Art Shows What Science Can’t About Climate Change

Climate change is invisible, insidious and urgent. Can the arts help us see it? The fact of climate change is beyond serious dispute, but has yet to become part of mainstream discourse in the UK or indeed beyond. Arts and climate science collaboration can help change this

Lucy Wood, 28 October 2016 (UK Guardian)

“Soaring mercury, sinking cities, mass extinctions…[F]aced with the sheer enormity of the climate challenge, people can tend towards despair and nihilism. For others, its seeming distance (both chronologically and, for many of us in the global north in particular, geographically) can seduce us with the easy denial that it is someone else’s problem to fix…We need to find new ways to narrate and envision a fairer, cleaner future in which we can actively participate…This year’s annual Lovelock Commission Cloud Crash by artist duo HeHe, a collaboration of Cape Farewell, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Manchester, is an example of how art can enable major public engagement…

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The Lovelock Commission takes inspiration from pioneering climate scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, which posits the earth as a single self-regulating organism – and this year the commission focuses on atmospherics - namely, man-made emissions…Cloud Crash seeks to make pollution – and its component part, climate change – visible, and asks some uncomfortable questions of society…The role of the scientist and that of the artist is to make the invisible visible…When it comes to climate science it is all about finding the right language…[to reframe] it as an opportunity not sacrifice, making tangible the intangible and giving agency where once there is apathy…” click here for more

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