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Eco-art is a fresh movement led by artists seeking to explore, address and heal our relationship to Nature. Our work has an agenda, it is activist and can make a difference. We use the spectrum of artistic tools, media and materials to bridge community and often collaborate with non artist partners. Our work remediates polluted sites, creates awareness of regional and global crises, engages local citizens in community issues, protects fragile ecologies and encourages changed or improved behavior.
Eco-art is not the Land Art of Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer; the landscape is not a canvas to be bulldozed or cut up for an outside-of-the-gallery aesthetic. Eco-art is created in harmony with the ecosystem with sensitivity to its environmental impact, implications, choice of materials and outcomes. Eco-art is Ana Mendietta's Silueta Series, Mel Chin's Revival Field, Newton & Helen Meyer Harrison's Future Garden Part 1: The Endangered Meadows of Europe.
From the Greenmuseum's website, a definition that I agree with:
In a general sense, [Eco-art] is art that helps improve our relationship with the natural world. There is no definition set in stone. This living worldwide movement is growing and changing as you read this. Much environmental art is ephemeral, designed for a particular place (site-specific) and involves collaborations between artists and others such as scientists, educators and community groups.
See "A Brief Introduction" by Clive Adams of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World.
Some environmental art:
Interprets nature, creating artworks that inform us about nature and its processes, or about environmental problems we face
Is concerned with environmental forces and materials, creating artworks affected or powered by wind, water, lightning, even earthquakes
Re-envisions our relationship to nature, proposing through their work new ways for us to co-exist with our environment
Reclaims and remediates damaged environments, restoring ecosystems in artistic and often aesthetic ways
An artist statement:
In our modern world advanced by technology, experience of the real is often mediated by the virtual: television, movies or email. With the globalization of economies, widespread and ferocious industrialization, rapidity of communication and commerce and the shift to hypo-real lifestyles, the very nature of our lives have changed. Work entails the exchange of information. Leisure is often sedentary and indoor. And agriculture is managed by a distant corporation. Nature has become an abstract concept; something that we see through a car window, passing at 55 mph.
Society has become disconnected from Nature—the very source of life. The ecosystem that we rely upon for our survival, we poison without second thought. As cultural disconnection from Nature continues to develop, it has become imperative that Nature in art and art in Nature provide a connection to the power and meaning of life. By re-instilling a respect for all life (which does not necessitate an avoidance of death, but an honoring of all life that we consume) and respect for the earth’s resources (which means using fully that which we take and not taking more than we need), we can reestablish a harmonious relationship to Nature and enjoy lives of greater comfort, peace and health.
It has been the responsibility of artists to mirror society, to challenge accepted thinking and to provide a critical voice. I intend works such as Nature Viewers, Found Poster Series and Nature: a Five Mile Drive, to challenge our relationship to Nature and its resources. I challenge us to take responsibility for our actions, regardless of comfort and convenience, because we must. In these works, Nature is the medium conceptually and physically. By creating art that places the body in a new, sensual relationship to the work, Eco-artists re-insert the body into Nature, seeking to reestablish Man as part of Nature—no longer removed from it. Through my work, I ask for recognition of your own physical presence and connection to the land, our complicity in these specific situations and our interconnectivity to the entirety of life. While this can be appreciated through documentation of my own and other Eco-artists’ work, I encourage you to also explore the work of Nature in Nature with the sun on your face and the wind at your back.
Tim Gaudreau