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.

“ When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen. ….. it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. 

Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya’s population of over 30 million drains the country’s limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa.

The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye.”

His first works were in the form of more-or-less “straight” documentation of the process of destruction.  This was not conservation photography mediated through a romanticized view of nature and wilderness.  Rather the images were a powerful testament to the impact of man’s interaction with his environment.

Though these initial images were powerful and shocking, Beard soon moved on to the use of complex collages and detailed diaries.  Here he juxtaposed writings, images, paint, found objects, newspaper clippings, drawings, insects or animal bones and often his own blood to create powerful and mesmerizing artworks.

Increasingly complex, Beard’s large collages contain many, seemingly unrelated images.  Yet they are put together in a way that creates a feeling of violence and destruction.  The same intensity of feeling emerges from his tightly packed diary pages.

As well as his passion for Kenya and it’s wanton destruction, Beard’s life was surrounded by beauty, celebrity and the world of fashion.  Based in Montauk, NY, he was part of an artistic and celebrity circle that included Andy Warhol, Jackie Onassis, Bianca Jagger and many others.  Not restricted to images of elephants in Africa, his photography and collage took in supermodels, celebrities and fashion – sometimes all of them ending up on the same page.

Perhaps this mix of celebrity, fashion and concern with conservation reached its peak when he was commissioned to produce the Pirelli calendar in 2009.

On his web site, Beard describes his career as “Escapism through collage, books, diaries and anthropology“.  Through its broad range of subject matter, Beard’s work maintains a continual sense of action, movement, intensity and power with a strong element of violence – sometimes obvious – sometimes as undercurrent.  Beard is a prolific artist who used his skills to bring much attention to Man’s endless capacity for violent destruction of his own planet.  A vast collection of his work has been compiled in a recent book published by Taschen.

Harri Kallio has tried to give us an insight into this lost-forever part of our world with his series “The Dodo and Mauritius Island”

Harri Kallio - Image 1

Kallio undertook extensive research into the dodo, what it looked like, its likely habits and its habitats. He then built two life-size models of the bird and traveled to Mauritius – the only island where the dodo is known to have existed.  There he set up tableaux and photographed his birds in what would have been their natural settings.

Harri Kallio - Image 2

Kallio’s image bring back a world that we have destroyed. European explorers arrived in Mauritius in the 16th century. They brought with them dogs, pigs, rats and other animals that plundered the dodo’s nests. Combined with forest destruction that destroyed the bird’s habitat, the dodo became extinct within 200 years.  This pattern of destruction and extinction continues today – only at a much accelerated rate. The list of threatened and endangered species continues to grow in the face of human destruction.

Harri Kallio’s work makes me wonder how many more animal models we our children have to build in the future to recreate that which we are happily destroying.

Harri Kallio - Image 3

Of his various series, two stand out.

The first is called “Running The Numbers – a portrait of consumer mass culture“.  In these two series, Jordan takes a specific number of items – a number with meaning – constructs an image with these items then photographs the image.

For instance, Shark Teeth is a collection of 270,000 fossilized shark teeth put together to construct an image of two sharks.  270,000 represents the estimated number of sharks that are killed every day around the world for their fins.

"Shark Teeth" - Full Image

Detail of fossilized shark's teeth that make up the previous image

“Midway” is a series of photographs that is emotionally much more striking than Running the Numbers.  Jordan describes this series as follows:

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.”

From Series "Midway"

From Series "Midway"

I find the contrast between these two series interesting.  Running the Numbers is essentially an intellectual exercise based on shocking statistics and converted into cleverly constructed images.  Midway appeals to our raw emotions. It is a simpler series that depicts terrible consequences of our consumption. Because it’s clever, Running the Numbers is probably more likely to appeal to the art establishment.  In fact, one piece was recently included in an exhibit at the Royal Academy in London about human impact on the planet.  But, if the objective of this art were not to appeal to the artistic elite but to convince people that these issues are important and that some action is needed, which of these two series is likely to be the more effective?  I know where I’d be putting my money.

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.