Tag Archives: Climate Change

Humanity and nature are not separate – we must see them as one to fix the climate crisis

Heather Alberro is Associate Lecturer/PhD Candidate in Political Ecology, Nottingham Trent University.

“My work revolves around all things relating to the human-animal-nature relationship and its radical reconfiguration along harmonious/anti-anthropocentric lines. Specific disciplines of focus include radical environmental politics, environmental sociology, green utopian studies, environmental ethics, posthumanist studies, and sustainability.”

Climate crisis – here’s what the experts recommend we do

Hannah Hoag is Deputy Editor and Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation. Hannah has covered the environment, science and medicine for more than 15 years. She has written for Nature, Science, Wired, bioGraphic, The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s, among others. She launched and ran Arctic Deeply, an independent digital media project covering circumpolar Arctic issues. She has graduate degrees in biology (human genetics) from McGill University and in science and medical journalism from Boston University.

Jack Marley is Commissioning Editor, The Conversation. Jack joined The Conversation in 2018 after internships at Mongabay and The Press Association. He has a research background in marine biology and began his media career at university, where he reported on a fossil fuel divestment campaign for his campus paper. Jack covers science and environment and is interested in climate change, biodiversity and animal behaviour. He is based in Newcastle.

Hidden Monuments

Siobhan McDonald is an award-winning Irish artist interested in the changeable nature of landmass, historical events and their interconnection to time. Her latest exhibition, titled ‘Hidden Monuments’, presents a series of artistic enquiries to remind us of the Cairns, standing stones and Megalithic structures that foreshadow our architectural histories. 

BioBAT: Spontaneous Emergence of Order

BioBAT Art Space is the first exhibition space in New York City that is entirely dedicated to the intersection of Art and Science. Their inaugural art exhibit, ‘Spontaneous Emergence of Order’ features four interdisciplinary artists who create works based in science and technology.

Spontaneous emergence of order is a form of self-organization out of seeming chaos, the organic forming of systems mastered by no one person or thing, but the unfolding, natural order of a collective of events and actions. The four artists in this exhibit are sifting through this ordered chaos and creating their own new order based on their findings. Whether their interest is in the biological or the technological their artworks are all connected through the messiness of life itself and our connections to the natural world.

Being Plastic

Rebecca Gasior Altman is a writer and sociologist. Her work explores the social history of chemistry, plastics, pollution and environmental legacy— what we pass from one generation to the next. She holds a PhD in environmental sociology from Brown University, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Science and Environmental Health Network, a national think-tank.

The intersection of Art and the Environment

For over 40 years, Diane Burko has investigated monumental geological phenomena. Her practice at the intersection of art and science focuses on issues of climate change. Originally basing her imagery on research and visual data from scientists, she soon moved to bear witness directly in the Polar regions. In her painting projects such as ‘Politics of Snow’ and ‘Polar Investigations’ she explores visual strategies, translating data into imagery.

What I see around me

“When you are looking closely at the world it is impossible not to see damage and – if you have some understanding of what you are looking at – absence, so increasingly my work is motivated by the catastrophic impact of human actions on the natural world. I am inspired and appalled in equal measure by what I see around me.”

Emma Tuck’s work is informed by natural forms and patterns, refracted through the psychological, the political and the trivial.

Landforms

“Within my art practice I examine ways in which climate and current cultural awareness influence how we regard landscape phenomena”.

Catherine Richardson experiments with natural processes using paint, inks, pond water and metals; building a library of textures by freezing, thawing, evaporating, heating and burning. Using these textures the artist compiles mixed medium ‘paintings’ on panel or paper. Richardson then uses digital techniques to organize a collage of scanned textures, creating imagery that expresses landforms experienced.

Mediating between Nature and Self

Tania Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large-scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape. Her work was the subject of a major solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2014, encompassing sculptures and drawings which explored her preoccupation with the sea. She is Course Director, MA Drawing at UAL, Wimbledon and has recently been appointed Professor of Drawing at Bath Spa University. She is also the author of ‘Drawing Water’ (2014) and ‘The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing – The Primary Means of Expression’ (2017).

All aboard the Antarctic Biennale in Venice

The participants in the Antarctic Biennale international project have returned from their first art expedition to Antarctica. About 100 people from around the world – artists, architects, researchers, poets, writers, musicians and philosophers – set off on board a scientific research vessel, the Academic Sergei Vavilov, from the port of Ushuaia to the Antarctic Circle. During the artistic voyage, the participants traveled around 2,000 nautical miles (4,000 km), making over 12 landings on the shore of the Antarctic peninsula and on islands surrounding Earth’s most southerly continent. In total, on the continent’s territory, over 20 artistic projects were carried out, including performances, installations, exhibitions and sound-art experiments, as well as over 15 research sessions and philosophical discussions.

In this article, Clive Adams reviews their work and exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Clive is the founder director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, now based at Dartington in Devon. When working for Fabian Carlsson Gallery in London, he was involved in a project in which artist Andy Goldsworthy made the first sculpture at the North Pole in 1989