Did You Get the Message? How Abstract Artists Communicate Environmental Urgency
Francis Berthomier
IdeelArt blog
2025
Full Article: Link
Without a figure, without a narrative, without literal representation: how do you pass a message in visual art? This is the activist's dilemma in abstract art, and it explains why truly activist abstraction remains remarkably rare. Figurative art can show us a melting polar bear, a flooded city, a protester's face. Abstract art offers only color, form, gesture, material. Yet as the climate crisis accelerates and demands all voices, a pioneering group of artists has proven that abstraction can indeed be activist, not despite its resistance to explicit messaging, but because of what it uniquely offers.
The challenge is real. Conventional climate communication (catastrophic images, overwhelming data) has reached its limits, often inducing what researchers call "climate fatigue" or emotional paralysis. Abstract environmental art offers an alternative strategy: rather than depicting disaster, it models environmental processes (flow, dissolution, accumulation) and engages viewers through direct sensory and emotional experience. It doesn't show you the crisis; it makes you feel it.
This article explores how abstract artists communicate environmental urgency through six distinct aesthetic strategies. Through the work of pioneering artists (Jaanika Peerna, Reiner Heidorn, Olafur Eliasson, Mandy Barker, and others), we'll examine how abstraction's apparent limitations become unexpected strengths in environmental advocacy.
TWO MODELS, SIX STRATEGIES
Abstract environmental activism operates through two overarching models: the Affective Model, which uses ritual, participation, and collective mourning to make viewers feel environmental issues through shared emotional experience; and the Cognitive Model, which uses visualization, immersion, and scale to make viewers understand invisible ecological systems and processes.
Within these models, artists employ six core strategies:
1. Making the Invisible Visible: Some of the most destructive environmental forces remain invisible to the naked eye: atmospheric carbon, temperature shifts, microscopic ecosystems, geological time moving too slowly for human perception. Abstract artists have found ways to translate these hidden phenomena into perceptible forms, rendering tangible what we cannot otherwise see but desperately need to understand.
2. Material Witness: Rather than depicting environmental crisis, some artists let their materials become active participants in the message. They use ecologically significant substances, or allow natural processes like erosion, dissolution, and decay to shape the work itself. The artwork becomes a forensic trace, physical evidence of environmental events rather than a representation of them.
3. Scale and Immersion: Monumental formats and immersive installations can overwhelm viewers, forcing a bodily confrontation with the vastness of ecosystems. This strategy breaks down the comfortable distance between observer and environment, using physical scale to combat the alienation that fuels ecological crisis. When you're surrounded by or dwarfed by the work, intellectual understanding gives way to visceral experience.
4. Color as Data/Witness: Color in environmental abstraction often functions less as emotional expression and more as coded information. Artists use specific palettes to translate data (pollution levels, temperature changes, biodiversity metrics) or to serve as symbolic witness to biological vitality. A particular green isn't just beautiful; it carries testimony about a specific forest, a specific moment of ecological observation.
5. Repetition and Accumulation: The repeated gesture, the accumulated object, the serialized form can model ecological phenomena that unfold through time and quantity: cellular growth, plastic fragmentation, the cumulative impact of industrial production. When individual elements multiply into thousands, the work makes visible the scale of environmental crisis in ways that single images cannot.
6. Embodied Experience: Some works demand more than visual attention. They require physical participation, engage multiple senses (touch, smell, temperature), or create collaborative rituals. By transforming viewers from passive observers into active participants, these works provoke affective responses (grief, calm, anxiety, connection) that live in the body rather than the mind, creating the kind of deep understanding that motivates ethical action.
Let's see how these strategies work in practice.
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THE AFFECTIVE MODEL: JAANIKA PEERNA'S GLACIER ELEGIES
Jaanika Peerna, an Estonian-born artist, working between New York, Lisbon, and Tallinn, has developed one of the most sophisticated approaches to environmental witness through participatory performance and controlled dissolution. Her practice underwent a deliberate pivot around 2017 to address climate breakdown directly, transforming her earlier studies of natural forces (wind, water, light) into explicit climate activism.
Peerna's technique involves grasping bunches of pencils in each hand and executing spontaneous, whole-body gestures across large Mylar sheets, creating kinetic drawings that record natural forces through pure movement. The pencils become extensions of her body, transforming the artist into what critics call "a vessel that captures natural processes." But the activist power emerges in the performance's second act.
In her ongoing Glacier Elegy project, Peerna invites audiences to collaborate in creating these large-scale drawings. Then she introduces blocks of natural ice onto the surface. As the ice melts, it actively dissolves the drawn lines and pigments, erasing the collaborative creation in real time. This process collapses decades of glacial melting into an immediate, embodied experience of loss.
The genius lies in public participation (Strategy 6: Embodied Experience). By including audiences in creation, Peerna guarantees emotional investment; the subsequent destruction becomes shared, tangible loss rather than abstract data. The work doesn't depict glacial melt; it enacts it, transforming viewers into witnesses and mourners. Her approach recognizes that conventional catastrophic imagery often induces paralysis; her ritualistic method provides a structured "way through" overwhelming climate grief, transforming engagement from passive observation into what she calls "an act of ethical responsibility and care for the planet."
The melting ice functions as Material Witness (Strategy 2). Water isn't just a medium; it's an active agent of transformation and destruction. Gravity and flow dictate the final composition, making the artwork a forensic document of the dissolution process itself. Peerna has also developed a sophisticated temporal dimension (Scale/Immersion, Strategy 3). While her earlier work celebrated slow natural processes, Glacier Elegy deliberately accelerates geological trauma, compressing decades of glacial retreat into the brief duration of a ritual performance. This compression simulates urgency in a way climate data cannot.
Peerna extends this practice into her studio work, where she performs solo versions of the same ritualistic process. The resulting works (titled 'Tipping Point,' 'Big Melt,' 'Meltdown,' 'Ablation Zone') present a powerful paradox: permanent synthetic monuments on Mylar that record momentary natural tragedy, underscoring the longevity of human-made materials against the fragility of natural processes.
The accumulation of kinetic lines and gestures on the Mylar (Repetition/Accumulation, Strategy 5) reflects the complexity and intensity of recorded natural forces. And though Peerna's aesthetic is minimalist (often black on white), her activism is anchored in precise vocabulary (Color as Data, Strategy 4). Her titles reference critical processes from glaciology and climate science, fusing emotional aesthetics with objective data points and grounding abstract work in scientific reality.
ABSTRACTION AS URGENT WITNESS
Can abstraction be activist? The work of Jaanika Peerna, Reiner Heidorn, Olafur Eliasson, Mandy Barker, and others proves definitively that it can. But these practices also reveal why activist abstraction remains rare: it requires solving the "message problem" that figuration sidesteps. Without figures or narratives, abstract artists must find other strategies: making invisible systems visible, using material transformation as metaphor, overwhelming through scale, coding information in color, accumulating evidence through repetition, creating experiences that transform observers into participants.
The challenge remains real. Abstraction will never communicate with the immediate clarity of a photograph of a clearcut forest or a painting of a climate refugee. But these approaches demonstrate that abstraction offers something equally valuable: the ability to witness environmental crisis through form, material, and process; to create beauty that carries urgency; to speak a universal visual language; to make felt what cannot always be seen; to provide structures for grief, healing, and ethical action.
For viewers and collectors, engaging with activist abstraction is itself an act of witness. When you spend time with Peerna's glacier elegies or Heidorn's microscopic ecosystems, when you encounter Eliasson's atmospheric installations or Barker's debris mandalas, you participate in a different kind of environmental awareness, one that lives in the body, in sensation, in the space where beauty and urgency meet. As these artists demonstrate, this participation can transform climate engagement from overwhelming despair into structured mourning, from passive observation into collective healing, from alienation into reconnection.
Activist abstraction is possible. It's difficult, it's rare, but when achieved, it offers forms of environmental witness that figuration cannot match. As climate crisis demands all voices, these artists prove that abstraction has essential contributions to make, not despite its resistance to explicit messaging, but because of what that resistance, when overcome, makes possible.
