Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship
CHARLOTTE — Climate anxiety or doom, the feeling of deep dread or distress about the impact of a warming planet on human existence, can cause feelings of powerlessness, according to Yale researchers.
But Vermonters have found a way to cope: Creating environmental art is a way to process these anxious feelings and help others understand the importance of environmental health, according to Vermont artists.
Cameron Davis is a Vermont painter and former University of Vermont professor who believes in the convergence between art and environmental studies. She wants her paintings to show the viewer that they are just as connected to the natural world as to other people. She believes that when they understand this connection, they can understand the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship to nature.
“The work has always been interested in what is that presence we feel when we’re in ‘nature.’ I’ve been painting for more than 40 years. It’s always been what is nature? And I’ve arrived from a place of really getting that we are situated within this wider web of life. We are nature,” Davis said.
Her paintings are striking, large and depict a complex web of shapes, designs and colors. They are colorful, dynamic and full of life, much like the world we inhabit. Cameron hopes seeing this web of life will influence viewers to not only appreciate the natural world but move to preserve it.
“ When you perceive it and feel all that communication that’s happening, that’s when you operate differently,” Davis said. “Maybe I’ll even buy different flowers for my deck. I won’t buy the ones that kill pollinators even though it’s more expensive to get them. I’ll have fewer pots.”
Davis said that arts push beyond rationality and help create an emotional response. This emotional response can shift perspectives and therefore practices. She said the numbers and headlines that come from the news can only do so much.
“From poetry to movement to film to visual art to music, the arts and storytelling are a way to deeply touch our, go into our, psyche — go into our emotions,” Davis said.
Nancy Winship Milliken, friend of Davis, is a site-specific environmental artist who directly works with the location that she installs her pieces in. She finds inspiration in the natural world itself and wants others to feel the same, instead of the climate dread.
Her work varies but generally consists of large striking structures that draw the viewer’s eye, while blending in with the world around it. She strives for her structures to show a reverence for the earth. She uses natural textures like clay or sheep’s wool and intentionally interacts with natural forces like wind and rain in the installations. She also consults community members, such as farmers, poets, artisans and environmental studies interns, for each project.
Milliken said she is no stranger to climate dread but does not want to scare her viewers into caring about the environment. She has taken up a different strategy and steers clear of negative discourse.
“When people come to visit the site, it becomes a place of quiet and solitude and introspection and then they may have a different perspective,” Milliken said.
Milliken is the president of the Board of Directors at the Shelburne Craft School, which has been offering education in artisanal crafts since 1945. Executive Director Heather Moore became an artist later in life and shares her passion for environmental art programming. The school is a place where not only art educators can go to work through environmental anxieties through creating but also everyday Vermonters.
They offer a variety of classes that take inspiration from the natural world, often in partnership with Shelburne Farms, helping students celebrate and steward the environment. In various wood-based classes, students travel to Shelburne Farms to learn about sustainable forestry, wood selection, milling and then the building process.
She shared that last February, students went to the farm to cut down an invasive tree, a Norway maple, and brought it back to the craft campus and made it into wooden bowls, exploring a mutualistic relationship.
“I love that idea of the resources that you use to create are helping the environment or being a part of the equation in terms of what you choose or how you choose to do it,” Moore said.
She thinks artists have a naturally empathetic nature that draws them to their line of work and the need to process the world around them. Through exercising this empathy in their own environmental art, they might be able to pass some onto its viewers to create change.
“ I feel like the first thing that separated us from primates was that we could create. So it’s still maybe how we could access those touch points of saving ourselves from ourselves, you know,” Moore said. “Because it’s really scary. We all, no matter what your field is, should be thinking about it. How do we leave a better planet for our children?”