I have often been asked why are there so many different approaches to environmental art. I can only really go to into depth about my own specific approach to environmental art and why it is called that and mention a few other artists who I am aware of that have also had the environment feature strongly in their work.
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I largely came into making this type of art largely by accident. This is not meant to infer that it was a mistake, because nothing could be further from the truth. It was simply a happy coincidence that in my case I happened to be wanting to make driftwood furniture for the new home that I moved into and it was on the these remote beaches in Australia that I discovered literally tons of plastics washing up.
These plastics fascinated and intrigued me and I went on to spend the next 10-15 years or so making works from these predominantly inorganic found objects.
There are other artists who have forged the way forward for artists like myself, like the land art movement, which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Smithson developed works, which were site specific and were largely a reaction to the commercialisation of art that was happening in the US at that time.
His work spiral jetty made in 1969, which was essentially a five hundred meter long spiral made in the great salt like in Utah.
Although this work was heralded at the time as a major breakthrough and an example off the this new form of art, it did have limitations which were only recognised at a later time, when it can be seen that the impact on the environment itself was quite considerable as it left permanent damage to the natural lakeside that he altered.
Another way of expressing environmental issues in art has been successfully done by the English artist Andy Goldsworthy. He has become known as an environmental artist, with his work reflecting what it is that nature does over a period of time.
In one example of his work, he covered a boulder with damp, very brightly coloured autumn leaves in the midst of a landscape, which he then took photographs of. The work over the following days disintegrated as nature took its course and the leaves dried out and either fell or were blown away from the boulder by the wind.
These works are beautiful and very ephemeral by their nature. He has also been known to make beautiful site-specific carvings from ice, then to document these carvings, and then let them melt and disappear.
Such is the transience of all things on this planet and his work is a good reminder of these things.
So there are different ways off incorporating environmental messages into the work that we do, which have us being categorised as environmental artists and here are three examples that I’ve mentioned above which include my own work, which show three completely different ways of expressing the environment and how we all express this differently, our concern, our love for it and our being in awe of it.
