How contemporary artists are working with the environment to co-create with nature, bridging the islands in the archipelago of the human and more-than-human world.

Attributed to the US environmentalist and author, Bill McKibben, is the quote: “Our tools are always deployed in the service of some philosophy or ideology. If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature - even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe - has to change.” Many contemporary artists, knowingly or otherwise, are embracing this philosophy, and, rather than just producing works inspired by nature, are instead working with nature in a co-production that spans the human and more-than-human world.

“We see every community as an island: scattered yet connected, belonging to a global archipelago,” states Nicola Sebastian, co-founder of Emerging Islands, a coastal-based organisation on the island of Luzon, northern Philippines, which promotes engagements between Filipino artists and grassroots communities on issues relating to the natural world. In an intentional echo of the composition of the country itself, comprising more than 7,000 islands, Emerging Islands’ praxis centres on tying together a variety of strands and initiatives within a broader holistic identity.

One such project, Follow the Water, saw the organisation curating an outdoor photography exhibition in La Union, Luzon, for Earth Day 2022. A group show featuring Filipino artists - including Ikit Agudo, Geric Cruz, Archie Geotina, Bren Lopez and Hannah Reyes Morales, among others - invited viewers to immerse themselves in a Philippine oceanic world and to recognise the importance of these seas as a climate frontline and a home for marine biodiversity. “To follow the waters that flow and gather all around us, beside our houses, alongside our roads, along our coastline, and deep in the ground beneath our feet,” the exhibition text states, “is to understand that we’ve never lost our relationship to the lakes, rivers, and seas of this planet; we’ve merely forgotten the connection… But only by rediscovering and renewing our place in this dynamic, interdependent system can we start to reckon with the devastation we are wreaking on the very waterways that give us life.”

On a similarly aquatic theme, but focusing on the ocean’s tributaries, Sofia Lemos is the curator behind the TBA21-Academy’s Meandering - a three-year multi-platform research programme exploring rivers and “how contemplative practices and poetics of the imagination can renew cultural approaches to social and environmental justice”. Based in Madrid, Spain, TBA21–Academy is the research arm of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, and its work seeks to foster a deeper relationship with the ocean and other bodies of water, through the lens of art, to inspire care and action.

Rivers, Lemos notes, are a richly illustrative figure - an intermediary plane, an artery. Meandering is experiential and process-based; the trajectory is the practice itself and the participating artists’ practices are “extra-disciplinary”: spanning multiple disciplines and dissolving the divide between process and output. Artists, Lemos muses, are cosmologists - heightening our awareness of how we inhabit reality, and offering us “metaphysical propositions that allow us to revisit, to rebuild”. The programme has already seen a guided river-walk along the Guadalquivir River to explore notions of ocean stewardship, climate responsibility, and contemporary mysticism; and a performance by artists Laia Estruch and Niño de Elche, who used vocalisation to converse with the fluvial ecosystem and its avifauna.

Also operating on a metaphysical level is American photographer Janelle Lynch, whose work, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, sees the artist experimenting with cyanotype prints and large-format photographs, presenting an ethereal, esoteric picture of the links between worlds seen and unseen. Made over the course of six weeks spent in solitude in Amagansett, New York, in 2022, Endless Forms incorporates both artefacts - rocks, driftwood, sea plants, the artist’s own body - and processes - such as cyanotypes - of the botanical, natural world. Her own abstracted limbs are at times indistinguishable from these other found materials. The overall effect is ghostly and liminal.

Like the title of the work, a reference to the famous final lines of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Lynch’s transcendent images reach beyond the corporeal and into the esoteric realm. When cyanotyping her own body in conversation with various environmental materials pulled from the local landscape, it deepened her connection to nature, she recounts. “With my flesh against botanicals and bird remains for the hour-long exposures, I experienced a union that I had not known before. With that came an astonishing sense of oneness and deeply felt associations to the primordial and the afterlife.” Throughout the solitary process, she was considering “what exists beyond human perception; is there an afterlife; is communication between the material and ethereal worlds possible; can an inanimate object - [cyanotyped] paper - hold the spiritual or energetic essence of the object or being with which it has been in direct contact?”

Similar philosophical questioning is evident in Speculative Ecologies, an exhibition featured in the Bienal’23 Fotografia do Porto, for which curators Jayne Dyer and Virgilio Ferreira explore the proposition that “the human ecological self is a counter proposition to the human Anthropocene self”. They explain: “Starting from the redefinition of the human ‘self’ as a cell in a diverse ecosphere of cells, we as humans become an ecological ‘self’ in nature, as an integrated part of a complex system of diverse ecologies, behaviours and intelligences with responsibility for the survival of all species.” Both the curators and the featured artists sought to ask and answer a set of questions: “Can we, through empathetic action, be part of a global collective body and take responsibility to catalyse regenerative change? Can we experience the pains and joys of humans and non-humans as if they were our own?”

In his photo series Once Beating Heart, Singaporean photographer Calvin Chow documents the lived experiences of climate change in communities living along the Tonlé Sap, a freshwater lake that is part of the Mekong river system in Cambodia. In these visual explorations of how climate devastation can ravage landscape and how communities along the Tonlé Sap have lived in symbiosis with the lake for millennia, Chow also reveals the underlying sense of interconnectedness between human and non-human ecosystems, and how they interact and complicate one another. Landscape becomes a site of psychogeography, an investigation into ways of living and being.

This sense of interconnectedness is a recurring theme; in Chow’s other ongoing long-term project, The Blindness of the Sea, he examines a seawall in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the constant, relentless incursion of both time and water on the built environment. “I believe that we as human beings ought to first and foremost experience the diversity of the natural world in order to understand the constructed world better,” he says. “From diverse voices in the digital world to diverse opinions in the political arena, I hope that we as a species can learn to understand each other’s voices, no matter how contrary to us they may be. From listening to the birds outside my window in Singapore during lockdown to the sound of silence while drifting in the middle of the Tonlé Sap in the early morning, seemingly diverse experiences often find a meeting point. They met in my body, my heart was open and I felt free.”

South African-born, UK-based nature photographer Murray Livingston’s practice also entails long-term, place-based landscape studies that display a keen sense of symbiosis between subject and photographic form. “I believe nature has an incredible ability to show us a glimpse of what exists beyond our own consciousness,” Livingston says. “The landscape will inspire me when I am attuned to it.” He recalls time spent making images in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, during which two storms passed through, forcing him to experience the environment around him at its most extreme: “When the winds finally abated, I noticed the return of birdsong, the sound of the ocean, the smell of sugar kelp. Only when you spend extended periods of time in a place do you become aware of these finer details. All of this leads to a deeper understanding and better photographs.”

For these artists, it is not enough to simply admire the natural world. Rather, they understand that we are part of nature, part of the Earth’s interconnected systems. We must observe and practise this understanding and find value in it, emulating nature’s generosity, structural integrity, reciprocity and interconnectivity. Nature is a mentor, a home, a part of the self and the self is part of something larger: an archipelago of care in which all Earthlings might flourish.