On Sustainability and Art: artist Hannalie Coetzee

Fire-created artwork.

ART AFRICA looks at the practice of artist Hannelie Coetzee. "Hannelie Coetzee’s artwork draws attention to our warped relationship with nature through pragmatic, solution oriented interventions."

The article also includes highlights of a fascinating discussion between the artist's associates and collaborators.

Some interesting quotes from the article:

The more intuitive approach of artists can provide a window into the complex models, calculations and simulations of the scientific world… Natural world issues require more than just a technical fix. They require systems of thinking and creativity to imagine and illustrate the best possible solutions. -- Prof. Caroline Digby from the Wits Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry

Sustainability is not primarily a scientific problem; rather, it requires us as citizens, communities and societies to rethink the way in which we live our personal lives… This requires engaging the hearts, minds and imaginations of a wide set of people across many different spheres of society. Artists have a particularly important role to play in this regard – not only in creating a space that can help bridge and connect between different actors, but in contributing and opening our minds to completely new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. -- Dr. Reinette Biggs of the Stockholm Resilience Institute and the University of Stellenbosch

How can art and science integrate into a discipline or collaboration that aids transformative understanding?

Art is the expression of creative ideas that are likely informed by prior knowledge but not restricted by natural, economic or social rules. Science is a knowledge that we have built through methodical enquiry over many generations into how nature, economics and society work. When art is introduced into science, it gives permission to seek different ways of addressing the same problem. It enables one to leapfrog or do a U-turn. As stated in New Roles for Art Are Clarified (Carney 2010), Tim Collins declares that, “while replicable fact is the domain of science, human perception and value are the domains of art and the humanities. – Philipp Kirsch, University of Queensland

How do such partnerships reach wider audiences?

I have been astounded by how much easier it is to interest people in the science when it is encompassed in an artwork. Before, I was only talking to the small community of people who were already thinking about these issues. People like the art – and they like the idea that the art has some scientifc substance behind it. Some, not all of them, want to know more details about our science questions and I am challenged to maintain their interest and expand it. – Sally Archibald, WITS

How can partnerships between artists and scientists contribute to resilient systems and change?

The data on climate change is indisputable, but how does one develop an emotional appreciation of the potential consequences? I think this must come through experience and art is a fantastic mechanism to develop emotional experiences and consider possibilities. – Caroline Lehmann, Biogeography, University of Edinburgh

How has an artist’s work influenced your work and vice versa?

Hannelie sometimes brings aspects that I think of as ‘outside’ the system, into the discussion. At its simplest, ecology is the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment and it is refreshing to have a different take on the shape and form of these interactions. – Sally Archibald

I started to write a conference paper about the potential to re-imagine mining overburden as a building material. To change the way that the industry framed everything as waste rock, waste dumps, waste piles etc. In researching this, I uncovered the genre of Land Art. These artists have given considerable thought to moving earth to make art. I strongly believe in the potential for artists to create not just new mine closure landscapes, but to also drive improved community relations when working side-by-side with the engineers and financial managers in mine planning and operations. – Phillip Kirsch

Read complete article here.

Codex Gunnison

Codex Gunnison is an art project that explores a poorly studied natural phenomenon in the Gunnison arm of the Great Salt Lake, UT. This bay is the saltiest water body on earth, yet it still manages to host life: a peculiar, salt-loving microbe that colors the bay's water pink and creates rock-like forms on the ground.

"Codex Gunnison is a mediative engagement with a unique and understudied ecological condition. It is also an effort to reimagine artistic practice as a speculative and vibrantly humanistic material science capable of interacting with and enriching conventional modes of objective inquiry. It does so by reframing representation as a process of critical engagement with the methodological frameworks employed by scientists with the artist manipulating the scope, aims, and outcomes of formal research."

Isn't this just a perhaps overly post-structural way of describing Natural History?

If so, it's nice to get back to that effort, which combined passion and close observation to gain understanding of natural phenomena before there was a structured practice of science to do that. Natural History combined artistic and analytical thinking and skills in a powerful way that has to some extent been lost in the process of science becoming more technical and fragmented.

Interlochen Arts Academy land art

Brief Summary of the Project:
This new collaborative project that uses “land” as a genre to bring visiting artists, scientists, and land use planners together with high school art and ecology students.

After conducting a Forestry Management Plan, Interlochen Center for the Arts identified about 70 acres of pine plantation on our campus that need to be selectively harvested and re-forested with native hardwood trees. Ten acres of this land have been identified as a study site for ecology and visual art students to document changes in biodiversity, soil and carbon capture as a result of the timbering process. We have the opportunity to create a permanent land art installation commemorating and responding to the process.

Two classes that run simultaneously in Math/Science and Visual Arts allow students to collaborate on the project. The design of a public trail system that runs through the land-art installation provides accessible recreation to our students and the community and raises awareness about the importance of protection, regeneration, conservation and the role art has in making the process meaningful.

The impact of this collaborative project reaches beyond our students and the land on our campus to the people in our community and will hopefully be a model of how to use art to invite the public into environmentally important projects nationwide.

Project Description: Due to the generosity of WilsonArt, funds are available to both study the pine plantation before, during and after timbering, and to involve students, faculty and visiting artists in a land art installation in the subject area. Our proposed plan has the following elements:

1. The subject area will be timbered in late 2017 / early 2018.
2. In the school year 2017 - 18, Johnny Hunt, visual arts instructor, will offer a landscape art course, based in the Visual Arts Division, open to students of all majors. Mary Ellen Newport, Director of Math and Science / Ecology instructor, will teach an ecology class that is offered at the same time as the art course. Ecologists and artists will study ecology and landscape art separately, and then have the occasion to work together in the studio and in the field on art and science.
3. A visiting artist will be brought in to work with instructors to plan, design, create, and ultimately install the land art project in a 10 acre area of the timbered pine off Riley Road. Elements of the plan will consider some or all of these themes:


• Regeneration
• Invitation / initiation / blessing of new forest
• The replacement of the plantation with the natural
• The way that forests and art are shaped by the passage of time
• The creation of a special place, a grove, a sanctuary, a nursery; a space that may or may not be able to acknowledge native American sensibilities
• The changing nature of a forest in the process of secondary succession
• The role of (bio)diversity in creating stability


4. Guest artists, native artists, scientists and land use planners will be brought in to deepen the experience between ecology and art. Plans for trails / paths, observation decks, planting regimes will be developed. The expectation is that some of the timbered wood from this plot could be used in building structures such as shelters for students doing data collection, bird observation decks over Bridge Lake.
5. Here is what we have put together as a description for the artist(s) we have involved: Interlochen Arts Academy seeks collaboration with a visual artist to guide science and arts students in the creation of land art for a 10 acre pine plantation forest that will be transformed (over the years) into a native forest. There are scientific objectives to the project (document changes in soil, biodiversity and carbon storage) as well. Ideally the artist would be available to consult with students for 2 week period in the early fall 2017 (in residence), a time in late fall 2017 (by remote, if necessary) for two weeks in January 2018 (IAA's Inter*Mester program), and for a time TBD in the spring semester 2018.

Images of the land and the areas we are focusing on for this project. The zoomed in area near the lake is where the art would be installed. The pine plantation between Riley Road and Bridge Lake is the location of the project. The project location contains scrubby Scotch pine to the north and west, an irregularly shaped patch of red pine more centrally located, and a wetlands area with a path leading SW to Bridge Lake. The irregular patch is the location of the project.

Melinda Zacher Ronayne
Director of Visual Arts
Interlochen Center for the Arts

E: melinda.ronayne@interlochen.org
P: 231.276.7844
W: interlochen.org

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What does art/science collaboration really mean?

Eric Magrane is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Geography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Eric's work is, "particularly interested in the encounters that ensue when creative practices occur within environmental research or tourism sites and how contemporary artworks and poetries may reflect, complicate, or disrupt environmental narratives."

Magrane is Poet in Residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, leading the design for poetry installations at the museum. Eric is currently in a van with a group of students somewhere in the Great Basin, leading a class that is visiting many of the iconic land art sites, and several field research facilities in the American Southwest.

He also maintains a blog for the Institute of the Environment called, "Proximities". Here is a great post about what art/science collaboration means. The article includes this thought-provoking quote from Barbara Morehouse:

"This is not about making scientists out of artists or vice versa; it is perhaps more about rethinking the Renaissance ideal of intellectual versatility in the context of very complicated times. It’s about developing a fully developed understanding of the environments we enjoy and on which we must necessarily depend."