Creative Exchanges: Environmental Art as a Catalyst for Dialogue and Change

For individuals and communities, the challenge of addressing a mounting global ecological crisis, understanding complex issues such as climate change and building a sustainable future can be an overwhelming one. Generating individual and collective action to facilitate change requires meaningful communication and a shared sense of values and direction, so what role can artists play in such processes? Creative practitioners possess astute communication and innovative thinking skills which can be applied to the dissemination of environmental information in imaginative ways. Additionally, artists’ capacity to elicit emotional responses, present fresh perspectives and circumvent habitual ways of seeing can stimulate behavioural changes that support sustainable living. By employing open rather than didactic forms of communication and by engendering aesthetic or challenging experiences, artists open a space of questioning between the work and the participant/viewer. Increasingly, much eco-art practice is focusing less on a singular art object and more on process, including the processes of communication that the work catalyses through audience engagement and the ‘dialogical exchange’ that it fosters. Through such participatory and dialogical practices, artists can produce works which connect people with what they value within the environment and why they might choose to enact sustainable practices. This paper explores such processes of dialogical exchange in the context of the biennial, site-specific environmental art event Floating Land which, by ‘merging arts and culture with science and the environment … aims to contribute to positive global change through education and conversations’. Examples are employed to consider, on a broader level, how artists and events such as Floating Land communicate about environmental issues and how they facilitate dialogical processes which foster reflection on environmental values and operate as catalysts for change