Let’s face it. The above image of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen wearing a dress made out of water is more likely to draw attention to the vital importance of water to our lives than yet another picture of a polluted river or another attempt at heart rending with a child in Africa standing by a dry water pump.

Gisele Bundchen has taken environmental issues to heart. In 2009 she was appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment.

For the last few years, advertising campaigns for her own Ipanema line of sandals have been associated with images and actions in support of environmental issues and initiatives.  The above campaign was the first – and the best. The impact of this imaginative and creative use of water, the glamorous image and the metaphorical use of the idea that our body is water all combine to create a highly impactful and emotive image. The campaign was in aid of a campaign to stop damage to the Xingu river.

Later campaigns (below) supported the work of SOS Mata Atlantica in support of the Atlantic forests while the latest campaign is focused on supporting efforts to combat climate change.

These campaigns have what it takes to have an impact in today’s world: artistic imagination, eye-catching imagery, celebrity culture and, above all a positive feel rather than more doom and gloom telling us all what bad people we are.

David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

WHAT IS MISSING?

What Is Missing? is the title of what has been labeled as Maya Lin’s last memorial. The aim is to draw attention to the environmental issues that are facing us all today – from global warming to the sixth mass extinction of species that is currently ongoing.

The Listening Cone. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

In trying to bring attention to environmental issues, Lin is also re-defining the meaning of ‘Monument’.  Rather than a single structure in a single place, Lin is re-defining a monument to be a series of permanent or ephemeral structures or installations spanning the globe and linked by a common mission and a common message.

The Listening Cone (above) was one of the first installations.  A giant cone allows visitors to look into the wide end and see a series of looped videos accompanied by sounds of the marine environment – the natural sounds of the oceans.  It allows me “to create a scene that makes people realize how loud the ocean is for any sonar-dependent marine animal,” says Lin.

The Empty Room is a traveling installation that allows visitors to catch and hold projected images in their hands, each image saying something about endangered species and environmental degradation. 

Lin is planning many projects using many different media in different locations – and even virtual installations.  Future projects include ‘a sound-only sculpture’, video billboards, a peeking wall that allows us to peek through holes at video installations and even virtual media that can be downloaded onto mobile devices. To get an overview of this ambitious project visit the project’s web site.

Maya Lin has embarked on a large and ambitious vision intended to bring environmental issues to as many people as possible using modern media and formats that capture our imagination while constituting a call to action.  What Is Missing? is a work of contemporary art that, in true post-modern tradition, challenges established norms while working to change our outlook.

Let us hope that it is only some of her installations that prove ephemeral  rather than the species and ecosystems that she is trying to help protect.

Huang Xu, a Beijing born artist, collects plastic bags from the endless rubbish heaps now to be found in China and, using 3D scanners normally used by archeologists, digitally re-models them to create these wonderful images.

Plastic bags are an interesting phenomenon of modern life. At some level, they represent economic development, technological advance and convenience. Today, they have become an almost universal symbol of consumption and unsustainable waste. Yet, they are also one of the few areas where we have seen much progress with the introduction of re-usable, re-cyclable and biodegradable bags now being widely available and in common use.

These delicate images of have often been said to evoke the imagery of fine Chinese silk – a material which evokes positive connotations. It’s not clear to me why plastic bags should be seen as a sign of excessive consumption and silk should not.

Rather than simplistically interpreting Huang’s work as a sad commentary on consumption, waste, and pollution, maybe it should lead us to reflect on the difficulty, and fruitlessness, of drawing borders between economic and technological development and excessive consumption and waste.

But a closer look at these images reveals that all is not as it seems.

The images are digital composites compiled using photographs of garbage dumps. Large mounds of garbage are covered in sheets of green protective nets.  The artist photographs these mounds and then re-assembles the images to create these bucolic landscapes. Viewed quickly or from afar, these are beautiful landscape images. Closer to, they are mounds of garbage.

As China undergoes rapid industrialization and urbanization, these huge mounds of garbage are generated everywhere with significant damage to the environment.  Yao Lu has inverted the historical process. While China turns its landscape into one huge garbage dump, the artist, alchemist like, has turned garbage into the beautiful, romanticized Chinese landscape which is rapidly disappearing.

For a different take on the relationship between beauty and garbage, see the work of Edward Burtynsky.

For a closer look at Yao Lu’s images in larger format, look here.

I have been wondering how long it would take for the biggest environmental disaster in history to inspire the creation of some art. Digital artist Ubermorgen has created a series of works entitled Deep Horizon.

25 Million Liters

The images are created from photographs of the oil spill itself, digitally manipulated to create abstract images with various liquefied effects.  Some images (above and below) are part of the “Aerial Series” and, to my eye, manage to convey a sense of the overwhelming immensity of the disaster that is truly frightening.

17 Million Liters

The second “Liquid Series” plays with color and light. Here all evidence that this is a major industrial, environmental and human catastrophe disappear and we are left with bright, happy images that disguise the reality of what is going on. The disconnect between the feeling created by some of these images and the image titles could not be greater.

2 Million Liters

Other Art

Of course the disaster has inspired the more usual forms of artistic endeavours.

From political cartoons…….. (see here for more political cartoons)

Matt Davies political cartoon

To take-offs of what now seems like a laughably cynical BP “all green together” logo and corporate image.

The background to some of her themes has been explored before but her work, evolving over a number of years, builds, layer upon layer, to create an ever more cohesive vision of where our current trajectories may lead us in the future. Concepts of a living environment that becomes increasingly hostile through desertification or rising waters are nothing new.  However, Mattingly develops her fantasy world further, having all but destroyed their surrounding environment, we see images of a nomadic people living in ‘wearable homes’ crammed with all manner of modern technology. Individuality is eroded and homogenization is the rule. Mattingly’s nomadic people look bemused. They seem surprised that the world around them has somewhow disappeared. They wear their beloved hi-technology but they have nowhere to go.

We can clearly see how this vision of the future is an almost straight line extrapolation of today’s world with its near deification of technological advance and its increasing disdain for the natural world.

Mattingly develops these future visions in extreme detail and then shows us glimpses of them through constructed photographic images, videos and drawings.  Her work becomes thoughtful and provocative when viewed as a complete body of work.

Her web site (www.marymattinglyglobal.org) is intense.  Full of a combination of dense (and occasionally abstruse) text, images, drawings, videos and external links it creates an impression of an artist deeply, almost obsessively, absorbed in the detailed creation of her world of fantasy.

As part of her detailed development of scenarios of future living, Mattingly also founded the Waterpod – “a sustainable, sculptural art and technology habitat, with four artists living on and off it, generating food, water, and power in a contained and self-sufficient environment.”

Mary Mattingly is patiently constructing detailed images of a future that, if one has the patience to persist and work through her body of work, leads us to question the wisdom of our current social, technological and environmental trajectories.