Cabbages, Crumble and Sky Talk: Environmental and Planetary Issues in Art – Aotearoa New Zealand
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article describes changed approaches to environmental art in the face of our changing environment. Susan Ballard’s Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (2022) and Janine Randerson’s Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (2018) propose that changed environmental conditions require, and are generating, new subject matter and new ways of making art. Their ideas are discussed in relation to an early example of public art, Barry Thomas’s Vacant Lot of Cabbages (1978), and works chosen from the oeuvre of Marilynn Webb (1937–2021), who saw her art as acts of spiritual and political protection of the land. The writing of Bridget Reweti in the recent exhibition catalogue Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills (2024) casts new light on Webb’s engagement with Māori understandings of the land.
Source: Journal of New Zealand studies
Author: Bridie Lonie
Institution: Otago Polytechnic
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402396884