Introduction

Have you ever wondered how art could reshape our relationship with nature? Step into the world of environmental artists, where creativity meets ecology in the most extraordinary ways. From ephemeral ice sculptures¹ to massive land art visible from space, these 12 visionaries are redefining the boundaries between art and the environment.

Did you know that one artist planted a wheat field on two acres of landfill right next to Wall Street? Get ready to be inspired by these eco-pioneers who use nature as their canvas and challenge us to see our planet in a whole new light.

Lessons from artists

Andy Goldsworthy

British-born Andy Goldsworthy (1956) is one of the most famous environmental artists. He is known for creating site-specific artworks and installations using natural materials such as twigs, mud, snow, and colorful flowers. Aside from being an artist, Goldsworthy is also an environmentalist and most of his works can be found in natural settings and urban areas.

He has been making breathtaking creations for more than two decades using no more than his own hands. Goldsworthy also creates ephemeral installations using unstable materials such as water, ice, and light that mostly survive only as photographs. But there are instances where he has created durable works in public spaces. In 2001, Thomas Riedelsheimer released a documentary on the artist titled Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time.

The biopic shows Goldsworthy, a solo figure enclosed by nature, creating sculptures in his own unique and dogged way – painstakingly balanced sticks, stones held together apparently by magic, and twigs hovering in an unwinding spiral formation as they followed the undulating stream.

There is plenty we can learn from Andy Goldsworthy, including originality.

In his Learning into the Wind, the artist lies on a sidewalk pavement t on his back at the beginning of a drizzle, rising a few minutes later to leave behind a dry shadow. It is one of the many instances where Goldsworthy was captured in the footage using his own body to create an artwork.

The gesture is both excruciating in its disdain for social norms and fascinating in its simplicity. While it is enticing to think that we can also perform this simple exercise, Goldsworthy has other thoughts:

It’s my own very personal response to the world, and that’s probably the best lesson that anybody could take from it – not that they should repeat or try to remake the things I’ve done.

What we can learn from this is that we should rely on our own curiosity and institution and explore what interests us most. Goldsworthy characterizes his art as “Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.”

Agnes Denes

Known as the Grandmother of the Environmental Art Movement, Agnes Denes is a Hungarian-born conceptual artist currently living and working in New York City. Denes was at the forefront of the early environmental art movements of the 1960s and 70s and she is interested in humans’ perception of natural cycles as well as stewardship.

Her most iconic installation is, without a doubt, Wheatfield, a Confrontation². In 1982, she spent six months creating it, planting a field of golden wheat on two acres of a rubble-filled landfill adjacent to Wall Street in Manhattan, with the help of the Public Art Fund.

By creating an incredible paradox in an urban setting, Wheatfield, a Confrontation, raised important questions about the usage of the land, ecological concerns, and mismanagement of natural resources. Denes continues to work in a range of media, including writing, poetry, and intricate hand and computer-generated diagrams, to explore the relationship between the urban environment and nature.

Her 2019 show at The Shed was her first solo show at a major art institution in New York. Agnes Denes is inspired by mathematics, linguistics as well as other fields, which she has relied on to create intricately annotated drawings, large-scale public art commissions, and geometrically precise.

The Hungarian-American environmentalist artist has had an enduring appreciation of the physical universe around her as well as a deep respect for our sickly planet earth, compelling him to create art about the role of humanity in the destruction of the natural world before others were paying attention.

As a self-taught polymath, Denes has studied cloud formations, observed overcrowded bird habitats, engineered techniques to rid the atmosphere of methane using algae, and investigated comets. Even at the age of 90, Agnes Denes is still active in raising concerns about environmental degradation.

Speaking about her work, Agnes Denes said:

My work is about helping humanity.

Christo

Known for working closely with his wife Jeanne-Claude, thus the two are referred to as Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Christo is one of the most influential environmental artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The two began working together in the 1950s, under Christo’s name, before they credited their works to both “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”. Christo and his wife are noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, usually prominent landmarks and landscape elements wrapped in fabric.

Their famous works include Wrapped Reichstag, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Running Fence, and The Gates. The two artists were born on the same day in 1935, but in Bulgaria and Morocco, respectively.

Their installations were typically monumental, visually impressive, and sometimes controversial, regularly taking years or even decades of cautious preparation. Some even outlived both artists and thus never came into fruition. The preparation often included political negotiation, technical solutions, hearings, and public persuasion, and permitting and environmental authorization.

Fascinatingly, the pair rejected donations, grants, scholarships, or public funds. Instead, they financed their projects through the sale of their own work. Christ and Jean-Claude’s installations are held in various notable public collections. The two were awarded the 1995 Praemium Imperiale, the 2004 International Sculpture, Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, and the 2006 Vilcek Prize.

Out of the two, Christo was the only one considered traditionally to be the artist because he created all the sketches that would be used later to make large installations and outer wrappings. Jeanne-Claude served as the project manager; she organized, negotiated, fundraised, explained, and persuaded. She was also in charge of managing their taxes.

The success experienced by Christo and Jeanne-Claude can also be attributed to their teaching aspect. They believed that public engagement was an integral part of their creativity and that the artistic experience also included sharing knowledge.

About their work, Christo said:

I am an artist, and I have to have courage … Did you know that I don’t have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they are finished. Only the preparatory drawings and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.

Fujiko Nakaya

Born in Sapporo in 1933, Fujiko Nakaya is a Japanese environmental artist and a member of Experiments in Art and Technology as well as an advocate, supporter, and practitioner of Japanese video art.

Nakaya is noted for her fog sculptures³. But before her career took off, Nakaya moved to the United States after finish high school in Japan to enroll in Northwestern University in Illinois, and then went to Paris and Madrid to study painting until 1959.

After spending a few years in Europe, she returned to Japan to kickstart her career. She exhibited some oil paintings in a two-person show along with her father at the Sharman Art Gallery in Chicago and a solo show in Tokyo.

Nakaya opened the first video art in Japan, which she named Video Gallery SCAN, to sponsor semiannual competitions for new works by various artists. But the gallery was closed in 1992. Since then, Nakaya began to create fog works, which became her signature style.

In an interview with Irene Shum Allen in 2014, Nakaya stated that he does not directly make images with her fog sculptures. Instead, the fog acts like a transducer that reacts to the local meteorological conditions, adding that the landscape can seem to be mostly static until the introduction of fog.

When fog is introduced, nature’s information and stories are made more accessible to the audience. Critics liken her fog sculptures to her father’s incorporation of photography and video to record atmospheric conditions and snow.

They relate her father’s, the famous physicist and science journalist Ukichiro Nakaya, ethics of recording nature in its inadequacy – even documenting the “ugly” snow crystals abandoned by Wilson Bentley – to Nakaya’s curiosity in the contingent process instead of completed objects in her fog practices as well as video recording.

Speaking about her fog sculptures, Nakaya said:

The fact that it disappears is what I like the most.

Kaarina Kaikkonen

Kaarina Kaikkonen is among the leading artists from Finland with a wide range of experience in environmental sculpting. She creates her work from second-hand clothes, especially men’s apparel, to create installations and various artworks⁴.

She felt a deep connection with clothes from a very young age because they bound her with her father, who passed away when she was just ten, but his attire remained a source of comfort for her. Kaarina often used her father’s wardrobe as a starting point for her installation. According to her, clothing has an extremely emotive quality – it helps her invoke up personal stories as well as childhood memories.

In an interview she uploaded on her website, Kaarina describes the clothing, especially the shirts, as “the closest thing to the heart. That is why I use shirts in my work.
Kaarina studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in 1983 and commenced her creativity with clothing. First, she sets up “washing-line” inspired scenes from all around Finland.

By recreating wholesome and mundane scenes for the audience to view as artwork, her large-scale installations have been spotted in many streets worldwide. Kaarina is passionate about reprocessing and reusing textiles for art since she essentially believes you do not need fresh materials to conjure new ideas.

Usually using nature as her start point, especially water, Kaarina stresses the need for collaboration with nature when producing art. By using only second-hand apparel, the artist pushes her ideas without harming nature, something is she is deeply passionate about and prides herself in.

Her attraction to second-hand clothing goes beyond the ecological need. She is like the fact that they are part and parcel of our personalities, our way of living, and our memory.

Clothes are a form of memory for the body and they carry stories within them.

Nils-Udo

Born in 1937, Nils-Udo is a German environmental artist from Bavaria who has been making eco-art since the 1960s after he quitted painting and studio for nature. Nils-Udo began his career as a painter on traditional surfaces in France but moved back to his home country and began planting creations and putting them in nature’s hands to grow and develop before they disappear.

Since his work was fleeting, Nils-Udo introduced photography as a way of introducing permanence to his artwork, recording and sharing it. One of his well-known works in the public domain is the cover design for Peter Gabriel’s 2000 album OVO. Nils-Udo aims to offer a mutualistic vision wherein nature as an environment is a ubiquitous backdrop.

By revealing the diversity in a specific environment, Nils-Udo establishes a relationship between human and natural history, between nature and humanity that is always present but yet rarely recognized. Nils-Udo draws his materials from the environment. Anything to do with minerals or plants is a reason to create – flowers, snow, leaves, berries, water, forests, deserts, and stones.

He never uses inanimate materials, instead opting for living subjects, which are continually developing and evolving. Subject to the laws of nature, his artwork becomes alive. He proclaims that he thereby creates a “spiritual and aesthetic dialogue” with nature, his only point of contact.

From sculpture to installation or photography, the artist’s main work appreciates this interaction, this interaction with nature, land of experience, when man acting upon his environment is aware of acting upon himself.

The basic idea is to achieve absolute purity. Nature performs a demonstration of itself. Every non-natural element is ruled out as impure. No other materials are used than those found in each natural space. The characteristics, the respective possibilities for processing, and the character of the natural space itself play the major role in determining the shape of the work.

Olafur Eliasson

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson needs no introduction. He is known for large-scale installation art and sculptures, which he creates from elemental materials like water, light, and air temperature to enhance the audience’s experience.

Eliasson spent his early year alternating between Denmark and Iceland, where the distinctive terrain inspired his affinity for nature as material for his art. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1989 to 1995. During this period, Eliasson began to receive worldwide attention with groundbreaking installations and sculptures that used illusory tools with deliberately simple mechanics.

After becoming an internationally renowned artist, he started to divide his time between Copenhagen and his Berlin studio that he opened in 1995. In this studio, he conceptualized and constructed most of his projects with the help of engineers, architects, and assistants. His early interest in natural phenomena and opinion led him to create works that concurrently sparked and challenged the senses.

For instance, in his work Your Strange Certainty Still Kept (1996), precipitations were frozen in midair using a punctured hose and strobe lights. In Ventilator (1997) uses a menacing electric fan swaying from a ceiling. Eliasson fixated on artificial environments as well as site-specific works. One of the highlights of his career is when he represented Denmark in the 50th Venice Biennale with The Blind Pavilion.

Architectural structures were created by alternating black opaque and transparent glass panels that formed disorienting reflections for the audience walking through. Perhaps his most popular installation is the New York City Waterfalls, an artificial waterfall commissioned by The Public Art.

The waterfall range from 90 to 120 feet and is located in New York Harbor and was the most expensive public art installation since Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates in Central Park. In 2019, Eliasson was appointed as Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations Development Programme to “advocate for urgent action on climate change and sustainable development goals.”

Rob Mulholland

Rob Mulholland is an environmental artist and sculptor operating out of the United Kingdom but exhibits around the world, taking both private and public commissions. His art aims to explore the complex relationships between the natural world and humans, using various materials and forms to create installations and sculptures that interact with their surroundings.

Mulholland incorporates mirrored surfaces in his work to reflect the given environment and the audience’s view of the space. The reflection is deliberately distorted to invite the audience to question their individual relationship with the environment. This connection between humans and the natural world is further cultivated in his recent installations, including One Flock, which irradiates this symbiotic nexus.

Mulholland is interested in elements of deconstruction and has construed this with sculptures like Evolve and Skytower, in which kinetic forces seem to have torn through and rearranged the sculptural forms. With these sculptures, Mulholland stretches the boundaries of physical, structural engineering, thus allowing him to experiment and develop further his practice. This can be seen in the Still in Loch Earn at St. Fillans, Perthshire.

The sculpture depicts a larger-than-life ironman standing still on Loch Earn. It was commissioned by the owner of the nearby Four Seasons Hotel to create the mood of anticipation, a sense of homecoming, and returning and re-connection with nature. The Iron Man, as the locals refer to it, is in constant flux.

The small panels forming the figure are being torn away with the menacing wind, being re-shaped by the natural forces. It is a perfect depiction of a spiritual and physical relationship between humans and natural wilderness.

My practice aims to explore all aspects of life. I’m interested in the theme of ancestry and continuity. Our world is in constant flux and our own personal lives are shaped by political and social powers beyond our control. I want to celebrate the individual, explore the resonance we have with the natural environment and convey how we are affected by the elemental forces of life and creation.

Robert Morris

Robert Morris was among the key figures of Minimalism. Initially starting as a painter, Morris’ early works were influenced by Abstract Expressionism and artist Jackson Pollock. But he later started to explore the work of Marcel Duchamp, creating conceptual pieces such as Box with Sounds of its own Making (1961) and Fountain (1963).

In the early 1960s, he had a show of minimal sculptures at the Green Gallery in the City of New York. The artist again exhibited at Green Gallery a collection of large-scale polyhedron forms made from 2 by 4s and gray-painted plywood. It was until the late 1960s that Morris produced his first piece of Land Art, titled Steam.

Through both his early works and theoretical writings, Robert Morris created a vision of art pared down to simple geometric forms stripped of metaphorical associations and concentrated on the artwork’s interaction with the audience. However, unlike his fellow Minimalist artists, Morris had an amazingly diverse range that extended beyond the Minimalist ethos and was at the center stage of other modern art movements in America as well as Land art and Process art.

Through his critical writings and artwork, Morris explored new ideas of chance, temporality, and ephemerality. In 2002, Morris created a set of seventeen pale blue and beige-colored stained-glass windows for the medieval Maguelone Cathedral in Montpelier, France. Morris died from pneumonia at the age of 87 in November 2018 in Kingston, New York.

Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience.

Robert Smithson

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1938, Robert Smithson is an American artist noted for his land art and sculpture practice and also photography and drawing in relation to spatial arts. He is a very-known artist with his work internationally exhibited in museums and galleries and help in different public collections. He was among the founders of the land art movement.

Smithson primarily identified as a painter earlier on, and his initial exhibited works had a variety of influences from pop art to science fiction and Catholic art. His drawings and collage pieces included images from natural history, classical art, science fiction films, pornography, and religious iconography.

In the late 1960s, Smithson started to explore industrial areas in New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks digging up rocks earth that he described as equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. As a result, he came up with the idea for his ‘non-sites series, in which earth and rocks are gathered from a specific area and installed in a space like sculptures, often incorporating glass or mirrors.

His famous work involving rocks and earth is probably Spiral Jetty⁵ (1970) – a 1,500-foot-long and 15-foot-wide counterclockwise spiral of local basalt rocks and soil extending from the shore of the Great Salt Lake inwards. Smithson died in 1973 in a light aircraft crash as he was inspecting the site of Amarillo Ramp on the ranch of artist Stanley Marsh 3.

The crash was attributed to the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed after allegedly being distracted. The Holt/Smithson Foundation was established in 2017 to preserve the inspective spirit of the two artists who “developed innovative methods of exploring our relationship with the planet, and expanded the limits of artistic practice.”

Thomas Saraceno

Thomas Saraceno is an Argentinian contemporary artist known for creating art that is inspired by the concepts linking art, social sciences, and life sciences. Entangled at the crossroad of these worlds, his community projects, floating sculptures, and interactive installations aim to explore new, sustainable methods of inhabiting and sensing the environment.

Slightly over a decade ago, Saraceno activated projects aimed towards an ethical alliance with the atmosphere, such as Museo Aero Solar. This move propelled him to international stardom, resulting in his collaboration with the international, interdisciplinary artistic community Aerocene.

His fascination with spiders and their webs inspired the creation of Arachnophilia.net as well as the Arachnomancy App, through which the artist invites people to weave the web of interspecies understanding and get involved in the challenge of Mapping Against Extinction. Saraceno left Buenos Aires to Frankfurt and Venice before relocating his studio to Berlin in 2021.

Walter de Maria

Born in 1935, Walter de Maria was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator, and composer associated with the Minimal, Conceptual, and Land Art movements. He is renowned for his large-scale outdoor installations that often incorporate natural elements. De Maria’s most famous works include The Lightning Field⁶, a grid of 400 stainless steel poles in New Mexico, and The New York Earth Room⁷, a permanent installation of 250 cubic yards of earth in a SoHo loft.

His work often explored the relationship between art, nature, and human perception, challenging viewers to experience art in unconventional ways. Another notable work is The Vertical Earth Kilometer, a brass rod inserted 1 kilometer deep into the earth, with only its top visible as a small disc flush with the ground’s surface.

De Maria’s work offers several important lessons for environmental artists and art enthusiasts alike. Firstly, his pieces demonstrate the power of scale and simplicity in creating profound experiences. By using basic geometric forms and natural materials on a grand scale, he invites viewers to contemplate their relationship with the environment.

Secondly, his work emphasizes the importance of site-specificity and the integration of art with its surroundings. The Lightning Field, for instance, is as much about the New Mexico desert landscape as it is about the steel poles themselves. Lastly, De Maria’s art teaches us about the value of patience and the temporal aspect of experiencing art.

Many of his works require extended viewing periods or specific conditions to be fully appreciated, encouraging a slower, more mindful approach to art appreciation. These principles continue to influence contemporary environmental artists, pushing the boundaries of what art can be and how it can interact with nature.

Conclusion

These 12 environmental artists demonstrate the power of creativity in addressing our planet’s most pressing issues. From Goldsworthy’s ephemeral nature sculptures to Saraceno’s futuristic eco-communities, each artist offers unique insights into our relationship with the environment.

Their work challenges us to reconsider our impact on the Earth and inspires innovative solutions for a sustainable future. As we face growing environmental challenges, these artists remind us that imagination and art can be powerful tools for change.

So, the next time you step outside, take a moment to consider: how might you use your creativity to make a positive impact on the world around you?