Look at this eh – two blog posts in two weeks! What is going on here?! (Short answer: unemployment)
Today’s blog post is courtesy of Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange’s current exhibition, Storm Warning. A collaborative exhibition with Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, Storm Warning focuses on the impacts of the climate crisis around Cornwall (Mount’s Bay in particular) and South Essex. I have only seen the Cornish contingent of the show, and as I can’t imagine I’ll be in Essex any time soon, the proceeding thoughts will have to be based on that alone.
To begin with, I think the focus of the show on the communities and environments local to the galleries is incredibly important. So often in climate discourse it becomes easy for the individual/the viewer to disassociate from meaningful engagement due to the magnitude of the issue. By keeping the works focused on the local, the show shies away from careening towards panic and disaster, instead pulling our attention to the tangible and the doable.
The scale of the climate crisis and the change that needs to happen to counteract its impact often seems overwhelming and out of reach to individuals, so each gallery is presenting a diverse range of artworks and resources that aim to inform and inspire. The two galleries share the ambition to discover the local impact of climate change and highlight ways in which we can all take action to protect our environments.
Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange and Focal Point Gallery […] each serve communities living through the cost-of-living crisis, alongside the pending threat of rising sea levels and unpredictable weather patterns.
‘Storm Warning’ opening wall text
Rebecca Chesney’s Future Landscapes is a series of small collages, each depicting a house/houses surrounded by water. I’d be curious to know more about the process of their creation; according to her artist statement, her works are ‘created upon research on weather, water quality, air pollution, habitat loss, and also on how concept of nature is fed by mix of truth of fiction (sic?), or science and folklore’. While the collages are wonderfully atmospheric, I feel they suffer from a lack of more specific context on exactly what has informed them – where has the imagery come from? What has her research led her to discover? I wonder if without this, the work is in danger of leaning more towards this aforementioned unspecific climate panic, rather than a focused response. Having had a look at her website (http://www.rebeccachesney.com/), I feel the piece Wee-weep is a great example of this focused response; the piece translates birdsong (five birds from Songs of Wild Birds by EM Nicholson and Ludwig Koch: gold crest, wood warbler, great tit, stock dove and lapwing – specific!) into phonetic notation which is then embroidered into cotton. I love the way the specificity of the piece makes it a gateway to ideas around human-nonhuman conversation and language, multi-sensory data capture, what we lose in translation and documentation, which then all feed back, while also adding nuance to, into this overarching climate narrative. I feel the lack of specificity in Future Landscapes (or at least the viewer being denied the knowledge of this specificity) means it feels like a very general gesture towards rising sea levels, without the focus that some of the other works have on the local, the informative, or the doable.
Another piece which I felt had the potential to stray towards climate cliché was Andre Kong’s Whale in the Room: a looming installation of washed-up plastic debris suspended over a circle of chairs by fishing nets. While it was a powerful image (and the smell added an effective multi-sensory element to the rest of the exhibition), it certainly strays close to being a little too obvious; again, as with Chesney’s work, we know plastic pollution is an issue, just as we know rising sea levels are far from ideal. That being said, the sheer amount of suspended matter packed a strong visual punch, which can never hurt when it comes to an issue we can all tangibly contribute towards. Equally, unlike Chesney’s work, the wall text and accompanying video added further specificity which greatly added to the piece:
The 380 kilograms of plastics, retrieved from the sea by Clean Ocean Sailing […] represents the amount of plastic waste that enters the world’s oceans every single second.
The lights rhythmically flash onto the suspended marine debris, effectively acting as a metronome for the alarming pace at which plastic pollution is infiltrating our seas.
[…]
As you stand in front of the installation your sightlines are entangled in the web of nets and plastic debris. It’s only when one actively takes a seat in the circle of recycled plastic chairs, a forum for discussion, that you can see eye-to-eye with one another. A shared responsibility and collective action are needed to prevent the escalation of marine plastic pollution.
The space will host a programme of talks, demonstrations, and events, facilitated by local environmental groups addressing issues of marine pollution, and other concerns for our coastal communities.’
‘Whale in the Room’ wall text
There’s a lot that I think is important here when creating art about the climate crisis:
- The material that has been used has been sourced sustainably (and relevant-ly?) and will go on to be reused and recycled afterwards.
- Although verging on being unhelpfully panic-inducing, there is space within the work for meaningful action and conversation to take place. This is also tied nicely in conceptually with the creation of the physical space underneath the netting for these conversations to take place in.
- Although maybe not ‘important’ in the same sense as above points, I like that the weight of the piece has come from data, which is also complemented by the metronomic strobe lights, as opposed to being purely aesthetic. It helps ground the piece, offering an emotionally impactful illustration of science, which is hard to do without being too literal.
There was a documentary film piece at The Exchange (I’m not sure whose – I couldn’t see an accompanying wall text and didn’t make a note during the film) which explored various Cornish (and potentially Essexian? If that’s a word?) sustainability projects. Topics covered included plankton, seagrass, and reef cubes, with approximately 5 minutes spent on each in a magazine show style. Again, I would love to know more about the context and development of this film, particularly if it was put together by an artist. I felt it was a really informative film which focused on knowledge that was local but potentially not well-known, thereby being both engaging and productive. However, it did feel slightly strange in the context of an art gallery as, much as I’d like to steer clear of the ‘what is art’ debate, it felt more like a scientific/factual documentary than an artistic moving image piece. While I feel this can have a place in an exhibition such as this, again it needs context to situate it amongst the other artworks. Bringing art to the climate crisis, as I spoke about in my last blog post, is often hard to navigate as it feels like a problem both monitored by science and to be solved by science, leaving little room for art. I think therefore when curating an exhibition such as this there needs to be careful thought applied to explore exactly what role the art is playing. While art can be an effective illustration of science, I personally believe art is at its strongest when it goes beyond where science can go, pushing research towards the more emotive or speculative. I wonder if, then, this film felt a bit limiting in this regard (in the context of an art gallery rather than as a stand-alone climate resource) as a fairly straightforward presentation of material rather than an artistic exploration.
A film that I felt did do this was Joey Holder’s Metis:
The film presents us with an array of semi-speculative creatures produced by scientific observation and AI. The narrative follows the journey of the discovery of ‘Metis’, an unknown creature which had been lying dormant for centuries, but now awoken due to the rise of technology, capitalism, and its impact on the climate.
‘Metis’ wall text
The word ‘semi-speculative’ perfectly summarises the capacity in which art is most effective in climate discourse: by taking existing information but pushing it to create fictional narratives that engage our emotions in a way science alone cannot. Metis is wonderfully weird, and in a way that blurs all sense of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imagined’; the creatures crawling across the room-size screen could be straight from images taken down a microscope, or they could have been dreamed up by a sci-fi illustrator. This is so effective at highlighting the sublime weirdness of all that exists on this planet – a vital tool to changing the anthropocentric mindset that has led us to the climate crisis. The immersive set-up of the film only serves to heighten this, and again in a way that stereotypical art-science exhibits do not; where conventionally you might picture a climate exhibition as neat wall exhibits detailing greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature predictions, this instead is a flurry of sci-fi imagery, flashing green hacker-text and accelerating synth-pop. There was, admittedly, some factual information on the wall text outside the exhibit but I felt this was an effective way of subtly pointing the alienness of the film back at the real world.
Another exhibit that I felt escaped the pull of the scientific was Environmental Justice Questions by Harun Morrison:
A growing compilation of questions for discussion and debate. Harun has invited a range of people including artworkers, scientists, activists, writers, theorists, architects, growers, natural historians and horticulturalists to propose questions relating to environmental justice.
‘Environmental Justice Questions’ wall text
Again, this project pulls on art’s ability to be speculative, although where Metis does this in a maximalist way, EJQ is minimalist. Its simplicity is its strength, not striving to be anything more than a compilation of questions, and by doing so becoming a springboard for the imagination into all there could be to ask and to know. It feels so freeing to be able to ask questions when we’re liberated from finding the answers to them; science is good at asking questions, but perhaps only questions it feels it has the means to answer.
I feel it is fitting at this point (or perhaps I should have done this a lot sooner), to at least mention the great art/science divide that I keep alluding to. I personally am not sure the division of knowledge into distinct, guarded ‘subjects’ is always beneficial, particularly throughout early education, assigning modes of thinking to the binaries of ‘STEM’ or ‘the Arts’ rather than exploring more fluid methods of learning and thinking (not to mention the hierarchy that then forms upon this division). It’s hard, therefore, to talk about the differences between art and science, as I have done here, without feeling like I am further perpetuating this divide, which is not my intention. It is more that this division intrigues me so I feel the need to examine it, but I acknowledge this runs the risk of straying into hypocritical territory.
On a final note, it feels remiss of me not to acknowledge the links that many of the pieces I’ve chosen to focus on here have to my own current work and interests. As I’ve just mentioned, I am interested in the role that art can play in tackling the climate crisis, particularly in relation to science, hence my interest in the exhibition as a whole. Rebecca Chesney’s Future Landscapes are materially very similar to my recent collage work, hence my initial focus on that. I feel like I came down unnecessarily harshly on these works (especially considering Chesney has some other, very different pieces, also in the show that I did not mention), but this may have been in part due to this relationship to my own work – to an extent I was analysing my own work through the lens of Chesney’s. My interest in her piece Wee-weep relates to the exploration of language I am also looking at in my collages. Whale in the Room relates to my general concerns with art becoming clichéd in its depictions of the climate crisis, and also to my growing interest in socially engaged practice through conversation and workshops. The unknown film relates to the query that I mentioned at the end of my last post about the didactic nature of climate art, and how didactic is too didactic – all contributing, again, towards this exploration of the science/art divide. Metis relates to my interest in exploring and emphasising the weirdness of the nonhuman (again spoken about in my last post), and Environmental Justice Questions seems somewhat similar to Rocks that do things in its interactive, open-ended, and provocative nature.
In fear I could go on, but I must abandon this somewhere so I’ll try and wrap things up. This was an excellent exhibition, and one that I feel is much needed. I appreciated hugely that as well as showing work about the climate crisis, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange also appear to be making a concerted effort as an organisation to decrease their climate impact – details of this, as well as what there is still to do, were detailed on boards in the exhibition. An exhibition such as this would be hollow without this institutional integrity, so I’m glad it was acknowledged. To end where I begun (making this whole text either wonderfully full-circle or incredibly pointless), the focus on the communities local to the galleries is, I believe, vitally important to the success of this exhibition in bringing such a huge and nuanced topic meaningfully to each visitor.
Anna Harris 