Curators Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years

As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s Martin Mahony and GroundWork Gallery’s Veronica Sekules discuss the collection through a professional curator’s perspective and how it enhances our understanding of our planetary age.

3,380 words: estimated reading time = 13 minutes

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets the context for this conversational post from Martin and Veronica.

We launched our online Museum of the Anthropocene in 2022, drawing directly on Dr Martin Mahony‘s work since 2018 with 3rd-year undergraduate students on his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia. Each year, the current cohort has submitted short essays on objects or entities that speak to some aspect of the nature of this new planetary age and our own species’ role in shaping it. Alongside each year’s selection for the ClimateCultures Museum of the Anthropocene, Martin has written an introductory post for us, reflecting on the ideas that emerge from the students’ pieces.

As we approach publication of our fifth set of contributions — coming soon to ClimateCultures — Martin and I discussed how we might draw out some of the themes and topics that have emerged so far from the series. We quickly settled on the notion of bringing in a professional curator’s voice and were delighted that Veronica Sekules generously took up the challenge. Not only is Veronica the founder and director of the GroundWork Gallery, where she has been responsible for showcasing the work of a great many artists and researchers who bring unique perspectives to the critical issues of the Anthropocene, but her background in education — and with the Sainsbury Centre in particular — brings significant experience to the notion of a collection such as this. And, of course, Veronica has contributed her own object-based insights into our planetary age for ClimateCultures, through her writing on three objects for our series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. So it’s a great pleasure to host this conversation between Veronica as our ‘guest curator’ and Martin as instigator of the Museum of the Anthropocene.

***

Seeing beyond the strata

Veronica: I have been thinking about the Museum of the Anthropocene for a few days now. I must at first say thank you — yes — it is wonderful and so rich in its approach and the range of its content. Congratulations on putting together such a very thought-provoking and original collection of ideas and discussions. Before I read it, I must say that I had been thinking about the Anthropocene — tutored, as it were, by Colin Waters who gave a talk about it at one of our GroundWork events — as a geological phenomenon. What stuck in my mind rather persistently after his talk was that we were creating a geological layer, including increasing quantities of giant chicken bones and tungsten from ball-point pen points, and of course, plastics. So it is utterly refreshing that you have opened up the subject so much, to be very much more cultural and, indeed, historical.

Showing: 'Cloud of Thorns' by Chris Drury, shown in Nature's Mysterious Networks exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2021. Photo: GroundWork Gallery — ‘Cloud of Thorns’ by Chris Drury, shown in Nature’s Mysterious Networks exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2021. Photo: GroundWork Gallery © 2021

Martin: Thanks so much Veronica! It’s really lovely to hear such a positive response from a bona fide curator, arts practitioner and museum educator. And yes, that ‘geological’ version of the Anthropocene has become a dominant story which is told, and it is a striking and compelling one. Geologists like Colin have done amazing work in quantifying the sheer amount of stuff that we’re leaving behind and which will be our record in the rocks for millennia to come. But geologists as a whole have a tricky relationship to the notion of the Anthropocene, embodied most clearly perhaps in the recent decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy not to confirm the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch. The reasons for that are many and interesting, but does it represent the death of the Anthropocene as a useful concept? I don’t think so. The term originated not in geology but in Earth System Science — not the people concerned with our record in the rocks, but the people concerned with how humanity is perturbing things like the climate and the biosphere. In recent years it’s become more common to think of the Anthropocene not as a geological age or epoch, but as an event, and a process. As process, it is something which is unfolding unevenly across space and time. As event, it is something which could, on geological timescales, be relatively fleeting. Which is quite a hopeful way to think about things! Either way, this new way of thinking scientifically about the Anthropocene sits much more comfortably with how social scientists, historians, artists and others like to think about it — as a set of processes with some coherence, perhaps with an identifiable beginning and hopefully an end, but which is highly geographically uneven. It’s not all ‘we’ and ‘us’, but some people, some systems, some ways of doing things which are powerful, but not unmovable.

Veronica: Indeed. As your defining terms in your very useful glossary, and several of the museum exhibit entries suggest, it is not just the Great Acceleration we need to concentrate on as the main culpable era, but that the beginning of the Anthropocene can arguably be traced back — as in the so-called Columbian Exchange — to the first expansionist, colonialist ventures, prospecting for more plants, land and resources. I think in fact it goes potentially much further, and your texts lead the way to thinking very much more broadly than previously, not only about the origins and conditioning factors for the Anthropocene, but about how it is defined. The medieval map and the Santa Maria replica ship both highlight those issues.

Martin: Absolutely, and that’s something we spend time talking quite a lot about. While the stratigraphers wanted an easily identifiable, globally synchronous ‘big bang’ moment they could point to as the start of the Anthropocene, historians, geographers and the like are more interested in tracing root causes of change, which might mean thinking about how the transformations of the Great Acceleration had their roots in early European colonial expansion or, as you suggest, perhaps even further back, in moments like the rise of settled agricultural communities, or in the emergence of particular attitudes to the natural world.

Showing: UEA Museum of the Anthropocene exhibition 2024. Photo by Daniel Lightening (Lightening Photography) — UEA Museum of the Anthropocene exhibition 2024. Photo: Daniel Lightening (Lightening Photography) © 2024

Veronica: Exactly — as the authors and you frequently suggest, there is also the whole persistent question about nature and humans’ attitude to it, and what role that is playing in, not so much the current concerns with mass extinctions, but exploitation and the wielding of power. There are moral nature-culture questions about the canary, the pigeon, the rat and the beaver, but also in different ways for plant species — the suburban lawn, the Christmas tree and Sweetgrass. There seems to be a persistent tension between the human desire for control as exploitation and the exertion of power, and for its more apparently benign purpose to create order. Time and again, while reading the museum entries, I was thrown back on thinking not only that everything is connected in complex ways, but that the earth is riddled with, as you put it Martin, ‘unequal geographies’.

Showing: A film work by Jane Ivimey about eroding cliffs at Happisburgh (Norfolk, England), shown in 'On the Edge' at GroundWork Gallery, 2019. Jane Ivimey © 2019 — A film work by Jane Ivimey about eroding cliffs at Happisburgh (Norfolk, England), shown in ‘On the Edge’ at GroundWork Gallery, 2019. Jane Ivimey © 2019

Martin: I think that’s really key. And we can trace the origins of those unequal geographies both in material processes of transformation (e.g. in the economic contributions of the transatlantic slave trade to the rise of industrialism in Great Britain), and in moments of ‘geo-cultural’ change, as Jason W. Moore puts it. That’s what I think is so fascinating about the whole debate around the Anthropocene. Suddenly we’ve got historians and ethicists talking to earth system scientists and geologists about human-nonhuman relationships in a profoundly generative way, in a manner which didn’t really happen when we were ‘just’ talking about climate change, air pollution, or other environmental crises that have now been bracketed together under the term ‘the Anthropocene’. That bracketing can be problematic as it leads to abstractions and blindspots. But it also draws attention to some big, consequential questions about our relationship to nature, the legacies of empire-building, about cultural change, and so on.

Our planetary age through objects and processes

Veronica: In fact, I think, the kinds of exhibits and concerns brought to light in the museum are leading me to think that we need a whole new definition of the idea of the Anthropocene, beyond geology and what we are physically laying down and altering on the globe. For much of what is being discussed is not so much about what the world is becoming physically, but by what moral, ethical and economic forces it is being, and has been influenced and shaped.

Take for example the Mirror — one of the artefacts of earliest origin — which highlights the problems of self-regard, vanity, narcissism and the confusion of nature-culture that we see or don’t see in our reflections. That author suggests that the Mirror-cene could be a relevant concept. That entry, and quite a few others touch on aspects of the original sins — pride, vanity, greed. Also, the Lawn, Fast Fashion, the Diamond Ring, Banana, the Pocahontas costume — but in each case, go much further to illuminate the subtleties of exploitation, appropriation of identity, commerce, corruption and consumerism, and the special poisons of corporate greed that have increased the scale of the problems these artefacts represent. But for all the evils of their proliferation, it also struck me forcibly when reading these, that the fact remains that humans are vulnerable to being exploited on a mass scale and to that end, culpable as consumers, not quite equally, but not without power as such, to change things — in either direction.

Showing: 'The Art of Waste' exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2023, with works by Jeremy Butler, Jan Eric Visser, Liz Elton.jpg — ‘The Art of Waste’ exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2023 – showing works by Jeremy Butler, Jan Eric Visser, Liz Elton. Photo: GroundWork Gallery © 2023

Martin: You’ve touched on a really tricky and fascinating point which is shot through all of this — how to talk about things like cultural values, norms, behaviours etc. in a way which prompts new forms of reflection, but which also doesn’t lay the blame for what’s going on at the feet of individuals? There have been a few occasions where students have chosen an object which connects to something they love — like a hobby or a sport they’re keen participants of — and then when they start to unpick all the ‘Anthropocene’ aspects of it, they’re left feeling their object is a Bad Thing. I warn them about the risks of that at the outset, but also try to emphasise that the world, our systems of production, our shared values and so on are determined to a large extent by forces outside of our control. We can change them, but not just by being better consumers, or by no longer taking joy from the plastic Christmas tree or enjoying a picnic on a manicured lawn. Again, history is powerful here, because it shows how contingent things are. Our rapacious version of consumer capitalism wasn’t inevitable — it was very deliberately engineered as a way of dealing with a crisis of overproduction following World War II. That’s what the archives show, and industries like marketing and PR developed precisely to get that new consumer economy going. Once one knows that, it’s possible to see how things could be otherwise. And that’s about collective action, political work, and imagination work. And on the latter is where the arts and museums can be so important.

Learning from the Anthropocene museum

Veronica: That leads me to think more about the state and status of the museum currently — it is a wonderful collection of stories as well as artefacts, and stories which manage at the same time to be quite depressing as a collection of observations about the harm we have done to the Earth, and enlightening in unpicking the forces and circumstances that led us there. There are plenty of positive statements too, about the desire for care for nature and nature as a refuge, and how this sometimes develops in surprising ways, as in the story of Pikachu, or more straightforwardly, Sweetgrass and the tribute to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s famous book. I also very much liked the positive reframing of the Witch as a bringer of ecological wisdom, as a counter to her conventional portrayal as a frightening practitioner in black magic and as a force to be reckoned with against the patriarchal and colonial creators of the Anthropocene’s problems. I also liked the ones that took us above and beyond Earth into space — as indeed that exploitation is going to be the next goal for the greedy prospectors — you just need to look at who the main ones are…

The museum educator in me began thinking about how the museum could be further activated educationally. Of course, it was created with an educational purpose, which in itself is extremely interesting. Conventionally the museum curator is the one who selects and essentialises the stories, whittling down to the uber-story that the display elucidates. When I worked as a museum educator, I always maintained that it was then our job to re-assemble the rich detail that lay at the heart of those distilled curated stories and then from there to explore the wider field that had provided the context — which embedded the story potentially much more deeply again and led to wider areas to discover. That in a sense is what your exhibitors have already done. However, I think there could be an interesting metacognitive exercise to re-dissect their themes, pick up on their keywords, to examine each aspect of their detail, and then to see where the further connections and alliances are between the different exhibits. Where, for example does ‘ecological wisdom’ occur — perhaps between the Witch, Sweetgrass and Pikachu? I am not entirely sure where this would lead, but it might be fun to do. And it might be a way to think about the cumulative effects of the phenomena you are faced with, and maybe come closer to thinking about how to address some of those thorny issues of inequality, resource exploitation, geographical power imbalance. For I do feel that you and the students are onto something in terms of reframing the debates around the Anthropocene and potentially coming up with some positive proposals to counter them.

I know you have frequently started your conversations with the Sainsbury Collection, and I used to have a whole repertoire of workshops whereby we would have a deck of words or phrases on card — which might have come from either a random source or a specific one and we would place them near an object with which we thought there might be some kind of connection. It wasn’t always enlightening in terms of being true to the cultures of origin of some of the artefacts, but always led somewhere interesting because of peoples’ desire to make new sense of things, and was a way to open up new questions… I always found the Sainsbury Collection tremendously valuable in encouraging questioning and I am sure that, plus its global range and variety of kinds of artefact, made it an ideal starting point for you and the students.

Martin: It’s really interesting that you say that. In Week 1 of the module we do an exercise with some ‘keywords’, to prompt some discussions of what the Anthropocene ‘means’ and what it ‘demands’. This always yields really interesting insights into how the students feel about environmental change and, essentially, what appetite for revolution they have! Revolution of various kinds — economic, cultural, technological… Bringing some of our previous museum entries into that conversation could be really generative too. I’ve learned so much from the education team at the Sainsbury Centre about how to do good object-based learning, and getting students thinking in those terms right from the get-go could have some interesting implications for the kinds of objects and entities they ultimately chose to focus on.

Veronica: I was wondering what difference it might have made had you begun with a more conventional museum, the kind that claims to provide answers and ‘factual’ information and a more taxonomic approach to its collecting. Perhaps you might have got a more conventional range of essays…

Martin: Quite possibly! Via the wonders of YouTube we engage with how other museums around the world have engaged with the Anthropocene, like the Deutsches Museum in Munich or the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In both cases I think the notion of the Anthropocene has challenged their curatorial practices, whether that’s poking the notion of natural history or challenging the boundaries of a museum focused on human technology — the type of museum that tended (until recently!) to tell a rather celebratory story of technological change. I think there’s something interesting about curating as a geographer rather than a historian too — I try to get them to think about difference, inequality, about what Anna Tsing calls the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. I think that leads to some differences of emphasis, as well as an always-fascinating range from the mundane and the everyday to the spectacular and the unique. But a perennial challenge is to find the grounds for hope in all of this — via these objects to identify historical contingency, to spot those spaces where different worlds are being built and ultimately, I hope, to help students discover their own agency in all this — not as self-flagellating, guilt-ridden consumers who must make better choices, but as agents of collective change equipped, I hope, with some useful knowledge and, more importantly, with persuasive stories to tell.

Anthropocene Museum: Showing Museum of the Anthropocene entries - the first four years, 2022-25. — Museum of the Anthropocene entries – the first four years, 2022-25

Find more

You can explore all 24 student entries over our first four years of our Museum of the Anthropocene, Inside the Museum. And Martin’s essays accompanying each new cohort are:

The Museum also has a small Anthropocene Glossary, briefly exploring some of the terms introduced in the students’ essay, with links to further reading: Coloniality, The Columbian Exchange, Epistemic communities, The Great Acceleration, The Malthusian Hypothesis, Technofossil, The Technosphere, The Tragedy of the Commons.

GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, is all about art and environment. As well as a full programme of exhibitions, events and residencies, their site has an extensive collection of resources: “writing linked to, or inspired by our campaigns. All of them have been connected with exhibitions and/or with artists’ work. Everything that GroundWork Gallery displays or exhibits aims to connect with a particular environmental message and these resources are grouped into themes, which have emerged through our discussions.”

You can read Veronica’s previous ClimateCultures posts, including her three chosen objects for our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects: A Personal Anthropocene History #6: ‘Cosmic Man’, TE20 Tractor, Loch Hourn Stone, and her essay for our Longer feature: The Art and Heritage of Waste.

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Veronica — “I use AI sometimes almost inadvertently (in that Google offers it automatically) to gather information and make lists of issues to follow up for further investigation. I only use it purposefully to adapt and/or shorten the long texts I write for exhibitions, mostly to produce press releases — which AI does admirably and I hate to do, so for that function I am grateful. It produces very odd press contact lists, though! And it is completely hopeless at producing blurbs for events etc — it makes anything sound utterly cheesy and gushing.”

Martin — “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”

Veronica Sekules

An art curator, educator and writer with a background in the environmental movement, who has created GroundWork Gallery to showcase art and campaign for the environment.

Martin Mahony

A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.

Ecopoetikon: Global Ecopoetries for a Cultural Tipping Point

Ecopoet Helen Moore celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.

1,410 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

Are we yet at a cultural tipping point, which makes conversations about climate change and environmental degradation “many, various, and unavoidable”? Doubtless this is the work of contributing artists to ClimateCultures, and it’s the vision of British ecopoet Caleb Parkin, who sees poetry “with its scalar shifts and ability to hold multiple perspectives and ambiguities” as being uniquely placed within the public imagination “to support the representation of massively distributed temporospatial (time/space) violences to the entire biosphere”.

Caleb’s insight is taken from a statement he wrote for Ecopoetikon, a new online showcase of global ecopoetries, which was launched in September 2023. It aims to provide a powerful poetic indicator of how ecological and intersecting social crises are affecting people across the world, and as such, adds significantly to these unavoidable conversations. Caleb is one of twenty ecopoets featured on the site, which I’ve been co-curating over the past year. His contribution includes his richly textural poem Almanac of Lunar Songs — a poem “inspired by human and more-than-human lunar behavioural influences – from microorganisms to ‘supermoon baby booms’ [, which] weaves through the various names given to the full moons each month” and written to be performed under Luke Jerram’s ‘Museum of the Moon’ in Bristol Cathedral. Almanac of Lunar Songs was a Bristol City Poet collaborative commission, with Miranda Lynn Barnes.

March

The plough moon brings on spring, softened soils. Equinox moon.
Longer days, last of winter, earth’s movement emerging. Worm moon.
Earthworms surface, converge on winter’s wastings, fertile, gleaming.
In like a lion, out like a lamb, March brings the wind moon, crow moon.
Sweetness seeps from the birch and the maple beneath the sugar moon,
sap moon. How it glows in the half-light. How we ache towards the solstice.

With each ecopoet nominated on the basis that they demonstrate commitment and creative innovation in their practice, the site is currently showcasing the work of poets from Australia, Botswana, Colombia, Estonia, India, Italy, Mauritius, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, the Philippines, the UK, and the US, and offers a rich tapestry of perspectives.

Global ecopoetries: a network of solidarity

Although the definitions of ecopoetry remain contested, at Ecopoetikon we define it as poetry written with engaged ecological and social consciousness. For us, ecopoetry should be informed by a level of ecoliteracy, an awareness that we live within ecosystems and in reciprocal interaction with the more-than-human world. We also see the intertwining social and ecological crises as having the same roots — i.e., globalised, industrial, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism, and materialism. And more deeply, as a crisis of perception and imagination, emerging from a paradigm of separation: human from Nature and Nature from culture.

Ecopoetikon was originally inspired by a student interview conducted by Kathryn Alderman with Craig Santos Perez, an acclaimed ecopoet from the Pacific Island of Guam. In late 2022, Perez called for poets from the Global North to read and support poets from the Global South, and to teach their work, and so the idea for a ‘world ecopoetry share’ was born. Categorising countries according to their economic and developmental status, as in the ‘Global North’/’South’ binary, is problematic; however, Ecopoetikon’s ethos is more broadly one of building a network of solidarity, and transcending Eurocentrism and the Western literary canon to highlight less privileged voices.

Rina Garcia Chua from the Philippines is another of our featured poets, and she writes of growing up in Metro Manila, where she experienced a typhoon that forced her to “swim and walk in flooded highways when it dumped a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours.” One of the three poems I selected for her webpage is titled 113 Submerged Reefs, and visually reveals contested territory in the South China Sea, with oil represented as an omnipresent but less visible text within the poem-collage.

Global ecopoetries: Showing Rina Garcia Chua's poem '113 Submerged Reefs' — ‘113 Submerged Reefs’ by Rina Garcia Chua, featured in Ecopoetikon, first published in g u e s t 17 (2019) and The Global South 19.1 (2023).

Tjawangwa Dema from Botswana touches on the fraught landscape of Elephant populations and expresses right relationship with the forest in their poem Commons:

Here we gather
blistered tongue to blistered tongue and say
no one owns the forest or its flycatchers
nor its trout lilies or lichen. No one

And Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose poems are beautifully translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, finds her inspiration among the trees, plants, birds, and snakes of Mt. Baiyun, and from factory-work in Guangdong. In Time, wild Nature is contrasted with the factory, where she herself worked from the age of twenty-one, witnessing how “workers are inflicted with occupational illnesses such as pneumoconiosis, dermatitis, lung cancer …”

a lonely bird hides itself in the darkness of the lychee grove
the darkness overwhelms the red of the lychees, and the dark branches
turn even darker, the birdcalls have faded, and here
the roar of the hardware factory continues its banging unabated …

Decolonising canon and curriculum

Who should have the power to determine which poems are worth reading? Conscious of the literary gatekeepers who have often raised obstacles to more politically engaged work, including my own, Ecopoetikon’s editors are aware of the opportunity that this online platform offers to transcend political borders and to include more diverse voices.

We aim to avoid exclusivity by including ecopoets who have been nominated by others on the basis of their commitment and creative innovation in their practice, and the editorial team welcomes nominations of ecopoets whose work we’ve yet to discover. In featuring poets from across the globe, we’re also aware that some may not define themselves as ‘ecopoets’, because an ecological worldview is inherent in their culture, and evident in their traditional ecological knowledge.

Funded by the University of Gloucestershire’s School of Creative Arts, and built by student web designer Ardeshir Shojaei, Ecopoetikon features three search tools, one of which is thematic. With poems grouped under ‘oceans’, ‘soil/agriculture’, ‘pollution/waste’, ‘indigeneity/roots’, ‘ecocide/extinctions’, ‘regeneration’, and ‘interspecies communication’, amongst other themes, this function readily provides material for research or learning across a range of disciplines. The site’s bespoke teaching resources, available to subscribers, offer writing prompts too. Over the coming years, the project team plans to evaluate Ecopoetikon’s impacts, and welcomes feedback from site users.

In September 2023, we launched our global ecopoetries project both at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment at Liverpool University and at the 2^nd Ecocultural Humanities Symposium at the University of Gloucestershire. In 2024, we aim to build awareness of the project through commissioned features, social media and in-person and online events – and again we welcome invitations to collaborate with other artists and networks. Look out for news of these, and why not book onto an evening with Ecopoetikon poets Helina Hookoomsing and Mario Petrucci, who will read at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s online ecopoetry event on June 3^rd2024?

A restorative act

When I ask the growing community of featured poets how they feel about the project, Mario Petrucci, whose extraordinary poem Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl I selected for the site, emails me saying: “In the ten-minutes-to-midnight cacophony of ignored environmental wake-up calls, Ecopoetikon sings a sweet yet piercingly persistent note. Too often, ecopoetry is met with neglectful silence; it’s profoundly encouraging to join this lively conversation.”

Working together we hope to see ecopoetry serving not only as a cultural tipping point, but also as a restorative act. A signpost towards regenerative cultures, where we value the Earth, and particularly the land/bioregion we inhabit, as our community. A future where the prefix ‘eco’ is no longer needed because all humans inhabit ecocentric and socially just cultures.

Find more

In celebrating global ecopoetries, Ecopoetikon aims to offer equal voice and representation to established ecopoets from around the world. Based in the Creative Arts at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK, Ecopoetikon is a developing research project that showcases a diverse international network of ecopoets through an online mapping project. You can find poems from a growing network of ecopoets around the world, including those mentioned in Helen’s post: Caleb Parkin’s Almanac of Lunar Songs; Rina Garcia Chua’s 113 Submerged Reefs; Tjawangwa Dema’s Commons; Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Time (translated by Eleanor Goodman); Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.

Cheltenham Poetry Festival, launched in 2011, offers an annual 10-day programme of live literature events. The online ecopoetry event with Ecopoetikon is on June 3^rd2024.

Helen Moore

A pioneering British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, translator and academic based in Bristol.

Giving Voice to the Nonhuman

Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan shares her realisation that, no longer content to simply document climate change, a more fluid, non-linear visual language can evoke the nonhuman voice and reflect our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world.

2,300 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
— Dorothea Lange

Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure to collaborate with a sound artist, Robin Servant, to create an interactive climate change art installation in Quebec, Canada. The result of our collaboration was ‘La voix des glaces’ (in English: ‘Ice Voices’), a multi-sensory installation that gives voice to the nonhuman: the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River.

Sensing the nonhuman voice: Showing a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto photographic ice sculptures, to listen to the underwater 'ice voices' during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES, created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant for the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, Canada, from 24 Feb to 31 March 2023. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023 — Touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto photographic ice sculptures, Edwige Leblanc listens to the underwater ‘ice voices’ during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023

This was the first time that I exhibited my photographs as tactile sculptures. I grouped 24 of my abstract photographs of the rapidly disappearing river ice into eight triangular triptychs suspended from the ceiling in the center of the gallery. Swaying in the natural air currents of the gallery, these ‘ice sculptures’ resembled floating blocks of ice in the Saint Lawrence River.

Sensing the nonhuman voice: Showing a close-up of four ice sculptures at the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant, held at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, from 24 February to 31 March 2023. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023 — Close-up of four ice sculptures at the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023

Each photograph was embossed with braille text from recent IPCC reports. Visitors – both sighted and visually-impaired – were invited to touch the braille relief in a gesture symbolic of our collective blindness to climate change.

By touching my photographs, visitors triggered underwater audio recordings of the ice blocks as they shift and crack from friction, waves and tidal movements. Every time someone touched an image, the gallery filled with haunting, otherworldly ice voices. They destabilize us, pulling us into their evocative vortex, coaxing us to listen more intently. We find ourselves imagining what the ice is trying to tell us.

Sending the nonhuman voice: Showing a close-up of a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant, held at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, from 24 February to 31 March 2023 — Close-up of a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023.

Bringing back the nonhuman voice

Giving voice to the nonhuman has, since 2019, transformed my photographic practice from documentary to abstraction. This shift was triggered by two events. The first (which will likely repeat itself in 2023) was Australia’s 2019-2020 Black Summer – the catastrophic, uncontrollable wildfires that killed an estimated three billion nonhuman beings. I was traumatized by the images of blood-red skies, charred kangaroos clinging to fences, and birds falling out of the sky. I suddenly realized that I could no longer participate in documenting climate change. I felt an overpowering sense of urgency to find a more fluid, non-linear, non-narrative language with which to express my ecoanxiety.

The second event that made me question the role of photography in the Anthropocene was a 2019 interview with the author Amitav Ghosh. Responding to a question from Amy Brady, Ghosh explains:

“I think, in literary terms, the most difficult challenge a writer has in an age of climate change is determining how to give a voice to the non-human (emphasis added). And not just in terms of natural disaster – in general. It’s such a challenge. One writer who has done this very well is Richard Powers. I thought his book, The Overstory, was a huge event because it expanded the boundaries of what writers can do. Now I am asking similar questions: How do we restore nonhuman voices? How do we trace the influence of the human among the nonhuman?”

I had previously read Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. But it was his 2019 quote above that inspired me — no, pushed me! — to completely change the way I used a camera. Instead of creating images from my perspective (while hiding behind a camera), I wanted to know how the nonhuman beings in front of my camera perceived climate change, from their perspective. What do they see when they look back at us? What do they feel about our destructive behavior and disregard for nonhuman life? What advice would they offer if given the chance? I was desperate to give voice to these nonhuman beings threatened in the age of man.

This shift in perspective, from the human to the nonhuman, has profoundly changed my art. Since 2020, I have been working on two series of abstract photos: ‘Je suis fleuve’ (in English: ‘Becoming River’) and ‘If I were a tree’. For both series, I have adopted a phenomenological approach in order to embody the nonhuman beings in front of my camera. It’s their story, not mine. If we humans are to survive the coming upheavals, we have no choice but to learn from our nonhuman relatives who were here millions of years before Homo sapiens sapiens first walked the earth. And many of them will likely still be here long after we have disappeared. So it would behove our self-described ‘wise’ species to absorb some of the wisdom from these ancient beings while there’s still time. But in order to do so, we must first slow down. We must learn to listen. We must learn to ‘see’ viscerally with our whole bodies, not just visually. This is embodiment.

A beauty filled with dread

Since Australia’s Black Summer, I have become obsessed with finding non-visual ways to enhance the photographic experience, both for myself (during the creative process) and for viewers (in the gallery setting). Instead of ‘photographing the river or the trees’, I ‘become the river or the trees’ through sustained contemplation and mimicry – moving my body in sync with the flowing water or the wind blowing through the branches. I do this using the technique ICM (Intentional Camera Movement). All of my ICM images are created in-camera; nothing is Photoshopped in post. To date, all my ICM images are single exposures, usually 1-2 seconds long. Through this experimental process, I have learned to embrace chance and mistakes. Most importantly, I have learned to stop trying to control every aspect (sharpness, composition, depth of field, etc.) as I did for 25+ years as a documentary photographer.

Untitled. From the series ‘Je suis fleuve’ by Joan Sullivan © 2023

I describe my new abstract photos as fluid and fleeting. My hope is that these ephemeral images provoke reflection on our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world. An article in a French-language art magazine here in Quebec described my new abstract photos as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (in English: “of a beauty filled with dread”). To me, that’s as close to a perfect description as possible, not just of my photos but also of my state of mind.

Yes, I am filled with dread. Things do not seem to be heading in the right direction; there’s no sense of urgency. But I also refuse to do nothing while we collectively watch the world burn on our cellphones. I counter this dread with a more powerful burning passion: to dedicate every second of my remaining years (15? max 20?) to helping shatter the absurd illusion that Homo sapiens sapiens is somehow separate from and superior to the one trillion other species with whom we share this planet and upon whom we depend for our own survival.

This is what prompted me, in part, to question the environmental impact of my own photographic practice. I started to think about all the toxic chemicals in the inks and photo papers that are used to create the photographic prints for my exhibits. Even for those photos that were never printed, a huge amount of electricity is required 24/7 to store them on my computer, in multiple external backup drives, and on my website. Social media, email, charging camera batteries, and driving to locations also require electricity and energy. Then there’s the undeniable problem of how to dispose of photographic prints (they are not recyclable), not to mention the layers of plastic and stryrofoam that protect them during shipping. I could go on and on…

But it wasn’t until November 2021, during a duo exhibit with the video artist Anna Woch, that I became aware of an even more existential dilemma for a photographer. As I looked at my photos on the wall, a wave of queasiness came over me: I felt strangely uninspired by my own work. Or, I should say, uninspired by the way they were presented: as static, two-dimensional objects hanging against a flat wall, protected behind glass to ensure that no one would damage them. After standing alone in the gallery trying to understand why I felt this way, it finally dawned on me: how absurd it was that these abstract images of the rapidly disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River were considered untouchable, yet we humans are constantly meddling with and disturbing nature. Photographs are ephemeral, just like the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence. Why was it so sacrosanct to protect ‘art’ for decades if the world around us was burning down? What’s the effing point? On the day that I took those photos down, I mentioned to the director of the artist-run center, Philippe Dumaine, that this would be the last time that I exhibited my photographs in the traditional manner, two-dimensionally. I had no idea what my next exhibit would look like, but I sensed that I was standing on the threshold of a new direction in my artistic practice.

A month later, I was sitting at the kitchen table of the sound artist Robin Servant, whom I had heard through the grapevine was collecting underwater recordings of the river ice with his hydrophones. In our early discussions, I had not yet developed a vision for the tactile three-dimensional photo sculptures; that would come much later thanks to the input of several artist friends. But when I first proposed this project to Robin, I already knew that I wanted to incorporate braille text into my photos in response to the rhetorical question “Are we not collectively blind to the impact of climate change?” After many iterations over the next 14 months and in collaboration with the local chapter of People Living with Visual Handicaps, we presented ‘La voix des glaces’ in February-March 2023 at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer in eastern Quebec. Funding for ‘La voix des glaces’ was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Images 10-13 from the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photographs: Joan Sullivan © 2023. 10 A partial view of the installation, made up of eight triangular abstract photo sculptures representing the disappearing ice on Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River. 11 A visitor touches the braille text on one of the eight photographic ice sculptures. 12 A group from the Gaspesie chapter of the Association of Persons with Visual Handicaps visits the installation. 13 Gaëtan Banville, who is blind and a member of the Lower Saint Lawrence chapter of the Association of Persons with Visual Handicaps, reads the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto the eight photographic ice sculptures. Click images for full size.

The response to this multisensory interactive installation, in which visitors were able to experience embodiment of the disappearing river ice by using three of their five senses — sight, touch and hearing — was phenomenal. According to the Centre’s director, attendance at our installation broke all recent records. Especially among the youth. The secondary school students in particular were most captivated by ‘La voix des glaces’. One of their art teachers showed me some of the artwork that her students created after visiting our installation — such incredible abstract paintings, full of energy, movement, and emotion. And yes, rage. It gave me goosebumps knowing that some part of my work resonated with and was internalized by these young people. This gives me hope. We can live with beauty and sadness at the same time.

Showing a publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec. — A publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec.

I’m currently working on the conception for a new exhibit in 2024 or 2025 — my most audacious to date — that incorporates elements of ‘La voix des glaces’ but goes one step further. I’ll write about this in a future post.

Hope you enjoyed reading.

P.S. If anyone out there knows Amitav Ghosh, please thank him for inspiring me to experiment using my camera in new ways that give voice to the nonhuman.

Find more

‘La voix des glaces’ — created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant — was exhibited at Vaste et Vague artists’ centre in Carleton-sur-Mer (Quebec) from 24th February to 31st March 2023. It was supported by The Canada Council for the Arts.

Les artistes remercient le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien financier, et tous ses partneraires pour l’appui précieux : Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Centre VU, Engramme et La Chambre Blanche. / The artists thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, and all its partners for their valuable support: Center d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Center VU, Engramme and La Chambre Blanche.

Le Devoir, Quebec’s largest independent French-language newspaper, published Faire parler les glaces pour montrer que le climat s’effrite, a review of ‘La voix des glaces’, in February 2023. The Vie des arts magazine article that described Joan’s abstract images as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (“of a beauty filled with dread”) is Un vent du fleuve : expositions au Centre d’art de Kamouraska (A wind from the river: exhibitions at the Kamouraska Art Center: 19th September 2020).

You can see more of Joan’s series ‘Je suis fleuve’/’Becoming River’ and ‘If I were a tree’ at her website.

You can read Joan’s previous ClimateCultures post, Deconstructing our Dominion Stories in a Time of Unravelling, a joint review of After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time, by Charlotte Du Cann (2022) and Loss Soup and Other Stories, by Nick Hunt (2022).

The 2019-20 Black Summer in Australia was covered by Reuters in Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer (19th September 2023) and by the Guardian in The black summer bushfires killed 3 billion animals. They are our relatives; they deserve to be mourned (31st March 2023).

Amy Brady interviewed Amitav Ghosh for the Chicago Review of Books: The Uncanniness of Climate Change (18th September 2019). Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable was published by University of Chicago Books.

Joan Sullivan

A photographer, writer and farmer who focuses on climate change and whose abstract, phenomenological approach to photography expresses her ecoanxiety and gives voice to the nonhuman.

Starting to See Waste as Art and Heritage

Curator and writer Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using GroundWork Gallery’s recent exhibition to explore artists’ roles in helping change how we value what we discard, viewing our waste as art and heritage.

1,570 words: estimate reading time = 6 minutes

Longer is the place for works that don’t fit within the normal ‘short reads’ format of our blog. Longer is for essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail the creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces it here with an original post, where they can reflect on the motivation or inspiration behind the work or the process of creating it.

***

In my essay, The Art and Heritage of Waste, I hope to counter the prevailing culture of extractivism by looking at how mobilising the creativity of artists can help us to rehabilitate waste as a transformative resource.

From March to July 2023, GroundWork Gallery’s exhibition The Art of Waste] featured the work of eight artists, all of whom were in different ways [bringing creative responses to waste that point to solutions, albeit on a tiny scale.

GroundWork Gallery — which I opened in 2016 — is situated in King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, UK, on the confluence of the River Purfleet with the Great Ouse. It lives in a converted little 1930s warehouse, a building we saved from waste, as the planners and heritage officials at first wanted it demolished “for something more suitable”. The gallery is dedicated to the environment and to the role of art and artists in helping us to rethink aspects of it, and to understand and treat it better, vitally urgent now in our times of crisis. I believe art can carry a powerful message or ‘voice’ to a much wider world than the narrow confines of the conventional art world, if only its audiences respond actively to it and communicate its innovative messages to wider publics, other disciplines and contingent professions. That is how we begin to achieve change — through bursts of inspiration, sudden insights, and above all through widening influence.

Still from Henry/Bragg film, The Surrey Hills: a film about a landfill site incongruously situated in the Surrey Hills. © 2012

Environmentalists hate waste. This is the starting point for all the work I discuss in the essay, as artists hate waste too, and many of them are trying to find creative solutions to the way we think about it and literally view it. However, I’m proposing that we rethink the category of waste to include formally its relationship with art and with heritage, and think about the potential status of waste as both. The re-categorising and the status change involved will play a part in counteracting the extractivism which has contributed so significantly to the effects of climate change.

Artists working with waste for positive impact

Each of the artists in The Art of Waste used waste materials as creative resources, making use of surplus materials, implementing circular economies, being very economical in leaving nothing behind. As well as inventive practical strategies, the artists excelled in changing the status of waste, from that of detritus and ephemera, to be something precious and valued.

Jeremy Butler creates minutely detailed relief-assemblages which involve items that the artist has carefully crammed together to make complex formal architectures that hover somewhere between order and disorder.

Liz Elton makes large-scale draped fabric-like installations using compostable cornstarch, a material used in food waste recycling bags, which she colours with vegetable dyes made from her own kitchen waste, intercepted on its way to compost.

Caroline Hyde Brown makes work mainly in textile and paper, and is part of a bio-based collaborative group who are recreating textiles from Neolithic legumes, such as grass pea and more recently green manure crops such as Buckwheat and lentils.

Lizzie Kimbley works with woven textiles, natural dyes and basketry techniques, using principles of circular design to consider material sustainably in regard to its whole life cycle.

Kai Lossgott is a writer, filmmaker, visual and performance artist, and waste in his work has its own agency and is as much a metaphor as a physical phenomenon.

Eugene Macki is a sculptor whose work makes resourceful use of waste materials, often including food, and can be playful in making the most of the multiple meanings that result.

Jan Eric Visser creates sculptures from his inorganic household garbage, experimenting with new forms new materials, consistent with his own saying: ‘Form Follows Garbage’.

Rain Wu, whose conceptually driven work materialises in different forms and scales, works with waste and perishable materials to instigate discussions around our manifold relationships with nature.

The immediate impact of The Art of Waste was measurable to a degree from the visitor book comments. Responding to the exhibition, many visitors remarked that it was “inspiring, relevant and thought-provoking”. However, it was also “unsettling”, “bringing new perspectives on waste”. Some were moved to more action: “Interesting ideas, we need to reach out to everyone”, “WE NEED TO DO MORE”, “much needed”, “love being eco”, “we waste so much”, “educational and makes us aware of our industry and pollution”, “who knew waste could be so useful – makes you think”, “feels very dystopian”, “compulsory viewing for all politicians and their influencers”. One of the youngest visitors wrote: “Makes you think about waste. Awe inspiring”.

This positive impact was gratifying but just a beginning. It showed to an extent the desire of people to be receptive to new creative ideas and how these can stimulate our societal needs to change. However, beyond the specificity of the timescale and place of the exhibition, there needs to be a whole lot more thinking about how we can mobilise the creativity of artists and these kinds of responses to it. Where does it get us and where can it lead? What does that kind of power enable and what and whom can it both connect with and lead to?

Revaluing waste as heritage

As I explore in the essay, recent thought on waste has proposed various paradigm shifts that involve changes in consumer habits, moving away from a throw-away economy of short-term use and of things ‘becoming useless’, to one of waste as asset creation. Some argue that waste as an entity ought to be entirely avoidable, or even non-existent, providing that materials, foods and resources are used by people with greater economy and efficiency. Within the framework of Discard Studies, the entire concept of waste is open to interrogation from all points of view. In sympathy with that interrogative framework, I suggest that a paradigm shift in the way waste is categorised will help us all to prioritise what and how and why we save the stuff of the earth. Increasingly, students of waste, entrepreneurs repurposing it and artists creating with it are recognising that waste needs to be rehabilitated as a transformative resource, not stuck with the shifting values of random commerce or the vilification applied to detritus.

In setting the framework for further discussion, I hope my essay raises in outline some of the issues in the definition of heritage and of the potential for waste as heritage. It touches on some of the enormous complexities of the subject of waste, such as how and where is waste accumulated and what are the problems of distribution. I touch on the subject of who the various categories of ‘we’ are who are creating the problems. Then, taking a lead from a series of artists’ projects, I take a look at two specific contentious waste subjects in more detail: landfill sites and plastics, and how they might be faced afresh. The ways these subjects have been tackled by artists, writers and archaeologists hold the key to the category shifts we need, from dumps and surpluses to treasure, from waste and trash to art and heritage.

Waste Heritage: showing Jeremy Butler's Landskip 1 at GroundWork Gallery in 2023 — Jeremy Butler’s Landskip 1 at GroundWork Gallery © 2023

The innovative ways in which artists are using waste materials can lead the way to a shift in values, potentially turning what is currently a burden into a heritage asset. Categories of definition matter and both art and heritage are relevant. Waste’s role as heritage, specifically, needs to be brought into focus more, in order that we give greater value and the right kind of longevity to all the earth’s material and how we are using it. Shifting values affect attitudes. Applied at scale, that is one way the idea of waste as bulk mess and detritus can end. Instead, if surpluses, leftovers and spent materials are sorted not only by reuse potential, but as categories of art and heritage, this re-categorising can turn a negative into a positive asset and environmental benefits and economic consequences can follow.

Find out more

Veronica’s full essay, The Art and Heritage of Waste, is the third piece in our Longer feature, where members share original works, or ones that haven’t appeared online elsewhere, and which don’t fit easily into the regular ClimateCultures blog; Longer provides space to explore in more detail creative and critical responses to our ecological and climate crisis.

GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, UK, is dedicated to art and environment. It shows the work of contemporary artists who care about how we see the world. Exhibitions and creative programmes explore how art can enable us to respond to the changing environment and imagine how we can shape its future. The Art of Waste ran from 18th March to 15th July 2023.

Veronica Sekules

An art curator, educator and writer with a background in the environmental movement, who has created GroundWork Gallery to showcase art and campaign for the environment.

Celebrating Clean Air Day

Artist and writer Selva Ozelli marks Clean Air Day with a roundup of international art shows she has curated and participated in during this year of pandemic, spurred on by urgent connections between our environmental and health crises.

2,380 words: estimated reading time = 9.5 minutes + 2 mins video

It has been an unprecedented year, with 13% more large, uncontrolled wildfires around the world compared to last year — spelling dire consequences for carbon dioxide levels, health and biodiversity, as well as the economy. And human actions in burning down ‘Magical Forests’ — as depicted by my childhood friend artist Mehmet Kuran — are mostly to blame, according to a newly released report, Fires, forests and the future.

wildfires and clean air - showing art by Selva Ozelli — “Wildfires in the Age of Corona”, Oil 40 x 30 cm, Canvas Paper
Artist: Selva Ozelli © 2020

The year began with Australia’s record-shattering bushfires, burning down a forest the size of England. According to The Guardian, “On New Year’s Day in Canberra the air quality reading was the worst on the planet: 26 times levels considered hazardous to human health.”

In April, nearly 20% of the forested area of northern Thailand burned, and wildfires overtook Indonesia and Ukraine’s Chernobyl region, causing dangerous levels of air pollution. By June wildfires lit up the Arctic Circle, with Siberia registering the most extreme recorded temperatures, resulting in the severest Arctic melting. By August a government researcher told Reuters that Brazil’s Amazon wildfires were the worst in the past ten years. The West Coast of the U.S. slipped into an epic wildfire season, which is still ongoing. These wildfires raging across the world smashed last year’s records for CO₂ emissions, according to scientists at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, and aggravated respiratory ailments amid the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic — the most devastating plague to ravage humankind this century.

This unparalleled year brought out the artist and curator in me for the first time in my life. The unprecedented global Covid-19 lockdown allowed me to allocate my time to expressing my thoughts and feelings about climate change and Covid-19 via paintings, in addition to my series of articles on digital technology adoption, solar energy and tax policies in jurisdictions with the greatest carbon emissions.

International art for global challenges

I took my first step as a curator with an art brochure for fellow ClimateCultures artist Rana Balkis’s Infinite Possibilities series. We are now entering what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but still fuelled by coal and fossil fuels — with adverse environmental effects. In this era, not only are we able to transmit our ideas and our art digitally around the world, but also the pollution from energising these digital technologies — as well as diseases affected by pollution. This triggered an urge in Rana to find a new way, through her art, to raise awareness of climate change and environmental consciousness. In Infinite Possibilities — with two paintings selected in the United Nations’ Covid-19 Artwork open brief — working in the style of collage, she intends her oil paintings to expand our curiosity and imagination so we better connect, understand and adapt to our technologically changing world by expanding our perception in the context of our stagnant values, behaviour and norms.

Since our atelier, led by Teymur Rzayev, is a space for many talented climate change artists and interesting artwork, next I curated Atelier Teymur Rzayev’s First Digital Climate Change Art Show, with five paintings that were acknowledged in six international art contests. As I reported for the ClimateCultures Quarantine Connection series, I initially planned our group show to take place at the Balat Culture Center in Istanbul. However, due to Covid-19 social distancing rules, it was cancelled at the last moment. Therefore, I had to quickly switch to launching a digital art show with the assistance of Cem Ustuner, the owner of Pinelo Art Gallery, so it could reach global viewers. Our group show was registered as UN Environment, Ocean and Desertification Days digital events and it received a favourable art review; it got ample international press and was published by the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, Hong Kong.

Clean Air

The good reception of this show encouraged me to continue curating ten, and participating in seven, climate change and Covid-19 themed art shows: four group, and three solo. These were published by the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change Hong Kong, Climate Museum UK and over 160 museums, culture ministries and NGOs in over 40 countries around the world. I am pleased to share these art shows here today, to commemorate UK’s largest air pollution campaign: National Clean Air Day, which was launched in 2017. While this is normally celebrated on the third Thursday in June, due to Covid-19 this year Clean Air Day is celebrated digitally on 8th October in the UK.

Encouraged by the increasing interest of the international community in clean air, and emphasising the need to make further efforts to improve air quality, including reducing air pollution to protect human health, the UN General Assembly decided to designate 7th September as the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies, which was celebrated digitally for the first time this year around the globe with the highest level of participation from the UN — and Turkey’s Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, where Professor Mehmet Emin Birpınar, Deputy Minister, explained that “the coronavirus pandemic has shown the importance of clean air all over the world.”

But the largest ever global Climate Ambition Alliance — launched in 2019 and representing 452 cities (including London and New York City), 22 regions in 120 countries, 1,101 businesses, 45 of the biggest investors, and 549 universities — is the ‘Race To Zero’ campaign. It rallies leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, investors for a healthy, resilient, zero-carbon recovery ahead of COP26, where governments must strengthen their contributions to the Paris Agreement, achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest.

As part of the Race to Zero campaign, run in coordination with the UN and the City of New York, ex-Mayor of NYC Mike Bloomberg kicked off Climate Week in NYC on 21st September by announcing that Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sierra Club successfully retired 60% of U.S. coal-fired power plants — 318 out of 530 plants — via the Beyond Coal campaign. A day later, injecting new momentum into global climate action, President Xi told the UN General Assembly that China, the world’s biggest polluter of greenhouse gases, pledged to go carbon neutral by 2060 — only a week after the EU committed to increasing its emission-reduction target from 40 to 55 percent by 2030. On 27th September, the last day of Climate Week in NYC, the world’s first shipment of blue ammonia was transported from Saudi Arabia, which has the World’s second-largest oil reserves, to Japan — the World’s sixth largest CO₂ emitter — where it will be used in power stations to produce electricity without carbon emissions.

“Desolate Tree”, Oil, 90 x 90cm, Canvas
Artist: Fatma Kadir © 2020

With world leaders taking important steps towards decarbonisation, I curated a group show Clean Air for Blue Skies and my solo digital art show Breathe Life with the theme of air pollution. These two art shows contain six paintings that were acknowledged in five international art contests of forest fires, lonely trees, gardens and portraits of artists who were economically impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic with their shows being cancelled.

My solo art show Breathe Life includes portraits of composer and singer Niall Horan (Heartbreak Weather – Human’s Inertia in the Face of Wildfires) and ClimateCultures artist Renan Kaleli (Pollution), who is working towards preparing an art show Climate Change to Corona, with five paintings selected in the UN’s Covid-19 Artwork open brief. These artists turned to launching digital concerts and digital art shows this year, so I have also included a portrait of Professor Erdal Arikan (Pollution 2), the creator of 5G technology.

Urbanisation & Biodiversity

Serife Akkan explored the theme of urbanization and its impact on the environment and CO₂ levels in her solo art show One Door One Hundred Trees. Serife wanted to bring attention to and set alarm bells about the destruction humans are making of their environment — particularly since she witnessed firsthand the rapid urbanisation in Istanbul during her lifetime and its impact on air quality.

One of the concerns associated with predictions of CO₂-induced global warming is the claim that the number of birds and their habitat areas will decline. Conserving and restoring the ecological connectivity and integrity of ecosystems that support natural cycles are essential for the survival and well-being of migratory birds. Artist Fatma Kadir explored the theme of biodiversity in her two solo art shows Bird Watching 1 & 2, with sixteen paintings that were acknowledged in three international art contests to commemorate biodiversity in birds that are important plant pollinators and seed dispersers.

This July, less sea ice covered the Arctic Ocean than in any other July since scientists began keeping track of it with satellites in 1979. This marks another step toward the devastating and planet-reshaping inevitability of an ice-free summer for the Arctic Ocean. Artist Semine Hazar explored the theme of Arctic melting in her solo art show Sea Watcher. The inspiration was her trip to the Antarctic in 2017 where she witnessed the ice melting and, with a great sound, crashing into the sea. This brought tears to her eyes. Semine’s late husband was a captain. Captains determine their sea routes based on the silent light signals of lighthouses. With her sea and lighthouse themed paintings, Semine wants to draw attention to the importance of oceans to our world and our ecology as the largest carbon sink, and the need for us to guard them. She wants the silent signals from the lighthouses to be visible to all of us, not only captains of our world.

Covid-19

The current high levels of air pollution around the world have contributed to increased rates of chronic respiratory disease and impaired lung function in people of all ages, making air pollution a major and increasing threat to public health according to a study published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science. Many of the diseases that are caused by long-term exposure to air pollution are the same diseases that increase the risk of severe illness and death in patients with Covid-19.

In my two solo art shows Art in the Time of Corona 1 & 2, with sixteen paintings that were acknowledged in five international art contests, I explored whether climate change caused by CO₂ might be one reason for such a terrible global Covid-19 pandemic which spread around the world like a tsunami alongside heightened CO2, penetrating deep into our respiratory and circulatory systems, damaging our lungs to the point where we become highly vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“Corona Corona”, Oil, 30 x 30 cm, Canvas
Artist: Selva Ozelli © 2020

The unprecedented pandemic has put an enormous burden on health systems and professionals worldwide. So far, more than 27.9 million people around the world have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and more than 1,000,000 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University. Some 18.8 million people have recovered. The pandemic unveiled the challenges and the risks health workers face globally including healthcare-associated infections, violence, stigma, psychological and emotional disturbances, illness and even death. These frontline workers are physically exhausted and emotionally strained from the harrowing experience of serving on the Covid response with respiratory as well as neurological manifestations.

To commemorate their sacrifice I have included portraits of Covid-19 frontline professionals, including Dr Esma Akin, Chief of Nuclear Medicine at George Washington Hospital in Washington DC, USA; Dr Kalbiye Yalaz — the teacher of Dr Akin — who established the first pediatric neurology department in Hacettepe Hospital; Lale Baymur Vanli, a Pediatric Neuropsychologist who is the first psychologist to be hired into the first pediatric neurology department in Hacettepe Hospital and daughter of late Professor Feriha Baymur, who established the first Psychology department at Hacettepe Hospital and University.

Finally, climate change artists Fatma Kadir from her Bird Watching series, Resul Rzayev from his Mountain Air series, and I from my Art in the Time of Corona series donated artwork to the Portakal Cicegi Project, which will be on sale until 15th October 2020 to raise funds for the orphans of Covid-19 frontline health care professionals.

Find out more

Selva’s articles have been published by the world’s first Climate Change museum, The Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change in Hong Kong, as well as over 100 other publications around the world. She contributed Tsunami / Chasing the Quarantine Blues Away for Day 22 of our Quarantine Connection series, and in September 2020 art.earth published her piece, Acknowledging the true cost of climate change.

You can find out more about Clean Air Day in the UK and the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies campaigns, where the UN has described air quality as a two-fold problem, with both health and climate impacts. WWF published its report Fires, forests and the future: a crisis raging out of control? in 2020. You can read 8 things everyone should know about Australia’s wildfire disaster, published in Vox about the start of the bushfires in January 2020, with the Guardian reporting how “for months, Australians breathed air pollution up to 26 times above levels considered hazardous to human health. The long-term impact could be devastating” in Inside Australia’s climate emergency: the air we breathe. In June CNN published Temperatures in an Arctic Siberian town hit 100 degrees, a new high. In September, Reuters reported Exclusive: Brazil Amazon fires likely worst in 10 years, August data incomplete, government researcher says. This Nature Briefing from June 2020 suggests that Half the world’s population are exposed to increasing air pollution.

Artist Rana Balkis is also a ClimateCultures member. You can view Selva’s and Rana’s paintings for the UN Covid-19 art show at the Trvst website, and Selva’s brochure about Rana’s Infinite Possibilities series is published by Issuu. The international art show Atelier Teymur Rzayev’s First Digital Climate Change Art Show was featured in Coin Telegraph in May 2020, with a slideshow available in this piece from the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, Hong Hong. The Museum also has this slideshow of the Breathe Life art show Selva curated, and you can see slideshows of the Clean Air for Blue Skies art show, as well as the ‘One Door One Hundred Trees art show she curated for Serife Akkan, the Bird Watching series from Fatma Kadir, Semine Hazar’s Sea Watcher show, and Selva’s own show, Art in the Time of Corona.

Selva Ozelli

An environmentalist working as an artist, writer, international tax attorney and public accountant, who has curated a Climate Change Art Show at Balat Culture Center, Istanbul ...