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Into the ice: humans get closer to nature – in pictures.
From log trails to lava houses, from mud baths to melting glaciers, US photographer Lucas Foglia explores our relationship with the natural world in his new book Human Nature.
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Into the ice: humans get closer to nature – in pictures
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From log trails to lava houses, from mud baths to melting glaciers, US photographer Lucas Foglia explores our relationship with the natural world. In his new book Human Nature, he has captured off-grid families, climate scientists at work, and a hotel over-run with greenery
Tuesday 10 October 2017 02.00 EDT
Esme swims in a balcony pool at the Parkroyal on Pickering in Singapore. The hotel contains more than 15,000 square metres of greenery, amounting to twice its land area. Lucas Foglia’s Human Nature is at Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, until 21 October. Human Nature by Lucas Foglia is published by Nazraeli Press. All photography by Lucas Foglia
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Esme swims in a balcony pool at the Parkroyal on Pickering in Singapore. The hotel contains over 15,000 square meters of greenery, amounting to twice its land area.
Kurt guards logs, for export to China, on the Essequibo River in Guyana. Situated on South America’s North Atlantic coast, Guyana has one of the largest unspoiled rainforests in the world, parts of which are almost inaccessible to humans. In 2009, Norway offered $250m for protecting and maintaining the trees. At the same time, China is offering to buy any trees that are cut
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Kurt guards logs, for export to China, on the Essequibo River in Guyana. Guyana, a country on South America’s North Atlantic coast, has one of the largest unspoiled rainforests in the world, some parts of which are almost inaccessible by humans. In 2009, Norway offered $250 million for protecting and maintaining the trees. At the same time, China is offering to buy any trees that are cut.
Kenzie hangs from her safety rope inside a melting glacier. She is with the Juneau Icefield Research Programme, in which students assist scientists in climate research
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12 LucasFoglia HumanNature Kenzie inside a Melting Glacier
Matt builds an off-grid house, after a lava flow covered his land in Hawaii
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Matt builds an off grid house, after a lava flow covered his land in Hawai‘i. Construction after a Lava Flow
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Icebergs float away from the Gilkey Glacier in Alaska
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Icebergs float away from the Gilkey Glacier in Alaska.
Rachel immerses herself in the communal mud pit at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference in Louisa, Virginia. People from around the world come to the conference to talk about eco-villages, cooperative housing, and how to live closer to nature
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Rachel immerses herself in the communal mud pit at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference in Louisa, Virginia. People from around the world come to the conference to talk about eco-villages, cooperative housing, and how to live closer to nature.
New crop varieties are grown and tested in the Geneva Greenhouses at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. The USDA’s national and regional seed banks store hundreds of thousands of plant varieties, and crop scientists race to create a climate-change-resilient agriculture. As droughts, extreme rainstorms, and other erratic weather patterns intensify, farmers need crops that can cope with such stresses
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New crop varieties are grown and tested in the Geneva Greenhouses at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. The USDA’s national and regional seed banks store hundreds of thousands of plant varieties, and crop scientists race to create a climate-change-resilient agriculture. As droughts, extreme rainstorms, and other erratic weather patterns intensify, farmers need crops that can cope with such stresses.
A beach is restored after El Niño waves in Pacifica, California. With coastlines eroding close to houses, many coastal towns pay machine operators to rebuild beaches, even as waves wash the sand away
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A beach is restored after El Niño Waves in Pacifica, California. With coastlines eroding close to houses, many coastal towns pay machine operators to rebuild beaches, even as waves wash the sand away.
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Evan sleeps at Camp 18, overlooking the Vaughan Lewis Icefall. One of the greatest nonpolar concentrations of glaciers in the world, the Juneau Icefield spans 90 miles of southeast Alaska
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Evan sleeps at Camp 18, overlooking the Vaughan Lewis Icefall. One of the greatest nonpolar concentrations of glaciers in the world, the Juneau Icefield spans 90 miles of southeast Alaska.
Palm trees once marked the entrance to town. Now they are without water, during the prolonged drought in California
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Palm trees once marked the entrance to town. Now they are without water, during the prolonged drought in California.
Kate waits for a storm to pass. Researchers at the University of Utah, working under Dr David Strayer, are conducting studies measuring cognition in nature. The EEG cap and facial electrodes record brain activity as participants are exposed to different natural environments
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Kate waits for a storm to pass. Researchers at the University of Utah, working under Dr. David Strayer, are conducting studies measuring cognition in nature. The EEG cap and facial electrodes record brain activity as participants are exposed to different natural environments.
Honey bees trail water across a rooftop after rain in Portland, Oregon
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Honey bees trail water across a rooftop after rain in Portland, Oregon.
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Trees stand, marked for cutting by the National Park Service, in a forest burned by the Rim Fire that spread into Yosemite National Park the year before. The Rim Fire of 2013 was the third largest wildfire in California’s history and the largest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada mountain range
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Trees stand, marked for cutting by the National Park Service, in a forest burned by the the Rim Fire that spread into Yosemite National Park the year before. The Rim Fire of 2013 was the third largest wildfire in California’s history and the largest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
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Review: A cast of 87 sounds a climate change alarm.
Bringing together wrestlers, a food cart, a cellist and a bandstand, Pig Iron Theater Company takes on catastrophe in "A Period of Animate Existence."
Review: A Cast of 87 Sounds a Climate Change Alarm
By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESSEPT. 24, 2017
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From left, Karrington Riley Colón, Abigail Brown, Sean Harrington and Sara Schwartz in Pig Iron Theatre Company’s “A Period of Animate Existence,” about climate change and human complacency in the face of impending disaster. Credit Jacques-Jean Tiziou
PHILADELPHIA — Saturday afternoon was sparkling here: one of those early autumn days with not a whiff of fall in the air. The temperature was close to 90, and when a taxi drove past with an ad on its roof for a production of “The Nutcracker,” the incongruity was jarring. Aren’t the holidays too far off for that?
“A Period of Animate Existence,” the mammoth and muddled multimedia production I’d just seen at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, is concerned with precisely that sort of mind-set, but on a more consequential scale.
Presented as part of FringeArts’s annual Fringe Festival, where it ran through Sunday, it’s a big-ideas piece by the estimable Pig Iron Theater Company, with an eye-catching team of creators: the composer Troy Herion, the Tony-winning set designer Mimi Lien and the director Dan Rothenberg. The playwrights Will Eno and Kate Tarker contributed the libretto.
With a cast of 87, professionals and amateurs, the show’s primary worries are climate change and human complacency in the face of impending disaster. As an unnamed character (the reliably excellent Jennifer Kidwell) tells the audience, “I think there is something biological about our shortsightedness.” She seems, in fact, pretty placid herself.
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In the program, the creators write of their own alarm at living in a species-devastating age that some call “the Sixth Extinction,” as Elizabeth Kolbert does in her book of the same name. They intend “A Period of Animate Existence” — whose clinical-sounding title is a wordier way of saying “life” — to be a contemplation of the dangers facing us, and of whatever future we might have.
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Zachary Fuentes, front, and members of the Crossing in “A Period of Animate Existence,” which includes wrestlers as a “visualization of Henri Bergson’s ‘élan vital.’” Credit Jacques-Jean Tiziou
That’s unlikely to be the takeaway for spectators, though the first section seems promising. Structured like a symphony, in five movements with pauses in between, the show begins with a column of light projected from the stage, panning very slowly across the darkened house. (The lighting design is by Tyler Micoleau.) Underneath, an orchestra plays rumbling music that could be coming from the bowels of the earth, from the time of creation.
In the second movement, a cellist (Daniel de Jesús) plays and a chorus crisscrosses the stage around him, singing. A swath of humanity, these people are dressed in street clothes, and their simple choreography (by Beth Gill) is strikingly beautiful. When they lie side by side on the floor, moving as one, the performance reaches its sole moment of transcendence.
A food cart is the star of movement three, talking to us through its LED sign. “Let us learn and fast what every god learns the hard way,” it says. “The right to immortality is no privilege.” True enough, but the show’s curiosity about machines and their possible ability to think feels awkward, even a little feigned, alongside its more organic interest in children and elders.
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There are lots of both in this production, notably in the overlong movement four, which unfortunately is where the show goes awry. The style of each section is different, and this one is essentially a pageant with a brittle narrative strung through it, with neither the charm of the homemade nor the polish of the professional. The one bright spot is the bandstand, its backdrop a red circle edged in flames spiked with giant matchsticks.
But at least the environmental theme there is clear, whereas movement five is mostly just a head-scratcher unless you’re in possession of a news release that explains the pairs of wrestlers struggling on floor mats as a “visualization of Henri Bergson’s ‘élan vital,’” the “vital impulse” that gives life its uniqueness (and, in the philosopher’s optimistic view, explained the evolution of higher forms). Arrayed behind them, in majestic costumes by Loren Shaw that fuse the papal with the insectoid (they are meant to suggest trilobites, long extinct), is a choir called the Crossing, softly chanting.
Such elements of beauty and humor glimmer occasionally throughout “A Period of Animate Existence.” More often, it feels like a show whose ambitions are so weighty that its true form is still buried under the research somewhere.
It’s foiled, too, by the desire to change the creative language with each movement. These disparate pieces are intended to add up to something whole. At this stage of the experiment, they don’t.
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Scientists jam with musicians, artists to stir public passion for nature.
Collaboration between the arts and science can help change the way we look at the environment - and spark debate on how to protect it.
By Megan Rowling
STOCKHOLM, Sept 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Norwegian artist Tone Bjordam was moved to tears when she heard an eminent Swedish scientist explain the relationships between nature, society and the economy at a 2013 workshop in Uruguay.
Displaying a diagram of three concentric circles, with the economy in the middle and nature on the outside, Carl Folke, science director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, argued that if the economy collapses, society and nature will likely survive, and if society implodes, then nature can stay intact.
But if nature - the planet's ecosystems, wildlife and climate - descend into chaos, then so will the society and economy it supports.
"He said, 'I have never seen anyone react so emotionally to something as dry and boring as this!'," recalled Bjordam at a recent conference in Stockholm where scientists discussed ways to keep the planet and its inhabitants healthy and in balance.
In a hall next door hung the inspiration from her Latin America experience - an installation suspended from the ceiling.
A large circle covered in vegetation shelters a smaller disc mounted with a river and fields above and a maze of city lights below, while beneath the two glitters a small globe fashioned of money with coins dripping from the bottom.
"If you cut the wires that hold nature up, everything falls apart," said Bjordam.
The artist spends a good part of her time outdoors observing and photographing landscapes of mountains, lakes and forests, and the rest in her studio, making paintings, graphic art and sculptures informed by the natural sciences.
Bjordam believes her art work can help bring the beauty and fragility of our environment - and by extension, the need to protect it - to the public.
"Real engagement often starts with an interesting and fantastic experience in nature or through art," she told scientific researchers in Sweden last month.
Nor does the 42-year-old artist pay mere lip service to biology, chemistry and physics - she has collaborated with scientists since one saw her 2009 video piece "Coral" in an art museum.
"As a scientist, you're trying to capture the essence of something in the world in a way that is really appealing, that nobody has thought of, that may change the way people look at it - and that is exactly what artists do," said Marten Scheffer, a professor at Wageningen University and director of the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies.
In 2012, Scheffer and Bjordam produced an art video, "Critical Transitions", which portrays processes constantly going on around us, and how a system can build up to a tipping point where it suddenly shifts. Three sequences, like abstract paintings in motion or landscapes in flux, are set to music composed and played by the Dutch scientist.
Scheffer has since worked with mathematicians crunching data to see if it is possible to identify a "critical transition" in the midst of turbulence, like the political, economic and climate instability the world is experiencing today.
Scientist and musician Marten Scheffer (centre) points up at Tone Bjordam's sculpture installation entitled "Nature/Society/Economy", exhibited at the Resilience 2017 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, August 22, 2017. PHOTO/Tone Bjordam
SOFTER REALITY
Brigitte Baptiste, director of the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in Colombia, has direct experience of such a transition, having lived amidst her country's civil war that ground on for five decades.
The transgender ecologist says that, with a fragile peace accord now in place, Colombia must change the way it approaches its future to avoid a repetition of conflict.
"We want to avoid a clash of truths," she told the Stockholm conference. "We can live with a certain amount of uncertainty and ambiguity."
Using art, music and new languages to portray the choices Colombia faces "gives us a softer way of seeing reality that helps us to build compromise", said Baptiste.
To that end, the institute has produced a set of tarot cards featuring Colombian plants and animals, to help people think differently about themselves and nature. And in December, it will start publishing a sci-fi graphic novel for young readers called "The Resilience Chronicles".
"Art is going to be one of the most important, inspiring forces for building resilience in our countries," said Baptiste, referring to the challenges facing Latin America.
Swedish musician Anders Paulsson of Coral Guardians plays his soprano saxophone at sunset on Danjugan Island, home to a coral reef sanctuary, in the central Philippines, February 12, 2017. PHOTO/Kaila Ledesma
CORAL SYMPHONY
Swedish soprano saxophonist and composer Anders Paulsson believes similarly that music can build bridges between people - from children to a former U.N. secretary-general - and inspire them to care for the planet and its natural resources.
After working as a volunteer diver counting invertebrates on Danjugan, a once-endangered coral reef in the Philippines, he co-founded an organisation called Coral Guardians.
It organises events combining science and music, where individuals meet to discuss the threats to coral reefs and ways to protect them.
After a performance held in a town square near the Danjugan Sanctuary, "we heard stories that people who hadn't spoken to each other for 10 years were actually speaking again," said Paulsson.
At other concerts, scientists have felt the emotional energy of their work for the first time, and at an event with similar aims organised by the Tällberg Foundation, Kofi Annan played conga drums, he said. "That levels the field, so anybody can talk to anybody," added the internationally renowned musician.
On Danjugan island, the Philippine Reef and Rainforest Conservation Foundation runs camps for children using coral reefs and the ocean as a marine classroom.
"It will take 10 years before these kids are community leaders, but eventually they will come with a different perspective than their parents," Paulsson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Following the world premiere in April of "Coral Symphony - Kumulipo Reflections", a tone poem composed by Paulsson after hearing a native Hawaiian chant telling how creation began with the coral polyp, Coral Guardians plans to work on a 10-year project with Conservation International, visiting coral reefs and collaborating with local musicians.
"I would like to hear some of this music on Top 40 radio," said the saxophonist, smiling.
"If someone is to sing about conservation and in a poetic way, not just a scientific way, and people... actually sing along, that would be a shift in consciousness."
(Reporting by Megan Rowling @meganrowling; Editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://news.trust.org/climate)
The Thomson Reuters Foundation is reporting on resilience as part of its work on zilient.org, an online platform building a global network of people interested in resilience, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation.
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A man on an eco-mission in mixed media.
The Brooklyn artist Justin Brice Guariglia has turned Greenland’s meltdown into a new show at the Norton Museum of Art.
Last year at the Telluride Film Festival, the artist Justin Brice Guariglia fell into conversation with a stranger.
“I got stuck on a gondola ride with a climate change denier,” Mr. Guariglia said recently. The stranger clearly had no idea who he was dealing with.
Not only had Mr. Guariglia previously talked his way into joining a NASA scientific mission over Greenland so that he could photograph melting polar ice caps. He also had even created a mobile app called After Ice, which allows users to take a selfie that is overlaid with a watery filter indicating the sea level projected in their geo-tagged location in the 2080s.
So when the man on the gondola said the earth’s warming temperatures were just part of a cycle, Mr. Guariglia recalled, “I took off my jacket and I said, ‘Does this look like a cycle to you?’”
Along his right arm is a tattooed wavy line that is actually a graph charting the average temperature of the earth’s surface over the last 136 years; on his left arm, a similar line reflects 400,000 years of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere. It shoots upward at the end and curves around his wrist.
Mr. Guariglia’s role as an alarm-ringer on such topics is more subtly evidenced in his coming exhibition, “Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene,” at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Fla., from Sept. 5 to Jan. 7. (The term Anthropocene was coined by the atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen to refer to the current, human-influenced geological epoch.)
Even though the issue is personal for him, the 22 large mixed-media works in the show — all based on photographs by Mr. Guariglia, a former photojournalist — are elegant, abstracted and somewhat mysterious.
It’s hard to tell at first glance what they depict. Stars in the sky? A moonscape? Some images appear from a distance like a three-dimensional sculpture but all are in reality perfectly flat, falling “somewhere between a photograph and a painting,” in Mr. Guariglia’s words.
All the works depict parts of the landscape that have been changed by the presence of humans, from the scars of strip mining to the shifting topography of ice sheets.
“They are beautiful but terrifying,” said Beatrice Galilee, a curator of architecture and design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who follows Mr. Guariglia’s work.
The largest piece in the show, “Jakobshavn I” (2015), is 11 feet by 16 feet and depicts the melting surface of the famous “galloping glacier” in Greenland, so named for the speed of its flow into the ocean. But the image is one ethereal stillness, showing a delicately pockmarked surface of white and gray.
“What’s interesting to me is how civilization can transform things in all different ways,” said Mr. Guariglia, 43, seated in his spacious South Slope, Brooklyn, studio. He seemed very pleased to be discussing his first solo show at a major museum.
Mr. Guariglia has marshaled technology in creative ways. Most significant is the 17½-foot-long printer that dominates the studio. Mr. Guariglia sold his apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in order to facilitate its purchase.
Mr. Guariglia calls it “a beast,” and picked this space precisely because the equipment fit there, though just barely. To hoist it inside, he hired the same riggers who install Richard Serra’s massive steel sculptures.
The printer, which is only one of a handful of this particular model in the United States, applies an acrylic ink to surfaces in a painterly manner, based on the photographic image that Mr. Guariglia has digitally manipulated. “It allows me to take the vocabulary of photography and expand it,” he said.
The works are all backed either by a type of durable plastic called polystyrene or by an aluminum panel. On top of that go multiple layers of gesso that Mr. Guariglia sands by hand. “I create a traditional painter’s ground,” he said.
To heighten the mottled, Pollock-like splotches of “Landscape Study II, Gold” (2015), he added a layer of gold leaf, a technique he learned over a few weeks from a local gilder.
Mr. Guariglia is part of a fairly recent movement that could be called environmental anxiety art, from the photographer Edward Burtynsky’s wrecked industrial landscapes to Korakrit Arunanondchai’s poetic films that associate recycling with the idea of human reincarnation.
“The cognitive dissonance on these issues is so great, artists like Justin can provide something to hold onto,” said Ms. Galilee of the Met, adding that it was an “urgent task” for artists and curators to address climate change and related topics.
Just having these works at a museum in Florida is a pointed move on the part of the Norton. As the photography curator who organized the show, Tim B. Wride, put it: “If you dig down three feet here, you hit water. So for us, sea level rise does mean something.”
Mr. Wride said that the deeply invested Mr. Guariglia was part of an artistic tradition that goes back at least to the early 20th century, with photographers depicting nature with an eye to its fragility.
“It’s not a mistake that Ansel Adams was a conservationist,” Mr. Wride said.
Mr. Guariglia grew up in Maplewood, N.J., and was a freelance photojournalist based in Asia for 20 years, taking pictures for The New York Times, Time, National Geographic and others. His stints living in Beijing, Taipei and other cities during the region’s economic boom attuned him to environmental concerns.
“I was feeling the physical impacts of years of living in China,” Mr. Guariglia said. “The air pollution was awful. My nose would be running black from the coal in the air.”
About eight years ago, Mr. Guariglia decided he wanted to transition to fine art. “I wanted to start engaging on a deeper level,” he said.
He knew that his photographs would be “raw material,” as Mr. Wride called it, rather than the finished product. Mr. Guariglia obtained his source images in different ways, some of them while he was 40,000 feet up on commercial airplanes.
Then, while surfing the internet, Mr. Guariglia learned about a NASA mission called Operation Ice Bridge, an aerial survey of polar ice caps. He made a cold call to NASA and eventually found the right person to talk to about getting on a flight, offering his photojournalist credentials and samples of his work.
“They said, ‘We’d love to have you, we can get you on a flight in a couple years,’” Mr. Guariglia said. But the conversation also revealed that a plane was leaving on a mission to Greenland in two days. “I said, ‘What if I can get there tomorrow?’” Mr. Guariglia said.
Two days later, he was flying just 1,500 feet above glaciers, lying face down at the foot of the pilot, taking pictures through a small square window in the bottom of the plane. He had to maintain that position for the better part of eight hours.
“It’s very taxing,” Mr. Guariglia said. “But it was thrilling. It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.”
To his mind, going to such lengths will be worth it if the Norton show narrows the gap between the public’s perception and reality, even a little bit.
“That gap has brought us to the great ecological crisis we’re in,” Mr. Guariglia said. “I want to bridge that — between what we know and what we don’t know.”
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These artists are trying to make climate change visceral.
Recognizing that people often act by heart rather than logic, these ten artists aim to help viewers understand the data while developing an emotional attachment that convinces them to do something about it - now.
Climate change data has its problems: It is often lofty and complicated, hard to digest, and even harder to conjure into feelings of urgency. But artists are stepping in to marry data with their crafts, bridging the gap between scientific information and human connection. Recognizing that people often act by heart rather than logic, these ten artists aim to help viewers understand the data while developing an emotional attachment that convinces them to do something about it—now.
Zaria Forman
Iceberg Antartica no. 1, 2017. (Courtesy artist, Zaria Forman)
Amid the dire reality of melting ice sheets and subsequent rising sea levels, Zaria Forman opts to spotlight the beauty: “A bombardment of terrifying news is paralyzing, but focusing on the positive is empowering.” Forman’s staggeringly realistic paintings capture the majesty and fragility of the icebergs. Look closer and you’ll see the finely painted ice fjords crackling, crumbling, and melting. Still, Forman’s message always leans toward hope and action. “I try to celebrate what is still here; to give viewers the sense that it is still possible to do something to protect this Earth that sustains us.”
Sean “Hula” Yoro
(Courtesy of Sean Yoro)
Growing up in Hawaii, Sean “Hula” Yoro was raised to respect nature. The surfer and self-taught artist creates murals usually involving portraits on hard-to-reach locales like ship docks and dams to illustrate the changing landscape. In some cases, he paints on natural surfaces like icebergs or forest trees, letting the figures rapidly melt or get washed away by natural forces to create a sense of urgency. “The idea of my art not lasting adds another depth to the message and feels more real,” says Yoro.
Jill Pelto
(Courtesy of Jill Pelto)
(Courtesy of Jill Pelto)
(Courtesy of Jill Pelto)
At 24, painter and environmental science student Jill Pelto is already establishing a new kind of art informed by scientific data and inspired by early 20th-century explorers like Edward Adrian Wilson. Pelto knows that her generation and those that follow are the ones inheriting the issues and that the research isn’t always simple to digest. “I also find that many people just don’t pay attention,” she says. Her illustrations depict the same kind of graphs you might find in a textbook (decline in glacier mass balance; ocean acidification; deforestation) overlaid with watercolor paintings of the affected natural wonders, bringing the research to life.
PangeaSeed
(Courtesy of PangeaSeed)
(Courtesy of PangeaSeed)
(Courtesy of PangeaSeed)
Murals can transform cities and inspire change. Photographer Tre’ Packard, who founded PangeaSeed with his wife to promote environmental activism through art and education, applies the same concept to ocean conservation. The organization’s Sea Walls festivals, hosted in cities around the world, unite artists with scientists to create abstract street art that encourages dialogue. “I’m not delusional,” says Packard. “I know we are not going to change the world, but small efforts add up. We want to lead by example.”
Courtney Mattison
(Courtesy of Courtney Mattison)
One of the challenges in communicating the scope of environmental change is that we mostly can’t see it. With coral reefs, though, the impact is clear: The water gets warmer, the corals bleach, and unless the temperature is stabilized, they deteriorate. “It’s like a city going bankrupt and letting the buildings fall apart,” says former marine biology student and sculptor Courtney Mattison. Her thousand-pound ceramic reef renderings show this process starkly, with white corals mixed into the vibrantly painted and meticulously detailed pieces. She lets her fingerprints show on the stoneware and porcelain corals, speaking to our potential role in recovering the fragile ecosystems by emphasizing the human element of the work. “If people see evidence of my hands in the work, they may relate more closely,” says Mattison. “I don’t want it to be too literal, because the point is to spark curiosity.”
Tamiko Thiel
(Courtesy of Tamiko Thiel)
Tamiko Thiel uses technology to illustrate the impact we have on the planet. Her Gardens of the Anthropocene virtual reality installation first appeared in Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park and depicts a world overtaken by mutated versions of regional drought-resistant plants that feed on everything in sight—phones included. As an engineer, Thiel felt compelled to include factual data, but as an artist she wanted to complete the picture and pick up where the science (which she notes is couched in conditionals) stops. The series, now on view at Stanford University, is meant to entertain while stealthily urging viewers to do their part. “Humans only change when they see no other alternative in order to survive,” says Thiel.
Justin Guariglia
(Courtesy of Justin Guariglia)
Justin Guariglia became one of the first artists in a decade to officially work with NASA when he joined the group on survey flights for operation Oceans Melting Greenland as a photographer in 2015. The aerial images obtained are impressive, but Guariglia takes it a step further by transforming the photos into tactile, topographical prints that pop off the canvas through a printing process he developed. His work will be presented in West Palm Beach, Florida’s Norton Museum of Art in September. This year, Guariglia also launched After Ice, a selfie app with a filter that shows how high sea levels will rise by 2080 in New York. (Spoiler alert: If you’re near the city, you’ll be swimming with the fishies.)
Eve Mosher
(Courtesy of Eve Mosher)
In 2007, artist Eve Mosher took to the streets of Brooklyn with a baseball field chalker to trace a 70-mile line around the city marking the projected reach of a flood that could hit the coast within three to 20 years. Mosher’s HighWaterLine project simplified complex data down to a clear-cut line that hit way too close to the literal home of thousands of New Yorkers. It got attention. Then Hurricane Sandy came along and proved the predictions true. Now, HWL has grown to include workshops, community outreach, and other public art installations in cities from South Florida to England. “Art can create the space needed to go from grief and shock of what is coming to action.”
Hannah Rothstein
(Courtesy of Hannah Rothstein)
“I have been worried about climate change for a long time, and when I saw the systems designed to fight it being dismantled, I felt my time to pull out the art guns had come,” says illustrator Hannah Rothstein. She drew from some of the most iconic images in U.S. history—vintage National Park posters—and reimagined seven of them to resemble their fated decline for 2050, only 33 years away. Although she stays away from politics, Rothstein has been pleasantly surprised to see people sending postcards of the prints to senators. “Instead of deepening our divisions,” she says. “I hope this project will inspire our country’s policymakers to put politics aside and focus on the greater good.”
Lisa Murray
(Courtesy of Lisa Murray)
Photojournalist Lisa Murray has seen firsthand how new weather patterns affect rural communities. She’s seen women in Kenya walk hours to get water for their families following periods of intense drought; healthy villages in South Sudan going hungry after flash floods wipe away the harvest; fishing communities in Indonesia disappearing due to erosion and rising sea levels. “In the West, climate change doesn’t impact on our lives the same way it does in the global South,” she says. “It’s easy for people to ignore it.” Murray launched Faces of Change to document how environmental issues impact the lives of real people without sensationalizing or harping on the negative. “Showing the impact climate change has on everyday people and everyday life enables us to understand the consequences of a warming planet on a human level,” says Murray.
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An African architect’s profound message about climate change, built under a tree in London.
For the first time, an African architect has designed London’s prestigious Serpentine Pavilion.
For the first time, an African architect has designed London’s prestigious Serpentine Pavilion. This year, Francis Kéré will take center stage in what has become a global architectural and design event. The Burkinabe architect plans to use the pavilion as a platform to discuss the impact of climate change and humanity’s communal responsibility to preserve the natural environment.
Each year since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery commissions a temporary structure from one of the world’s best architects, which is erected in London’s Kensington Gardens over the summer. Kéré joins a global architectural elite that includes the likes of trailblazing British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid and veteran French architect Jean Nouvel. Like his predecessors, Kéré wanted to bring to the London garden a sense of the cultural identity and historical perspective he represents.
Kéré grew up in the town of Gando in Burkina Faso, where the ever-encroaching Sahara desert made him painfully aware of the human impact of climate change. This perspective that led to his creation of an innovative primary school that utilized traditional clay bricks with modern techniques to create a more robust structure for the children of Kéré’s home village. It’s also informed the inspiration behind this year’s pavilion.
“Coming from a continent like Africa, I am accustomed to being confronted with climate and natural landscape as a harsh reality,” said Kéré. “I was interested in how my contribution to this royal park could not only enhance the visitor’s experience of nature, but also provoke a new way for them to connect with each other.”
Kéré, who is based in Berlin, envisioned his design as a communal space centered around a tree, much as it would be in a village. For visitors to the Kensington Gardens, it’s a reminder of humanity’s psychosocial reliance on nature—and not just for its resources.
At the center of the canopy is a large opening, which will act like a funnel, collecting water when it rains. The waterfall it creates, which ebbs and flows with rainfall, speaks to the need to include sustainability in modern design.
Even the way light passes through and is blocked by the pavilion plays a role. During the day the structure provides shade, and at night, the openings in its walls allow light to escape, becoming a source of light to the park.
“In my home village of Gando,” Kéré said, “it is always easy to locate a celebration at night by climbing to higher ground and searching for the source of light in the surrounding darkness.”
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Bringing scientific data to life through art.
Jill Pelto constructs effective ways to communicate science through art.
Bringing Scientific Data to Life through Art: Jill Pelto constructs effective ways to communicate science through art
Gavenus, Erika, Pelto, Jill | June 29, 2017 | Leave a Comment Download as PDF
Jill Pelto | Climate Change Data. The full piece can be viewed at the end of the article.
Through the Arts Community space and weekly blog posts the MAHB has been highlighting artists who create work taking on the themes of sustainability and equity. We were pointed in the direction of Jill Pelto and her amazing work. A Masters student in the University of Maine’s Earth and Climate Science Department, working with Dr. Brenda Hall on paleoclimate research in the Antarctic, Jill also holds an undergraduate degree in Studio Art. Jill’s creative work incorporates scientific research and data into striking pieces to raise awareness about important environmental topics, particularly Climate Change. I was lucky enough to connect with Jill for a quick interview.
Hi Jill, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. To start off can you share a little about yourself: who you are, your interests, and how you came to be a scientist and artist?
I am 24 years old and graduated from the University of Maine in December 2015 with a double major in Studio Art and Earth Science. I grew up with a family who loved the outdoors, which fostered my love of nature, and with a twin sister with whom I could constantly draw. Aside from making art, my favorite things include cross-country and downhill skiing, reading, running, camping, traveling, and spending time with my friends and family.
I have assisted with research on the mountain glaciers of Washington and British Columbia, in the Dry Valleys and Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, over the rolling hills and carved cirques of the Falkland Islands, and around the aqua lakes and ochre mountains of New Zealand. These wonderful experiences worked with my interdisciplinary track (taking painting and climate change courses simultaneously at UMaine), and made me realize I could use my creative skills to communicate information about extreme environmental issues with a broad audience. I create artwork about the research I have been involved with as well as a myriad of other important topics. I believe that art is a uniquely articulate lens: through it I can address environmental concerns to raise awareness and inspire people to take action.
Jill Pelto conducting glaciological research.
I have had the chance to look through some of the amazing artwork on your site (jillpelto.com), and found your incorporation of data into them so captivating. Was this a technique you have always used, or was it something you have developed more recently?
I developed this more recently, while working on my Undergraduate Honors Thesis Project titled Art as a Tool to Communicate Science. I had been struggling for a long time with how to make art about the important issues I read online, or see while doing fieldwork, but in the summer of 2015 I was so blown away by the effects of global warming in Washington, that I finally hit upon using actual data. August 2015 was my 7th consecutive year working on North Cascade National Park glaciers with my father, Dr. Mauri Pelto, and his North Cascade Glacier Climate Project (NCGCP). That year the drought in Washington absolutely devastated the glaciers, the water supply, and the surrounding ecosystem; I returned home to Maine determined to create a series that could show people just how drastic these changes are. The NCGCP has been working on these glaciers since 1983, and this year when I was looking at the data collected and calculated over 33 years, I realized this sharply declining graph line would translate really well as the profile of a glacier. This idea became Decrease in Glacier Mass Balance, and uses measurements from 1984-2014 of the average mass balance for a group of North Cascade, WA glaciers. Mass balance is the annual budget for the glaciers: snow gain minus snow loss. This idea lead to a data-inspired portfolio.
Jill Pelto | Decline in Glacier Mass Index. This piece uses measurements from 1980-2014 of the average mass balance for a group of North Cascade, WA glaciers. [2] Mass balance is the annual budget for the glaciers: total snow accumulation minus total snow ablation. Not only are mass balances consistently negative, they are also continually decreasing.
I sometimes find that my interactions with the natural world are influenced by my understanding and interests in ecology. I am curious, do you find how you experience nature as a scientist differs from how you experience it as an artist?
I really like this question. The way I experience nature as an artist and as a scientist has become intertwined. For example, when I visit North Cascades Glaciers in Washington, I simultaneously see their major retreat just over the past 8 years and the new forms of beauty these changes bring. A lack of snow on the glaciers in the summer means that a lot of old and stunning features in the ice are exposed, yet I also know that because they are exposed, they will melt away. For me there is no comparison to being immersed in nature, and it fosters a deep relationship that is as important as that with family and friends. So when I see crevasse fields, lake sediment cores, and old moraines, I want to share with others how incredible it is to step outside and observe how the past has shaped the beauty of the present
Jill Pelto working on a sketch in the field.
Are there ways that these lenses complement each other? How does being a scientist influence your art? How does being an artist influence your science?
Art and science both require a lot of creative thinking and are driven by observation: what is happening in the world and how it can be depicted in art, studied through research, and shared and communicated with people. Scientists and artists are both passionate about understanding our world, but go about it in different ways. The scientist makes new discoveries and gains knowledge, and the artist can use their visual and/or audio skillset to share this.
You have expressed that you wish to use your creative skills to communicate information about extreme environmental issues with a broad audience. Can you explain the role you feel art has in communicating science, especially in the realm of environmental issues? Do you find that art reaches a different audience than typical science communication?
I think that art is so powerful because of the importance of the visual, many people respond more to this than to the writing in a scientific paper. My art can show the essential information of an environmental issue, but is also expressive through its beauty and its story. My hope is that this combination of intellectual and emotional content will be meaningful to a lot of people.
Jill Pelto | Habitat Degradation: Deforestation. This piece uses data showing the decline in rainforest area from 1970 to 2010. [3] These lush ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes, and with them, millions of beautiful species. Jill is quite certain that anyone would agree that a tiger is a magnificent creature, yet how many people realize that they are critically endangered? For this series Jill chose to separate the animals from their habitat, because that is ultimately what we are doing. The tiger is trapped outside the forest, cornered. He is defensive and angry that we are sealing his fate.
Are there audiences that are still not reached by either? Are there ways we could broaden the reach?
Definitely. And I guess that is an answer I am pursuing with my career, and don’t yet know. To find out how to broaden the reach I have to keep making art, keep communicating science, and learn, based on reactions, what different people respond to. My goal is to inspire as many people as possible to care about environmental responsibility, so it is a huge win for me if anybody who does not necessarily take any action to protect our world is touched by my art.
One reason why the MAHB has launched this initiative, is because of the potential for art to illicit a more emotional response than something like a table of data. Have you experienced the ability for your art to connect with people in a different way than your science?
I certainly have, people have responded a lot to the way I elicit emotional content from data and graphs. The trend line is starker. A graph with the declining volume of glaciers becomes the profile of a glacier, and suddenly the visual makes the data come to life. That is ice painted under the graph, and people can see it decreasing with the line, people can understand the loss. When I read a scientific paper or article detailing, for example, sea level rise estimates for the next century, I am floored. I want to share this scary but true reality with others, because knowledge is a power in itself. But I find that most people I know don’t take the time to read these articles, so I am trying to inform them in a way that I hope catches their attention more.
Jill Pelto conducting glaciological research.
What is next for you? How can people follow your work?
I am working on my Masters in UMaine’s Earth and Climate Science Department, working with Dr. Brenda Hall on paleoclimate research in the Antarctic. The project focuses on understanding how sensitive the Antarctic Ice Sheet is to factors such as sea level rise, and increasing oceanic and atmospheric temperatures. Additionally I am planning to be a part of several exhibitions this summer, including Art of Climate Science featuring work by UMaine’s Climate Change Institute in Belfast, Maine, and a show in UMaine’s Hudson Museum on campus. In August I will work with the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project for my 9th consecutive year, and in December I will be heading down to the Antarctic for the second field season of my Masters research.
People can follow my work at my website (jillpelto.com), or for more continuous updates through my Instagram (instagram.com/jillpelto).
Jill Pelto | Climate Change Data. This piece uses multiple quantities: the annual decrease in global glacier mass balance, global sea level rise, and global temperature increase. The numbers on the left y-axis depict quantities of glacial melt and sea level rise, and the suns across the horizon contain numbers that represent the global increase in temperature, coinciding with the timeline on the lower x-axis.[1]
It sounds like you have a lot of exciting opportunities coming up to expand on the incredible pieces you are creating and your efforts to reach more people. Best of luck with your exhibitions, and thank you for taking the time to share your work.
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