Art

As concern mounts that the world is heading for some catastrophic disaster caused by pollution, climate change and the relentless pillaging of resources, it seems natural that artists will want to respond to this plight through their work. What is less clear is what they can do, if anything, to help avert a global ecological emergency. On Monday and Tuesday a group of scientists, academics, politicians and artists will discuss this and many other pressing environmental topics at a symposium, cheerfully titled ‘No Way Back?’ at the Royal Society of Arts. Feature continues

Far from a soapbox for doomsayers, the speakers at the symposium include artist Jeremy Deller, who is this week launching a competition to design a bat house at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. Since filming his famous flying bat sequence for 2004’s Turner Prize-winning work ‘Memory Bucket’ and seeing the artificial habitats constructed for the creatures in Texas, Deller has become a certified bat lover: ‘I’m not an eco-artist, it just so happens I love bats.’ Even though his proposal is not so much a work of art as a practical proposal for the preservation of bats in the city, Deller says there are wider resonances. ‘The project is also about housing [for humans] in this country, because we have similar requirements to most other mammals – we also need somewhere warm, dry and safe to live.’

The symposium is part of the RSA’s grand ‘Arts and Ecology’ programme that encourages artists to tackle green issues, but not all of the initiatives are as straightforward as Deller’s bat house. Artists Heather and Ivan Morison, for example, recently ‘crashed’ a lorry in the middle of Bristol, spilling 25,000 flowers in order to provoke conversation about the transportation of roses from Ecuador. The pair’s current gallery show in London, ‘Earthwalker’ at Danielle Arnaud, provides subtle conceptual cues about man’s adverse impact on nature through their juxtapositions of images from flower auctions in Holland with photographs of dead or stuffed animals. ‘We’re not making a statement, just prodding things and leaving them open,’ says Heather.

Without waging an ecological campaign or even necessarily using biodegradable or recycled materials, the Morisons’ art has always taken a sideways glance at such currently exigent topics as sustainability and global warming. When they travelled through Eastern Europe to Russia, Mongolia, China and New Zealand in 2003 without ever getting on a plane, the idea was not to reduce their carbon footprints, but to ‘have a connection to where you are every step of the way’. During this ‘Global Survey’, as the project came to be known, they posted back cryptic but inspirational postcards bearing messages such as: ‘Mr & Mrs Ivan Morison do not understand it. Why are they cutting down all the Siberian larches? Arkhangelsk, Russia’. Heather explains that ‘regardless of your professional life, you can’t help but be influenced by the environment.’