Hermaphrodite Polar Bear

Gary Hume is a successful British artist who does not usually engage with environmental issues. He became involved with Cape Farewell and created some artworks in an attempt to engage with the issues.  As reported in an article in The Guardian, he found this a challenge:

“How do you depict global catastrophe?” he says. “I’m too selfish to describe the world’s dilemma, so I describe my own paltry dilemma of what it’s like to be alive.”

The image above – Hermaphrodite Polar Bear – is intended to bring attention to the significant changes affecting life on Earth as a result of damaging human activity. “The Industrialist” (below) is a lead tracing of smoke coming out of an industrial chimney. He describes it as an epitaph for industrialists.

But Hume is not really convinced by his own work. First of all he is wary of artists’ fascination with death, global catastrophe, etc. Depicting disaster is maybe the easy path to take. But most revealing is his take on the trip to the Arctic with Cape Farewell. Clearly he found the trip beautiful and was no doubt saddened by the prospect of the damage being done by climate change but found it ‘hard to relate to my life’.

So here’s the question: is all the talk of ‘global catastrophe’ making the problem seem so huge and insurmountable that it starts to be feel totally of reach – impossible for people to relate to their life? Is one possible result that people simply shut these issues out of their minds – the only coping mechanism they may have left to get on with their life?

Is it time for a new narrative?

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

Gaudi was a spiritual man with a great regard for nature as God’s creation. The newly consecrated Sagrada Familia “strives to compress all of earth and heaven into its structure – endless saints, biblical scenes, symbols, inscriptions, seashells, reptiles, birds, flowers and fruit.” according to Rowan Moore in The Observer. Gaudi even included in his highly decorative (if sometimes pretty ugly) sculptural details, images of the animals that were going to be displaced by the building of the huge church on the then outskirts of Barcelona. Neither are sculptural details reproducing nature limited to the Sagrada Familia – they are widespread across Gaudi’s full range of art-in-building.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

But Gaudi also realized that nature provided more than mere decoration. His structural forms mimicked those found in nature thereby providing him with both aesthetic and functional benefits.  Columns mirroring trees or human bones, roof structures mirroring leaves, arches mirroring rib cages; all these allowed him to reduce the materials needed to build strong structures because of the supreme functionality gained from reproducing nature’s designs.

The Sagrada Familia column structures gain strength by mirroring nature's architecture

Then, of course, there is the sheer joyfulness, color and blousy expressionism of natural forms that find themselves expressed in Gaudi’s celebration of life.

A celebration of life

Gaudi transformed Barcelona into an art gallery with a celebration of life on every street. His designs were sometimes outrageous – as outrageous as the plants and creatures inhabiting a tropical rain forest. In using natural forms, Gaudi was, maybe, one of the first in what would be today called a sustainable architect. He understood that nature gives us not only beauty, recreation and joie de vivre but also wisdom – something that maybe we could all learn a bit more of today.

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.