The topic of pipelines and crude oil in B.C. isn’t likely to go away any time soon, and there are those who strive to find new ways to curb environmental degradation. Activists grapple with changes to public policy, and artists have used their work to address environmental issues and promote ecological awareness.

According to Beth Carruthers, an artist and expert in arts, culture and sustainability, ecological art, or eco-art, is much more than just work that depicts nature or wildlife. She suggests what defines eco-art is its aim to educate and spread awareness, as well as being “activist” in nature.

“It’s art that embodies a particular ethical stance,” she says.

Carruthers likes that eco-art continues to be an elusive term, because it creates an ongoing conversational space and, like ecosystems themselves, it is evolving and not static.

Art and science together

Eco-artist Solveig Nordwall. Photo courtesy of Solveig Nordwall.

For Solveig Nordwall, a nature illustration eco-artist and a member of Artists for Conservation, her illustrations serve as a means to communicate and educate people. Nordwall was born in Sweden, raised in Norway and Canada and spent time in Japan. She now shuffles between B.C. and Hawaii.

She typically draws animals and scenery, and has been focusing on ocean life forms. Her illustrations come with facts and information about the item or organism in question.

“Each image becomes like a soundbite,” she says.

The works she produces end up combining scientific facts with aesthetics.

“I think there’s a better chance to have eco-art work if it really joins the art and science,” says Nordwall.

She laments the division found between art and science in North America, but believes that nature-art illustration is useful, because its realistic depictions can also reach those who don’t understand art.

Aside from trying to bridge art and science, Nordwall also tries to be a bridge across cultures. Scandinavian and Japanese influences can be found in her work, and the information written on them is in English, Norwegian and Japanese.

“Anybody and anything that can cross cultural barriers and build a bridge is probably the most critical thing that we can do for the environment,” she says. “I’d say a lot of the practice that I’ve seen has been about trying to work with culture.”

Since the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Nodwall’s work has focused on the ocean. Illustration by Solveig Nordwall.

Understanding where we are

Carruthers explains that Canadian artists have almost obsessively focused on questions of place, largely because of our colonial history.

She believes that Vancouver’s rapidly changing demographics, with all kinds of people coming from everywhere, prompts people to ponder how to develop place relations.

According to Carruthers, interrogating how people develop and maintain connections to where they are is one of the most important questions in Canadian eco-art practice. She maintains that ecology plays a central part in our culture, whether we see it or not.

“Where we are informs our culture in ways that we don’t know about,” she says.

Vancouver’s architecture, she suggests, is problematic because people couldn’t come to grips with this spectacular space.

Beth Carruthers. Photo courtesy of Beth Carruthers.

Of course, these issues have interested artists for decades. According to Carruthers, while eco-art may be vital today, the movement itself is nothing new. In fact, it began in the 1960s, when the modern environmental movement itself was born, and it has deep local roots. Vancouver was actually the birthplace of the dramatic interventionist performance works that eco-artists are primarily known for, with locally based Greenpeace leading the way.

Eco-art helps us understand the complex relationships between humans, place and nature, and the ethics of those relationships, explains Carruthers. She says that eco-art opens up a different way of thinking about our place and purpose in the world.

“If the world is something we’re just tinkering with, then we still have a problem,” she says. “What [eco-artists] are doing is offering another experience of being in the world of people.”