COP 26: What is 'Environmental Art'?

By Emma Nicolson, 28.10.2021

Hannah Imlach, Moth Kota, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

The art world loves a label, and there have been many given to art which addresses environmental and climate issues since the late 1960s: land art, earthworks, site-specific art, destination art, ecological art, eco-art and environmental sculpture. So would it be fair to call this work environmental art and, if so, what is environmental art? 

Certainly the undeniable beauty of works by landscape artists James Morrison or Barbara Rae move us to appreciate nature but would you consider it environmental art? In fact, the use of the word landscape indicates a view of, the act of looking, whereas I feel work that engages with the environment is all-encompassing. Our relationship between the ‘environment’ and the ‘arts’ is constantly shifting and changing. It is one thing to be inspired by nature, but it is quite another to engage with it in an environmental capacity as an artist. 

At its essence, I feel contemporary environmental art sees artists go further by addressing environmental concerns or working with science, or demonstrating some kind of intention that relates to an ecological or conservation issue. It could be a social context, or the historical context around something, or a very specific scientific relationship. For that reason, I would like to suggest that the 19th-century female botanists were the first kind of environmental artists who were engaging with environmental concerns because they were excluded from science and botany was considered to be a gentle subject. Recently as part of our work with Cooking Sections (the artistic duo of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), we featured a list of these Scottish trailblazing women, women who collected seaweed and made beautiful pressed herbarium specimens which have their own artistic quality and encourage us to understand our relationship with the environment a little bit better.

The land art movement of the 1960s saw artists engage with the environment in a very literal sense and in so doing highlighted the catalysing effect of environmental awareness on artists. In this his centenary year, it’s important to remember the arrival of Joseph Beuys here in Scotland in 1970. At the provocation of the inimitable Richard Demarco, Beuys’ work in Scotland and engagement with the environment here not only transformed his own practice but influenced a generation of Scottish artists to take their relationship with nature further. Writing in Studio International in 2005 about the visit, Demarco said: ‘When I eventually met Beuys, he was fully engaged with half a dozen friends who occupied his small studio . . . I wondered what I could offer that would make him concentrate his attention upon Scotland . . . I decided not to ask him to make a new and special artwork, but to concentrate instead upon the physical reality of Scotland, the stuff and substance of its landscape and its cultural heritage.’ 

 

Years later, the transformative moment in my own practice came when I visited my first exhibition as an art student at Edinburgh College of Art in 1987. The Unpainted Landscape was a Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition featuring the work of 15 artists, including Scottish sculptor Linda Taylor, Andy Goldsworthy, Iain Patterson, Iain Hamilton Finlay and David Nash. There was something special about this show at the Gallery of Modern Art. For me, this was the first time I saw an exhibition that pushed at the edges and accurately reframed our relationship with the environment. The accompanying catalogue has travelled with me from Skye to Sydney and back again as a reminder of the power of a great exhibition to change the way we see and respond to the environment. It’s become a central tenet of my own curatorial practice, added to a social context where artists can engage directly with the public. 

As a curator and programmer, the reason I am attracted to art that explores environmental concerns is that it invariably has this social practice within it.  The experience of living and working in Australia, and then in Skye at ATLAS Arts, listening and learning from indigenous engagement with place and the idea of place being a living thing, are some of the reasons why I continually seek out artists that want to interrogate and explore this.

For that reason, I admire the work of Dalziel + Scullion who for over 25 years have created artworks that are research-based, often in collaboration not just with scientists exploring ecological issues but with musicians, philosophers and more, all to create a total immersion in the environment. In addition, with works like More than Us (2008) and Homing (2018), Dalziel + Scullion encourage us to view the world through the lens of non-human species. 

Most recently, I have been wowed by Hannah Imlach’s ‘Moth Kota’ unveiled this month at Loch Lomond Nature Reserve. The sculpture, designed around the behavioural cycles and sensory world of moths, incorporates a space for a multi-species encounter (!) and opens our eyes to the interdependent nature of our ecosystem. It is the kind of artwork that perfectly marries research and artistic flair and evolves our understanding of the environment. That’s at the crux of all great environmental art. That and how do we build people's understanding and skills in experiencing nature and engaging with nature? How can you move minds? 

In some cases, it’s simply through a work that sparks conversation, that does something that is loud and visual (like a giant golden monkey on the side of a gallery). And then there is the quiet research-based practice that is working alongside science and ecological practice like Hannah Imlach – for example, Christine Borland’s In Relation to Linum or like Cooking Sections who worked on the CLIMAVORE project in Skye with me. 

What’s certain is that while artists have different ways of responding to the climate crisis and different approaches to creating work that engages with the environment, it is more vital than ever that these artist voices are heard and given the opportunities and platforms to create work that does move minds and spark change.

 

Emma Nicolson is head of creative programmes at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. This article was first published in Scottish Art News Issue 34.⁠

The UK will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow on 31 October – 12 November 2021.