Focusing art on the climate crisis
The images we keep in our minds affect how we move through the world. We may have favorite photographs from our youth – pictures that shape how we think of ourselves and our origins. (One of mine is myself, as a child, picking up trash out of a river. An early environmentalist?) As adults, we may put together ambitious dream boards or engage in vivid visualization, picturing what our life will look like when we meet the monetary, professional, romantic or even artistic goals so perfectly executed by others on Instagram. We make our memories and futures in images.
More and more, imagery shapes how we think about the climate crisis as well. Overwhelming photos of roaring forest fires that blaze intense orange or devastating floods that cover trees and houses lodge deep in our collective psyche as we contemplate – or avoid contemplating – our role in creating the disasters we fear. Depictions of green-roofed urban buildings and massive solar farms give a glimpse of a future that might save us, if we can bring it about.
Sarah Grew is a lifelong artist who incorporates the physical elements of climate change in her work, from printing photographs with the ash of forest fires to using the sun as a light source for photographic techniques. She uses old photographic techniques such as carbon printing and cyanotypes to comment on new challenges like addressing climate change. Her recent experiences exploring the ocean on a research boat and living through intense wildfire seasons in Oregon have moved her to shift her artistic practice to address climate change more directly. We can trace her artistic evolution in several parts.
I. Contemplating time
Sarah had early experience taking pictures with a Brownie camera and making contact prints; the miracle of her first images appearing is fixed deeply in her mind. She began her artistic career as a painter, spending formative time in Europe, and for a time thought of photography as “like drawing” — a mere foundation or precursor for painting. Much of her painting focused on representing time, addressing the complex challenge of how to paint something that’s always passing.
As soon as any image is captured, its subject has already changed, even as the image itself is deeply influenced by when it was created. The process of painting itself also occupies time differently than photography, which can seem as instantaneous as the click of a shutter, even when the beauty of a finished image obscures hours of digital postprocessing, painstaking darkroom work or other labor-intensive photographic endeavors.
Despite all the intention and effort that went into her paintings, Sarah found that “people could still just hang the paintings on the wall,” looking at them as beautiful objects without contemplating their context. So the edges of her mind started to move toward a new topic, one also related to time. (As in, do we have enough left?)
Along with maintaining an artistic practice since her youth, Sarah has been environmentally aware from an early age. She remembers having a coloring book from the local ecology center as a child and later doing bike rides to raise funds for the same center, “always naively assuming everybody would be doing these things.” As she grew older, she eventually realized that not everyone put conservation at the center of – or even anywhere in – their personal, professional or artistic agenda, and that realization motivated her to take action.
“As climate change has gotten bigger and worse and people just aren’t moving on it, I started feeling like I had to express that in my work.”
II. Waves of change
Like climate change itself, Sarah’s climate-related artwork and processes have been accelerating of late – rushing along like water, if you will. In 2019, she was the artist-in-residence on a research science boat studying the effects of climate change on the zooplankton food web off the coast of Oregon and Northern California. She says the experience “catapulted me into putting science more at the forefront of my work.” It might be easy to think that zooplankton have little to do with humans, but changes in water temperatures brought on by climate change have effects on prey animals (like zooplankton) in these waters, expanding their population and potentially affecting the survival of larger creatures we may use for food.
In her work, Sarah has also worked to examine the role of women in photography, particularly “how women have been ignored in art history.” In her zooplankton project, she was able to bring together her interests in the environment and in women artists using techniques pioneered by early women photographers such as Anna Atkins. Sometimes credited as the first person to publish a book using photographic techniques, Atkins was known for using cyanotypes, a coated paper exposed to light with objects (in Anna’s case, usually plants) covering them.
In creating cyanotypes of Pacific plankton, Sarah felt she entered “a transtemporal transcontinental conversation” with Atkins’ 19th-century botanical cyanotypes. She observes that “If Anna walked into the world today, the books would look familiar in terms of process and paper, but in terms of what we’re talking about, it would be unimaginable,” particularly because Atkins catalogued plants for discovery; we now too often document their decline. Interestingly, Atkins was working around the time when amateur scientist Eunice Foote gained an early understanding of the greenhouse effect in 1856, showing that we’ve known about climate change for an incredibly long time, even if the literal heat hasn’t turned up so strongly until now.
III. Regrounding in process
Forest fires have hit Oregon hard over the past few years, burning 541,372 acres in 2020 and 231,494 acres in 2021, according to the Oregon Department of Forestry. These fires also affected Sarah, like many other Oregonians, deeply – her “gut feeling was so much pain,” as she canceled trips and avoided hiking in the mountains due to the fires. Soon she realized, “Either this devastation is going to kill me or I have to find a way to bring it into my work.”
She started photographing burned areas and collecting burned pieces of wood, finding the fragments “really beautiful and fragile – there’s so much in them.” As she began to think about ways of documenting forest fires, she learned that carbon printing is another early photographic process from 1855, right before Eunice Foote observed that CO2 could contribute to warming. Because there are only a few dozen people still making carbon prints, Sarah had to engage in a painstaking combination of research and trial and error to figure out not only how to make carbon printing work, but how to make the carbon itself from the burned trees she had.
As Sarah learned about carbon printing, she figured out a lot through trial and error, echoing the sometimes-stumbling way we’ve made progress on the climate crisis. Even the few people who still engage in carbon printing today tend to use premade pigments, so turning bits of wood into usable carbon for printing became a major area of exploration for her. She eventually learned how to “grind the soot up finely enough” and mix it with other ingredients to make a gelatin emulsion, spreading it out “perfectly level and of the same thickness,” then letting it dry for a few days. This creates the “carbon tissue” that will be used to make a carbon print.
After creating the carbon tissue, Sarah applies chemicals that make it sensitive to light, then exposes the tissue to light using a digitally reversed (to avoid having to transfer the image again) negative the same size as the gelatin itself – no enlarger involved, although modern technology lets her print any size negative she needs, in contrast to the “old days” when photographers would need to use a camera with film of the exact size they wanted to print. Finally, the exposed carbon tissue is pressed against the printing substrate (for Sarah’s forest images, this is glass) underwater, and the carbon tissue is eventually washed away. The process itself is time-consuming in a way that defies modern expectations of the instantaneous, and permanent in a way that undercuts our often-expendable culture.
Sarah calls carbon printing “The most archival of all photographic processes,” as “carbon doesn’t fade.” As she works on her prints, Sarah feels that “All I’m doing is releasing the memory of the forest from within the carbon molecule. They’re not really my photographs, they’re the forest’s memory. I’m just the vehicle.”
“They’re not really my photographs, they’re the forest’s memory. I’m just the vehicle.”
IV. Fixing our place in time
Once-new technologies helped usher in climate change, and we’re constantly inventing new technologies that can further or combat it. As we change our weather, perhaps permanently, we can look at the seemingly ephemeral digital worlds we increasingly inhabit and wonder about returning to an age of more seeming permanence. We still have access to art that’s as many as tens of thousands of years old, whether it’s cave paintings or pottery. Will our digital creations last this long? Would we want them to?
Something about the precision of having a photographic negative the exact size of the material to be printed on feels like it can be extended to climate change: we need to know the “size” and type of the solutions we’ll choose, then match them to the size of the problem. There is, I hope, more “wiggle room” in matching these sizes than there is in the size of the negative and photographic paper, but we do clearly have to think about big solutions to big problems.
A cool thing about carbon printing is that you can do it on pretty much any material you can get gelatin to stick to. Sarah chose glass for her forest fire prints “because I wanted the images to be as fragile as the forests.” She’s found that some galleries hesitate to display the pieces due to their fragility, but Sarh thinks that “If they break, that’s okay, that’s the point. As long as nobody gets hurt, I don’t care if they break. They need to be that fragile and transparent.” While the images would also look beautiful on paper, they wouldn’t have the same effect as putting them on glass, then creating a hanging “forest” of those glass images that people can walk through. Sarah chose to include 140 “trees” in her ghost forest to reflect the annual U.S. average of 70,000 wildfires and the 7 million acres we burn every year. She notes that, 20 years ago, there were more fires – 90,000 a year – but fewer than 1 million acres were burned. Fires are becoming more destructive.
The fragility of the glass reminds us of the fragility of our environment – a few forest fires too far, a few crashed oil tankers too many, and it could break in a way we can’t fix. We’re already very close to that point. Still, we can develop precise new processes, ways of adapting that can address the issues. We have many old and new technologies that can guide our way toward a more livable world, perhaps one more rooted in place, perspective, practice. In art, and in people.
The U.S. Park Service sponsors artist residencies in national parks, and Sarah has had the opportunity to participate in residency at Joshua Tree National Park. Her project there used cyanotypes and served as a remembrance of her painterly practice of representing time in art, attempting to call into question the age of representation in her work. Particularly when the subject is an ancient tree, Sarah asks, “How do we know whether an image is an old or new image? How can we make it look old or new with the same materials?”
Because Joshua Trees are so ancient and slow growing, they are particularly devastated by fire, and take a long time to return. Their ancient time scale puts humans in perspective, while also revealing the depth of the devastation we’ve wrought on earth in scarcely a century. Will we recover, regrow like the trees? Or will a new organism take our place?
V. Actions and reactions
Given the urgency of the climate crisis, Sarah feels that artists should take action: “For artists right now, this is the time when we can be putting climate into our work in a big way and get people to pay attention,” Sarah says, adding, “I didn’t want just something on the wall, I really needed to make a difference.” Art also provides perspective that can be more difficult to gather from hard science: “Art can speak about things in the culture that other people can’t speak about, helping people process information and give them a space of hope.”
For example, Sarah had anticipated that people would feel devastated by her forest fire exhibition due to the intensity of the imagery and the extent of the destruction they depict. But people have told her they came away from the exhibition with “this weird sense of hope.” One firefighter was initially triggered by the show and had to leave the gallery because the images “looked so much like a smoky window.” But he was able to recover, return and experience the show in full. Sarah also gave a talk about her work to some young members of a fire work crew who hadn’t had the opportunity to be in gallery or museum spaces before and found the artwork powerful for its ability to acknowledge and expand on their experience with fire.
“Because climate is a subject we all know about a little bit, it’s also a place where artists can reach a lot of people and get a lot of people to think.”
Next, Sarah plans to turn from water and fire to earth. She’s been thinking “about mining and extraction and how we change landscapes to suit us” and may use earth pigments to create a photographic series about mineral extraction, possibly even printing on metal (building on a previous series of paintings on metal). These images may be more abstract, creating a challenge for the artist, as people respond to plants and trees and even plankton in a way that they might not to images of earth or machinery. She’s also thinking about mapping the destruction that mining has wrought on the earth, a scale that can be hard for humans to process.
Art helps us understand ourselves better, and commemorate where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s an important tool to help us understand the climate crisis as well as motivate ourselves and others to work to address it. Sarah and other artists can guide the way toward climate hope and climate solutions. It’s up to all of us to listen, observe, appreciate – and act.
Sarah’s Ghost Forest exhibition is at CSU Stanislaus through December 15, 2023, for anyone in the area.
Sarah’s recommended resources
Melanie Walker (artist)
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing
Takeaways from Sarah
All art can address climate, and everyone can appreciate art
Practicing old techniques can help us understand the present
Your artistic practice can evolve with your philosophy