Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Art and Changing Environments

Exploring the role of the artist in relation to the environment, climate change and the forces of nature.

For fifty years Ackling consistently made objects by burning wood – focusing sunlight through the lens of a hand-held magnifying glass to scorch repeated patterns of lines on the surface of card and wood. Best known for his work on driftwood collected from the beach at Weybourne near his home on the North Norfolk coast, later works feature discarded or low value materials of a more recent industrial past.

Casey’s recent work responds to the precarious nature of glacial archaeology, using sediments released from melting ice and drawings that are erased by the heat of alpine sun. Both artists explore the relationship between humans and their environment: between the earth-shaping forces of time, weather and geology and the agency of artists whose work is produced in collaboration with these processes.

Recent years have seen an efflorescence of art practices that engage with climate and the creative and destructive forces of nature. The art and activism of Imani Jacqueline Brown, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and Jenny Kendler variously addresses the unequal and technologically mediated bond between human and ‘wild’ ecologies. Meanwhile Mary Mattingley, Otobong Nkaga, and Michael Pinsky offer sculptural and interdisciplinary approaches to our reliance on the non-human for forms of shelter, sustenance, and societal wellbeing. The work of these artists is hugely diverse both formally and conceptually, dealing with subjects as disparate as colonialist geographies, climate change, the biodiversity crisis and the complex relationship between science and nature.

This one-day conference delves deeper into the themes emerging from the work of these artists.

Main image: Roger Ackling, Bird 1974, sunlight on wood. © Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art. Photo: Carol Robertson.