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How Sharon Thesen is constructing the world through the creative imagination.

This thesis contends that Nina Katchadourian's oeuvre can be read as subtly breaking down problematic assumptions about nature in Western thought. The second chapter draws on biosemiotics, which redefines life as semiosis, and trans-corporeality, which reconceptualizes the human body as inseparable from the environment, to show how Katchadourian's art routinely calls attention to non-human animal and material agencies. The third chapter demonstrates how Katchadourian's work implicitly reinforces Donna Haraway's idea of naturecultures, which contends that nature and culture are mutually implicated and inextricably intertwined, through a close reading of two of Katchadourian's pieces, Natural Crossdressing and Mended Spiderwebs #19 (Laundry Line). The final chapter compares the use of irony in two pieces that comment on Western animal classification--Chloe, by Katchadourian, and Scala Naturae, by Mark Dion--contending that Katchadourian's piece demonstrates what Bronislaw Szerszynski terms an "ironic ecology."

Environmental art: Art relating to the individual’s response, understanding and interest towards the land, including art forms such as Land/Earth art as well as more sensitive art forms such as Eco-art, focussed more on the earth’s natural processes. Exploitation: The exploitation of mineral resources is closely associated with progress and success, but also that of benefiting from something at the cost of something else, in this case exploiting gold at the cost of the ecology of the natural environment. Gold mining industry: The labour-intensive activity of removing gold from ore, mined from deep within the earth’s crust through a system of shafts and stopes. Installation art: Refers to what is contested as being a medium or process of art, whereby three-dimensional works are designed to influence the perception of a space, often site-specific, within an enclosed space or the outside environment, temporary or permanent. The found object or existing object is often used in installation art for its intellectual value. Inter-and-trans-disciplinary approach: The utilisation and collaboration of different disciplines as a means to find a solution to a (environmental) problem. Landscape: A cultural construct, referring not to physical topography, but to an aesthetically processed vision of the environment, mostly arranged and framed by an artist. Post-industrial environment: Referring to an environment, man-made or natural in a state preceded by industry. Often these environments are characterised as polluted and derelicts sites left behind by large mining industries. The gold-mining industry on the Witwatersrand, is characterised by massive tailings dumps and slimes dams. Resource curse: A term coined by artist Jeannette Unite, describing the phenomenon of extreme poverty co-existing with valuable minerals in the same region, especially prevalent in Africa. Technospasm: A term conceptualised by archeo-metallurgist Duncan Miller, as the unsustainable rate of non-renewable mineral resources extraction. South Africa is known to the world for its vast deposits of valuable minerals, of which gold has played a seminal role in the development of the country’s economy. What is left after more than 120 years of mining for this precious metal is a landscape, better described as a derelict post-industrial environment, characterised by pollution and impoverished communities. Environmental degradation caused by mining industries is not unique to the African continent, but is a worldwide phenomenon. Due to the rapid deterioration of environments caused by mining and industry, new environmentalist attitudes became prevalent by the 1970s in the West, seeking change in attitudes towards the land. Along with earth activists, artists also started to question humankind’s destructive relationship towards the land. Apart from the early developments of Land/Earth art during the 1960s, artists have taken on roles of activists, interventionists and collaborators of multi- and interdisciplinary projects since then, in order to remediate and re-cultivate post-industrial sites. Environmental artists find value in what art holistically contributes to society, as opposed to the commodity value of art. While artists in the West significantly progressed in environmentally orientated art, South African artists focused more on responding to the socio-economic conditions induced by the long-standing Apartheid era. Few South African artists have attempted to engage in environmentally-concerned art, especially related to the mining industry. However, Western attitudes towards the land can be derived from South Africa’s landscape depictions since its colonisation by Europeans up to contemporary versions of the South African landscape environment today. This study provides a historic overview of South Africa’s aesthetic relationship with the mining landscape, specifically of the post-industrial sites situated in the Witwatersrand. The aim is to determine the South African artists’ contribution towards developing an environmental awareness, and to call for more artists to take part in visual art forms concerning the disruption of the environment, caused by the mining industry. The study determines the relevance of art as a means to raise environmental issues and whether art may be utilised for post-industrial remediation projects. International examples of Reclamation art projects and its incorporation of science are investigated to find solutions towards contaminated post-industrial sites. These examples are compared to the work of a small number of South African artists who have attempted to engage in the post-industrial mining environment through Earthworks and science The researcher’s own work is discussed to raise awareness of the adverse effects of Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) caused by the gold-mining industry in the Witwatersrand. A body of installation art produced for this degree was displayed in a gallery space, which presented a platform for audience engagement. Through this body of work and through the examples discussed in this dissertation, the researcher urges South African artists to take up the task of moral responsibility towards the environment for the survival of future generations of life on earth. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

Este é um estudo sobre o desenvolvimento e a prática de arte voltada para questões ambientais, cujo objeto de arte possa ser o próprio ambiente, por meio de ações ou intervenções em espaços públicos ou privados, construções de objetos de arte com utilização de materiais não convencionais, com proposta de foco ou crítica a questões ambientais. A pesquisa estabeleceu investir em um levantamento de artistas cuja poética se envolva com o meio ambiente, como um exercício de crítica de arte. Escolhi os artistas Brígida Baltar, Andy Goldsworthy e Carlos Vergara pelas poéticas. A análise da pesquisa caracterizou-se por um levantamento das principais características das obras escolhidas, as analogias estabelecidas entre a proximidade e as singularidades da poética de cada artista/obra analisadas com o meio ambiente. Considero que a crise ambiental pela qual passa o planeta pede uma nova postura dos artistas, uma necessidade de estar aberto às possibilidades de um fazer artístico junto ao meio ambiente natural, um fazer crítico, consoante com os novos tempos, reafirmando-se na função social da arte. / This is a study on the development and practice of art focused on environmental issues, whose object of art may be the environment itself, through actions or interventions in public or private spaces, construction of art objects using unconventional materials, including proposals of focus or critical environmental issues. The research established to invest in a survey of artists whose poetic engages with the environment, as an exercise in art criticism. I chose the artists Brígida Baltar, Andy Goldsworthy and Carlos Vergara by poetic. The research analysis was characterized by a survey of the main characteristics of the chosen works, the analogies made between the proximity of the poetic and the singularities of each artist / work analyzed with the environment. I believe that the environmental crisis in which the planet is a new approach calls for artists, one need to be open to the possibilities of an artwork with the natural environment, to do with a criticism way, according to the new times, reinforcing its position in the function social of art.

This dissertation explores the use of play in three ecoaesthetic games and considers their potential for affecting environmental thought. Ecoaesthetic games leverage the power of play as a “foot in the door” for divisive topics. Play, as structured through games, is found to be a powerful generator of meaning. Games specifically are found to be representational, affective, and relational systems that can facilitate critical thinking, sustained reflection, and thoughtful deliberation around intractable problems. My games Tether, recollect, and Fringe-assay modify the well-known games Scrabble, Memory, and Snakes and Ladders, respectively, in order to bring attention to three different but intertwining, environmental crises: language and species endangerment, species extinction, and growing human vulnerability in a climate changed world. In this study, I consider human cognitive tendencies that inhibit our desire to engage with and take action within complex politico-ecological problems. Then, I locate promising game features that can be modified in order to work against such tendencies. The dissertation closes with a consideration of the iterative design process and the insights I gained from each of the games designed for this study.

I den här uppsatsen i ämnet bildpedagogik förenas konst, natur och frågan om hållbar utveckling. Uppsatsens utgångspunkt är att miljöfrågor är aktuella i vår tid. Barn som växer upp idag lever främst i urbana miljöer med liten naturkontakt. I uppsatsen beskrivs att naturkontakten tycks kunna ha betydelse för miljöengagemang. Genom intervjuer med forskare, konstnärer och lärare undersöks frågan om konstbaserat lärande tillsammans med fördjupad naturkontakt kan lyfta miljöfrågor. Intervjusvaren visar varierande exempel på hur detta kan se ut. Exempelvis beskrivs hur man kan fördjupa sitt seende genom konstnärligt arbete i naturen och bli mer sensitiv för den. Resultatet av intervjuerna tolkas mot en litteraturbakgrund som bla beskriver utomhuspedagogik, naturkontaktens idéhistoria samt nutida konstinriktningar som ryms inom begreppet ”Environmental art”. Där lyfts miljöfrågor fram och skapandet är platsrelaterat och utgår från naturmaterial. Några av de intervjuade framhåller också möjligheten att bearbeta känslor och hantera paradoxer kring miljöfrågor med hjälp av konstnärligt skapande.

In an age of increased environmental awareness, environmental education in schools has become progressively valued and supported. With this in mind, the purpose of this study was to investigate the significance of art education within the context of environmental schools and other sites of environmental education. Specifically, this research aimed to identify ways art education is being used as a means to strengthen outdoor learning. Through qualitative research involving multiple case studies of the art programs of three environmental charter schools and one nature center in Pennsylvania, data was gathered by means of on-site observations and interviews with staff and students of the aforementioned sites. Although the findings of this study indicated that each of the sites incorporated some degree of art in their environmental curricula, the results demonstrated a significant deficiency in the presence and support of art education in the environmental education programs within each site. Based on the findings of this study, suggestions were made concerning ways art may be used as a means through which students might more closely examine and experience the natural environment. / text

Art and the Greater Good: Ecology and the Leisure Economy is a research project concerned with exploring how one could alternatively address the environmental issues of our day through site-specific art. Central to this investigation has been attending to the ways historical and contemporary accounts of environment politics, site specificity, land and environmental art could resonate within a more modest artistic gesture. The resulting work Would you go on without me? reflects the possibility of this by its position in an indeterminate zone; that draws together the demotic, gardening, rainwater harvesting, play and ecology into the manifold of environmental art.

Este é um estudo sobre o desenvolvimento e a prática de arte voltada para questões ambientais, cujo objeto de arte possa ser o próprio ambiente, por meio de ações ou intervenções em espaços públicos ou privados, construções de objetos de arte com utilização de materiais não convencionais, com proposta de foco ou crítica a questões ambientais. A pesquisa estabeleceu investir em um levantamento de artistas cuja poética se envolva com o meio ambiente, como um exercício de crítica de arte. Escolhi os artistas Brígida Baltar, Andy Goldsworthy e Carlos Vergara pelas poéticas. A análise da pesquisa caracterizou-se por um levantamento das principais características das obras escolhidas, as analogias estabelecidas entre a proximidade e as singularidades da poética de cada artista/obra analisadas com o meio ambiente. Considero que a crise ambiental pela qual passa o planeta pede uma nova postura dos artistas, uma necessidade de estar aberto às possibilidades de um fazer artístico junto ao meio ambiente natural, um fazer crítico, consoante com os novos tempos, reafirmando-se na função social da arte. / This is a study on the development and practice of art focused on environmental issues, whose object of art may be the environment itself, through actions or interventions in public or private spaces, construction of art objects using unconventional materials, including proposals of focus or critical environmental issues. The research established to invest in a survey of artists whose poetic engages with the environment, as an exercise in art criticism. I chose the artists Brígida Baltar, Andy Goldsworthy and Carlos Vergara by poetic. The research analysis was characterized by a survey of the main characteristics of the chosen works, the analogies made between the proximity of the poetic and the singularities of each artist / work analyzed with the environment. I believe that the environmental crisis in which the planet is a new approach calls for artists, one need to be open to the possibilities of an artwork with the natural environment, to do with a criticism way, according to the new times, reinforcing its position in the function social of art.