Art and Ecology

In his new book, John K. Grande interviews artists around the world who work in and with nature. It’s time, he says, for contemporary art to reconcile with the natural world.

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For years, Scottish sculptor David Mach walked past a twisted tree trunk on a beach in Fife. He eventually hauled it away to his studio, where he treated it with wood preserver and covered its surface with some 112,00 drywall screws. “It is the slowest way known to man, making these sculptures,” says Mach. But the screws transform the wood’s incredible, almost tortured form into the dramatic sculpture he calls Dark Matter.

As he worked, Mach found himself thinking of car engines and airplane fuselages. But, like many of the works highlighted in John K. Grande’s forthcoming book, Art, Space, Ecology: Two Views - Twenty Interviews, the piece is a collaboration – between the artist and technology, for sure, but also with the tree as well as the wind and waves that shaped and eroded it over untold years.

Grande, a Montreal-based curator and critic who has published several books about art and nature, urges a reconciliation between contemporary art and the natural world, something that seems increasingly urgent in an era of unprecedented climate change and environmental crisis.

“Art can connect to the natural world and engage with living species, and with the elements,” Grande writes in the introduction to the 190-page book, which includes a foreword by noted British writer Edward Lucie-Smith. “The rift between our place and nature – ever present – can be healed.”

At times, Grande sounds frustrated, almost insistent, noting that artists interested in the evolving field of ecological art often work in site-specific ways outside the constraints of art institutions.

"It’s never too late to evolve aesthetics, to integrate nature into the world of art. Wasn’t nature always part of art? Why the great distancing from nature in contemporary galleries? Almost all the great artists historically drew on nature as a source for their art. Aren’t we a part of nature?"

Grande offers an eclectic global perspective in the book, whether it’s Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures in the Canary Islands or Milos Sejn’s Solar Mountain, a site for contemplation and renewal in the Czech Republic.

The interviews are conversational in tone. For instance, Grande tells Mach that the narrative of Dark Matter is already present in the tree trunk. “Then you bring a human layer to it, and, over time, find a human voice to add to the nature layer,” Grande says. “You are adding a storytelling aspect with these covered tree pieces. The story is an ancient one, this intertwining of natural and man-made. It’s all in the flow.”

Grande includes Canadian artist Paul Walde, known for Requiem for a Glacier, an ambitious orchestral performance on Farnham Glacier in B.C.’s Purcell Mountains, and Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, who explores themes related to identity and the land. Robert Polidori, a Montreal-born photographer, is also featured. Polidori says his bleak shots of the interiors of New Orleans homes after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina show "the exoskeletons of an interrupted life."

Also part of the mix is Chris Booth, a New Zealand artist who completed a 2012 project at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden, where he planted a young western red cedar in a flower-like nest of stones and twigs with the assistance of the Musqueam people. “Transformation Plant is a collaboration with nature and community – living earth art,” Booth tells Grande. “We are consecrating Gaia here.”

Women are under-represented in the book. Two that are included are South Korea’s Haesim Kim, who creates poetic outdoor installations like Even Trees Are Sick, and Pilar Ovalle, a Chilean artist who builds interlocking forms from salvaged wood. Viewers can enter Ovalle’s recent work, Pulso, as if they are walking into the body of a whale. “A dialectic emerges somewhere be­tween enclosure and protection, between the living body and the broken object," says Ovalle. "And it also refers to the limbo between life and death.” 

The book's cover features a striking image of a tree seemingly thrusting through the floor and ceiling of an art gallery, a work by Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira. Other artists include Dennis Oppenheim, Newton and Helen Harrison, Peter Hutchinson, Jan-Erik Andersson, Alan Sonfist and Buster Simpson. While you might quibble with Grande’s choices and propose your own favourites, the book is timely and the conversations engaging. ■

Art, Space, Ecology: Two Views - Twenty Interviews by John K. Grande will be published in September by Black Rose Books. It is distributed through the University of Chicago Press.