. Doing that really seemed a bit insane on the side of highways – it was a challenge for sure–but now I’m so glad I have those works to finish up back in my studio and use as composite inspiration for paintings I’m about to begin. 

(Top image: Arles, 1, acrylic on canvas paper, 16” x 16”, 2019. Unless indicated otherwise, 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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Jennifer Atkinson

Many consider hope to be essential to maintaining social movements where change is slow, setbacks are frequent, and the odds aren’t good. As Rebecca Solnit once wrote, “To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” But when it comes to the existential threats of climate change and mass extinction, what if hope is part of the problem? What if it obscures the enormity of our crisis, or makes us complacent, allowing the public to defer responsibility onto other people or the future?

When you look at the scale of our climate emergency and the inadequacy of society’s response, hope can feel like a throwaway term, a cheap neon sign we dutifully switch on at the end of climate rallies. But those reservations about hope are not the whole story. Research shows that environmental discourse has long fueled public hopelessness by perpetuating apocalyptic narratives and the sense that it’s already “too late” to act. That hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as those who believe we’re already doomed – or that solutions don’t exist – chose not to act, thus ensuring the very outcome they imagined. Episode 5 explores the complicated role of hope in the fight for a livable planet, and the different forms it takes in environmental debates: hope as complacency or “cruel optimism” (an ideology to keep the public in line) as well as more subversive versions like active hope, intrinsic hope, and critical hope.

(Top image by Ruedi Häberli via Unsplash.)

Facing It is a podcast about climate grief and eco anxiety. It explores the psychological toll of climate change, and why our emotional responses are key to addressing this existential threat. In each episode of Facing It, I explore a different way we can harness despair to activate meaningful solutions.

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Dr. Jennifer Atkinson is an Associate Professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her seminars on Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, the Seattle Times, Grist, the Washington Post, KUOW and many other outlets. Jennifer is currently working on a book titled An Existential Toolkit for the Climate Crisis (co-edited with Sarah Jaquette Ray) that offers strategies to help young people navigate the emotional toll of climate breakdown.

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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