As an artist focusing on endangered animals, I travelled to Malax, Finland in the fall of 2017 to join the Malakta Art Factory’s residency program. I was invited to the Merenkurkku School in Vaasa to perform an art project during my stay, and I designed one that aimed to teach students about fur farms and how the leather industry violates animal rights. We gave students materials to create artworks on this theme, and they created origami birds using paper that was printed with animal fur patterns. Afterwards, we configured these paper birds into an installation that was showcased in the school hall. I travelled to Germany and Iran in the following years where I led the same art projects, and each time I found myself continually amazed by the engagement of the students, their interaction with the process, their eagerness to create art, and also their conversations about animal rights. These experiences raised new ideas for me, and they also made me reconsider the relationship between art and environmental justice.  

Throughout art history, nature has long served as the source of inspiration for artists. This influence can be found in wide-ranging art forms from the prehistoric cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic to the landscapes of David Hockney. Nature is still the focal point for many artists in the contemporary world, but with a twist. Today, artists have transformed this familiar and ancient practice of representing nature into a venue for expressing environmental concerns. We live in a critical historical moment where various ecological crises threaten lifeforms on Earth, and the destructive impacts of human activity on environmental pollution, climate change, and species extinction are increasingly self-evident. Given the ecological challenges we face, the need for a profound change in understanding the relationship between humans and other species on Earth is more apparent than ever. And art, just maybe, holds the capacity to both reveal and respond to these environmental issues and the need to redefine these relationships. 

One of the artists using art to highlight such critical concerns is B. Stephen Carpenter, the Chief Executive Artist of Reservoir Studio, who created a participatory performance at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University in 2014 to draw attention to the global water crisis. Water scarcity is a social and ecological injustice, one that sees 771 million people around the world without access to clean water and nearly a million people dying every year from water-related diseases. A group of students, faculty, and community members participated in Carpenter’s performance and were tasked with making handmade ceramic water filters as a creative response to water scarcity. By producing filters as art objects and bringing filter production practices into a public space, the performance made what often seems like an abstract concept into something that was now tangible and perceptible. In doing so, the performance generated conversations about the water crisis that moved into the classroom and university board meetings, as well as online and into social media channels. It also allowed participants to experience the power of collaboration and the influence of creative action. As art theorist Maxine Greene notes: “the arts provide a space for engaging in a co-creative dialogue with nature and culture.” By enhancing environmental sensitivity, questioning, creativity, and the imagination, art projects like Carpenter’s have the power to transform the collective consciousness—a necessary step in helping us rebuild our connections with the biotic communities we are a part of. 

Another art project aimed at drawing attention to environmental destruction comes from the ecological researchers Emma L. Johansson and Ellinor Isgren, who performed a participatory art project in 2017 to understand how large-scale land acquisitions in Kilombero Valley, Tanzania were impacting local lives. Climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollutants, soil degradation, and waste are all examples of how agriculture is entangled with environmental destruction, and art became a medium through which the local participants could express their concerns and stories of change. Beginning with group conversations around local perceptions of environmental change, how natural resources have changed and how this impacts livelihood, the project then transitioned into painting workshops inspired by the Tanzanian art style, Tingatinga. By using a familiar art style with storytelling motives and roots in an African tradition, the project allowed locals to visualise the social and environmental changes taking place around them. But it also allowed creative thinking to take place alongside conversations about these environmental issues. All in all, the project exposed locals to new ways of thinking about the pressing issues they were facing and helped motivate the community to act. 

The final example I’ll share is the innovative artistic practice of Kathleen Vaughan, a visual artist, writer, scholar, and educator who creates projects oriented towards increasing awareness of environmental and social issues and fostering a sense of community. Her Walk in the Water project ran from 2016-2020 and used visual art and oral history to explore the St. Lawrence River’s shoreline in the de-industrialized Montréal neighbourhood of Pointe-St-Charles from an environmental perspective. Flowing through and adjacent to numerous Indigenous homelands, this large river has always been a primary habitat and thoroughfare for many peoples and creatures. Yet the St. Lawrence River’s shoreline has dramatically changed over the last 200 years as the result of urban construction. Now, most of the Pointe’s terrain near the river is contaminated soil unfit for human habitation. Vaughan draws on writings and interviews with residents and environmental experts and uses multiple forms to raise awareness about the complexities of the river and how people can connect with its waters and creatures. There is the wall-sized textile map of the shoreline’s changes that features various layers of pieced and embroidered cloth showing the flowing river and its changed boundaries. There are also touch-activated audio excerpts that share river stories and even the hydroponically recorded submerged voice of the St. Lawrence River, giving a voice to the environment itself. 

All these art projects examine the environmental crisis through starkly different lenses. But collectively, they show how art can be used both to engage people and also lead them to discover something different in the process. If there is an urgent need for rethinking our relationship with the environment, these projects show that artistic responses can become both symbolic and genuine social actions all at once by educating the public and allowing them to reconnect with their natural surroundings. Art becomes a metaphoric experience where participants and viewers are empowered to creatively imagine and embody their ideas, while also gaining insight into the world around them.