::Contemporary Art with an environmental context::

Art can be used as space for exploration, presenting novel ways of exploring ecological issues and challenges that don’t fit neatly into boxes.



The strength of artists is that they often work across margins and disciplines, revealing new insights and asking questions in the process.
These new insights can be used as a catalyst for envisioning alternative futures, new ways of seeing land, nature and “unbuilt” environments.
Furthermore art is a framing device for visual and social experience and artists can be good at slipping between the institutional walls.

There are several artistic projects about environmental concerns to highlight. The “Shapeshifter” exhibition by Brian Jungen would be one example.
The Canadian artist Jungen is fascinated by the way we view animals and seeks to overturn assumptions and cultural stereotypes.

His recent works are large-scale whale skeletons made from dissected and reassembled plastic garden chairs.

“The chairs are a petroleum product which was once organic, yet as a result of the manufacturing process the matter became inorganic”, Jungen commented.



Taking the plastic chairs as a suburban icon of mass production and delighting in the irony of using this decidedly non-biodegradable material to represent endangered species, Jungen’s series is concerned with the status of both the familiar and the rare as commodities in a globalised economy.