Climate art - where is it?

shane

website team CRAGger Bedford

There is most definitely a wealth of expression of this kind but it is largely in the underground movements still. In 2003 i co-founded a London based organisation called http://creativeforum.org/ which was dedicated to providing a platform for people to use different art forms to express their position and visions etc. I think pop culture is too commercial nowerdays to allow money making artists to become too heavily involved.

vey straker

CRAGger Hereford

Hi David, I totally agree. I am constantly asking myself what creative expression I could manifest that would really touch people. Even jsut a few people! I have had a few goes over the years and would really like to share these with others and hear what others might have been up to.

My last attempt was a site specific installation in some woodland as part of an exhibition on a nature reserve in Herefordshire. I’ll post some pictures of it. But basically I erected hundreds of little white crosses around a path through the woods. Each little cross was different in dimension and some were in finished wood while others were crude rustic stick affairs, all representing individual souls. To walk through the clearing of crosses in the woods you had to walk over broken plaster crosses which would shatter further under your weight. Chalked up on the trees on either side as you walked through were the stark facts of the numbers of deaths caused by climate change induced hurricanes, droughts, typhoons etc in countries around the world. I was going to give people black helium balloons to carry as they walked along the path, to represent their own CO2 emmissions – but then I found out how energy intensive producing helium was!!

Vey

kirti

CRAGger Georgia Maryland

Hi David, you are awesome!

I want to thank you after reading your words and what you wrote and looking at the Hard Rain project book, I feel really inspired by it and will go get it, and look at it in detail,the images I saw on line were very moving.

You reminded me as an artist to get my focus on where it needs to be,using my photographic medium to express my feelings of the enviroment and its effects on the planet and express through the medium I am comfortabel using.its so easy to get bogged down with every day living.

There are so many ways to express and lots of channels, I would love to read one of your poems or writtings on this issue of climate change and its effects on the planet,I know you write wonderfuly!thats my weakness,i am told ! but love photography as you know!

I will focus on my photography to express more and maybe others can use whatever medium, they are inspired with and share here some day soon.

Again thank you for your words of inspiration !! I needed a knock of reality and what matters:)

Please continue to share anymore sites or literature etc, you feel would be inspirational.
Kirti

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

350.org is organising and inspiring loads of creative expression of the number 350! For example, postcards, film, dance and landscape, people art. See:

http://350.org/en/take-action

I like this stuff because it’s fun and aspirational. And many many insistent happy people are more difficult to ignore than a bunch of protestors (although that has its place). They are unlocking people’s creative potential! Most importantly, it’s getting the message out there in the public consciousness.

Perhaps if anyone has a GPS receiver, we could do some GPS drawings!

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

http://www.marklynas.org/2008/9/5/seeing-the-bigger-picture

Trailing a new collection of photographs – Vanishing Landscapes by John Berger