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 Maisel’s work spans many different project over many years. One of his interests is in documenting through aerial photographs the impact that Man has on the landscape.  The image above is from “The Mining Project” where he explores the effect of mining in “undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.” Like other artists (eg Edward Burtynsky – previously reviewed in this blog), Maisel explores how aesthetic beauty can be created out of destructive and polluting processes.

Examining landscapes from The Great Salt Lake (above) to his project “The Forest” where he examines patterns created by floating logs and clear cut forests (below), Maisel draws us into unknown (and maybe unknowable) landscapes using images that “are charged by both their profane beauty and their ethically questionable nature.”

Below: Image from The Lake Project: “the stuff of California legend: a story of engineers, politicians, and big land owners working together to divert water to the rapidly growing desert city of Los Angeles, generating a thriving agricultural industry and an environmental disaster in the process.”

How and why would one create an underwater scutpture park?

Sculptor and scuba diver Jason de Caires Taylor has, so far, created a total of 65 underwater sculptural installations in Mexico and across the Caribbean. While seeming somewhat surreal, these sculptures have a very practical purpose. They are intended to ‘spread the load’ currently borne by endangered local coral reefs by attracting divers to view these sculptural installations instead.  In additions, over time they form artificial reefs – new habitats where new coral can grow to form new coral reefs with their attendant value in supporting underwater life around them.

A video (below) shows the installation of the latest work in Cancun, Mexico.

Jason’s work may be an ideal example of how art can help conservation efforts.  His art not only draws attention to the issues but makes a very practical and tangible contribution both to conservation and coral reef restoration efforts and to the local tourist economy.  If only we could come up with more examples of this type of art.

She describes these as ‘living sculptures…plant based systems that clean polluted water, integrating ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphorical and aesthetic capacities of sculpture.”

One such project is called “The Gift of Water”.  The town of Grossenhain, near Dresden in Germany, built a new public swimming complex in which the water used is filtered entirely by wetland plants without the use of chlorine or any other chemical.  Brookner’s sculpture features various mosses on a pair of large cupped hands.  The mosses purify the water of the fountain thereby reproducing the whole technical concept of the swimming complex installation while the sculpture itself represents the precious nature of the water that we use.

The Gift of Water

Some of her sculptures are more directly functional.

The Roosevelt Community Center in San Jose is a LEED gold certified building and re-cycles storm water runoff from the roof.  Two of Brookner’s installations do this filtering. In one of them (below) water is channeled into a basin-like sculpture that aerates the water as it drops into the basin below where it is filtered and re-cycled.

Her second installation in the same site brings to the surface a process that usually happens underground.  An amber glass and stainless steel rock filter system mimics the water filtration that happens naturally in the nearby Coyote Creek watershed.  A map of the creek is etched on to the sculpture.

Jackie Brookner’s work brings to life natural processes that are important to the sustainability of our environment.  Her sculptures no doubt manage to engage viewers in a way that no amount of detailed technical explanation of these processes ever could.