I first came across the concept of eco-art upon viewing Olafur Eliasson’s 2018 Ice Watch installation. 30 blocks of real glacial ice carted from the waters surrounding Greenland and relocated to occupy a space at the front of the Tate Modern in London. Watching water droplets slowly melt from the ice blocks, I wondered if it was, as some critics believed, solely “subversive neo-conceptualism”? Was it an outlandish publicity stunt? Was it even art? Or was it a powerful art piece that provides a real-time demonstration of climate change?
Much of eco-art is subject to these questions. Often the genre defies the usual properties of traditional art: it is not intended to be aesthetically pleasing or beautiful, it is not meant to amuse or entertain, it is not designed to be hung above one’s fireplace or placed thoughtfully on a mantlepiece. Instead, eco-art aims at a new type of realism – to provoke real thought and real fear about the climate crisis, with the aspiration to encourage real, tangible change.
Eco-art is grounded in the belief that art can, and should, be individually and socially transformative. With the climate crisis being one of, if not the most, urgent emergencies we face today, eco-art evokes the ever pertinent question that lingers on the mind of anyone interested in art: can art really make a difference?
Artist Chris Jordan certainly believes so. His 2005 photography series, Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption, shows the environmental impact of mass consumption and consumerism. Featuring are photographs taken from landfills of a sea of thrown-out phone chargers, and junkyards with mountains of crushed cars. They’re eerily beautiful, but importantly depressing and downright frightening. Viewing his work prompted me to question my own consumerist habits.
When issues and debates about climate change are discussed in parliament, within tutorial classes, or, more often than not, at a tense family dinner, the climate crisis can sometimes feel so nebulous and far away from our comfortable existence. Instead, eco-art can defeat that separation – it serves as a striking reminder that our actions do indeed have catastrophic consequences.
With the worst ever forest fires California has experienced, the hottest summer recorded in 2024, even the red warning of Storm Elowyn just last weekend, it feels like the work of an eco-artist in an imperative – especially when we see on his first day in office, Trump withdraw from the Paris agreement for the second time. To me, art is political – it has the power to engage people and sway opinions.
It does seem naive however to expect that simply one artist and their work could change the world. Whilst eco-art alone cannot reverse the impacts of climate change, it has the power to engage people and sway opinions. It encourages change, but does not conduct or execute it. Instead, eco-art can, and does, have an impact, by galvanising individuals to take action and responsibility.
As Chris Jordan says, if his “work could inspire just one person to make the leap, that would be worth as much to me as all of the gallery shows and art-world accolades I could imagine”. After all, that is, to me, what art is all about.