This essay was published as part of Mozaik Philanthropy’s 2022 Future Art Writing Awards e-zine on the virtual exhibition Ecosystem X.

Hope and Beauty on the Edge of Collapse:

The Artist as Care-giver and Composter in Times of Ecological Uncertainty

We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence.

— Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble [1]

“An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”

— Nina Simone [2]

The word “care” stems from the Proto-Germanic *karō, meaning “lament” and “grief.” It began as a wail, a cry, a scream. Over time, it evolved to become a balm, all the while continuing to hold at its center the sense of importance and interest. “Care” is a word that understands the deep vulnerability of our condition; it knows that there is no solace without recognition of the pain at the root.

For a society facing multiple existential threats, we are sorely lacking in spaces dedicated to collective grief and care. Spaces that allow us to slow down, to quietly take in the bewildering information that is thrown at us daily, to ground into our emotions and into the soil, to consider where to go from there. While such spaces do exist, their discourse and methods are not the norm. Their absence from the dominant culture leaves us to process the horrors of our times as individuals, isolated within the confines of our own internal landscapes. This is particularly the case when it comes to the climate crisis, a phenomenon that is too big to hold, too big to carry, and too big to digest. Ecological theorist Timothy Morton calls climate change a “hyperobject” [3], a word he coined for things that are so vast and wide and unwieldy that we can never quite grasp them, never quite comprehend their magnitude and their infinite threads.

As ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose writes, the ecological crisis heralds the end of certainty and of the isolated individual, of atomization, in the West [4]. We are forced to contend with the “weirding” of our world and with the fact that we are intrinsically interconnected with all life, from the very bacteria in our gut to our vast networks of extraction, labor, and trade. We don’t have a clear view of what is to come in the unknown of our collective future; this is unsettling and frightening, but it also allows us to hope for a better outcome. A healthier world can only come about by addressing the one we’re in now; we must first identify our grief and its source before turning to technological fixes. And whether on a practical or on an emotional and ontological level, responding to this crisis must be done collectively.

Artists are uniquely equipped to respond to such a need. As Howard Zinn writes in Artists in Times of War, the artist “transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world” [5]. The climate crisis calls for the ability to recognize patterns and to synthesize them and make them more easily understandable.

As Ecosystem X artist Carol Anne McChrystal says, “the artist doesn’t have to communicate in a didactic way. We can use materials and methods to prompt a viewer to ask their own questions.” Through this, the artist can establish a sense of intimacy through time and distance and render the hidden visible and the unwieldy more graspable. Artists can bring attention to a cause; they can also serve in the role of processor, holding space for the grief of others and composting it into care. And where the scientist does the important work of untangling the phenomena, the artist will, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “get you into that dark sea” [6] of mystery, of emotion, and of the unknown.

Inhabiting multiple moments in time and specifically referencing the historical is one of the ways in which the artists in the Ecosystem X exhibition simultaneously hold lament and care. José Trejo-Maya’s Transparencies Through Time stands out radically from the pieces that surround it: a concrete poem with black words on a white background, among its verses a Seminole man looks back at us with sharp eyes. Trejo-Moya, who calls himself “a remnant,” is of Indigenous Mexican descent, and in his poems you will find multiple languages, including Zapotec, a language that itself looks back at us across history.

In Debra Scacco’s lithograph Stack, 1944, white lines cut across delicious inky volumes, resembling a kind of blurry, chaotic, pulsating Ansel Adams photograph, or the bark of a tree, or even veins sliding across flesh. As Scacco tells us in her description of the piece, Stack, 1944 is inspired by the stack freeway interchange in Los Angeles, which was the first of its kind and which replaced the city’s original Chinatown. The interchange also stands adjacent to the site of a sycamore tree that was a gathering place for the Tongva community and was destroyed at the age of four hundred when a new owner expanded. Scacco writes that “Stack, 1944 presents multiple ways of seeing. One is the rise of a city out of climate change, the other is a city sinking into it.” During our conversation, she revisited the metaphor of rising up and sinking in, noting that “rising up” is language that can also be coopted by the dominant class, who espouse endless progress and control through industry, never stopping their Icarian flight toward the sun. On the other hand, when you look at the problem as one of “sinking in,” you’re more likely to try to level it and to do so collectively. The borders of the white lines in Stack, 1944 are intentionally blurry, bleeding out and sinking in, rejecting notions of precision and mastery and of always flying closer to the sun. Scacco shared a beautiful misremembering of an Andy Goldsworthy quote in which he refers to his own practice as always taking beauty to the brink of collapse, telling me that “beauty is always on the edge of collapse,” an idea that is both delicate and violent, and one that I felt embodied the ethos of this piece. That became the title of this essay.

Another piece in the exhibition in which the artist utilizes the making itself as a form of aesthetic rebellion is Sandstone Keepsake I: Pangea (SKIP), by Carol Anne McChrystal. SKIP is a striking sculptural installation in which “the wonky, the unusable, and willfully amateur qualities of this object establish a diasporic lens through which to consider the fact that more and more migration stories are written by policies that intensified the climate crisis.” Made up of a large rush mat weaving created with found materials, the piece leans on a pile of “locally mined paving stones 350 million years in the making.” The mat is a swirling contrast of violence and softness; we can see that the materials were knotted and twisted and bent and tightened, but that attention, time, and love were put into the making, most apparent in the smaller spiraling patterns. Tender, yet violent, it is the coming together of many threads, from forces of extraction to refugees to manual labor to student rebellions. The first in a series of sculptural pieces, each representing the tectonic supercontinents, the piece is named after Pangea, the landmass that broke apart to become the continents we know today. This title reveals the threads’ confluence and the ways in which they are interconnected in the climate crisis and in labor, trade, history, and geology. SKIP is about deep time, justice, and migration, about the hands we humans wield, sometimes with irresponsible and irreversible violence, sometimes with gentleness and care. It speaks to our human desire to distinguish ourselves from the swirling entanglement soup from which we emerged and how that desire was always futile. As with the pile of paving stones bearing the weight of this mat of many worlds, little is holding all of our threads up, and we must pay attention, and maybe even lend a hand.

Bathed in the soft yellow glow of a 16th-century Dutch painting, Eliza McKenna’s photograph I Have Sunken in Deep Mud, and There is No Footing; I Have Come into Deep Waters, and a Flood Sweeps Over Me is a remarkable marriage of contrasts. Depicting two boys fighting in mud, the piece resembles a Renaissance painting in the curve of its subjects and its unfolding drama. As the artist tells us, the boys are in fact fighting, but from the way one boy is holding the other down, we could mistake the gesture for its opposite, with the boy helping his friend up: a gesture of care in the place of a gesture of violence. In capturing this contrast, McKenna made a wish for these boys that they would take a different trajectory than that of white male violence, that they might go with gentleness instead.

Unlike previous pieces, Ivy Guild’s The Keeling looks forward, inviting us into a speculative vision of the future in which humans no longer roam the earth but the marks of our presence remain in the destruction and debris we left behind. A population of semi-anthropomorphic plant-beings inhabit a white gallery, turning it into an uncanny elsewhere. They are propped up or connected to each other or to the wall by curving metal pipes and wheels, prosthetics that hold them up after the humans have disappeared and taken the abundant systems that are necessary to life with them. These prosthetics are the embodiment of the lament/care dichotomy, both a clear sign of damage and of help, entwining the organic and the artificial, propping up the fallen — the keeled over — and connecting the lonely beings left behind in the aftermath of the collapse. The Keeling begs the question of what we mourn and how we do it, and of whether anyone will be there to mourn at all, either human or nonhuman. Guild made the piece while hurriedly saving the trees from her university’s arboretum, which was about to be destroyed to build a hospital, a replacement of one form of care for another that betrays our anthropocentric ideas around who we care for and why, which lives are important, and who deserves to be held up.

Other pieces in Ecosystem X also celebrate our interspecies connections. Madge Evers’s Carry a Torch is a series of four fungi prints, in which fungal spores were peppered over a fennel stalk onto a piece of paper to reveal its silhouette among stark white and orange mushrooms and spores. An avid gardener, Evers is deeply aware of cycles of destruction and creation. She conceives her pieces as compostable items that can be returned to the earth, and a number of attempts at producing these fungal prints have ended in the mushrooms rotting or drying up. To her, decay is a necessary component of creation, unmaking an intrinsic part of making. The title of the piece is a reference to the myth of Prometheus, who, when he brought fire down to earth from Mount Olympus, did so on a giant stalk of fennel. In the myth, Prometheus is punished for this, his liver eaten every day by an eagle. The title Carry a Torch, along with the organic, compostable, and interspecies-collaborative nature of the work, compels us to consider how far we may go, and if we aren’t ourselves due for a punishment. Yet Evers isn’t one to dwell strictly on the “grim stuff,” instead choosing to hope, to act on the grief through her gardening and in her making.

Unlike Carry a Torch, Ashley Eliza Williams’s Organism is not in fact organic, at least not in its form. An oil painting of lichen on paper, Williams’s delicate and indiscernible brushstrokes are the result of a kind of ritualistic and minute observation exercised on walks Williams took during the pandemic, first on her own, then accompanied by her painted creatures. For Williams, attention itself is a kind of communication, in particular the close attention to the colors of the lichen beings she interacts with, which she then emulates and transfers onto her paintings. In creating these “friends,” as she refers to them, to take with her on her walks and in developing this new language with which to speak with the lichens, Williams subverts our understanding of connection and communication. Her practice emphasizes our belonging to the wider world, as well as the ways in which our denial of this belonging blinds us just as much to the consequences of our actions as it does to the colors that surround us.

Coming together around working with plant and fungal beings can be empowering and community-building, as exemplified in two projects presented in videos in Ecosystem X. Many Hands, by Kaitlin Bryson and Beata Tsosie-Peña (Santa Clara pueblo), is an educational multi-species and multifaceted community project that focuses on the bioremediation of a fracking throwback spill site in Diné Tah in New Mexico. A collaboration with Cheyenne Antonio (Diné) of Red Nation, Tewa Women United from Española, New Mexico, and community members across Diné Tah (Navajo Nation), the Many Hands project ultimately installed a myco/bioremediation garden at the spill site. These artists are acting as vital processors, transforming harms, both emotional and material.

Paige Emery’s Radical Gardening was a collaborative guerilla gardening project that took place in Los Angeles next to a houseless community and that engaged the people living in the community in growing food. The garden embodied a vision of society and the city “against the colonization and exploitation of land and humans.” Despite being torn down by authorities, it was a place and an act of healing. As Emery writes, “the existence of this garden was an act of hope for a future where the regenerative abundance and ecological awareness provided by gardens can be accessed by all communities.”

Ultimately, the one thing these artists have in common is that they care. This is the work of people who care so much they have to do something. People who, in the words of Debra Scacco, have to “be part of something bigger than [themselves],” and in doing so “radically give a fuck,” to quote Ivy Guild. People who embody critic Suzi Gablik’s notion of “making art as if the world matters.” As Scacco says: “How do I use whatever I have access to as a way to share generously whatever I am able to learn?”

The artworks in Ecosystem X are offerings of beauty, grief, and care at the edge of collapse. In their imaginings of possible futures beyond the paradigms that have led to such destructive, unjust, and uncertain times, the artists first turn to the sources of our lament to consider ways in which tragedy and hope may not only cohabitate, but collaborate. In this, they take an active position, one that could define the role of the artist today and for many years to come, and one that is rooted in the grief and in the hope of care.

[1] Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in Cthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 1.

[2] “Nina Simone: an Artist’s Duty” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99V0mMNf5fo&ab_channel=NinaSimone

[3] Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

[4] Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction, (University of Virginia Press, 2013).

[5] Zinn, Howard. Artists in Times of War, (Seven Stories Press, 2003), 7.

[6] Solnit, Rebecca. Field Guide to Getting Lost, (Penguin Books, 2006), 4.