Imagining Water: Myth, Ritual and the Changing Planet

Susan Hoffman Fishman 

Image magazine, issue 120

2024

Full Article: Link

Near the reputed site of the Garden of Eden, an international team of environmental engineers, sewage treatment experts, and others are restoring historic marshlands in what has become a desert wasteland. They are creating a new Eden-not simply a public works project that will filter wastewater for the Ahwar region in southern Iraq, but also a place of astonishing beauty. This innovative project, twelve years in the making, has been created and led by Meridel Rubenstein, an American installation artist and photographer devoted to healing the environment.

Rubenstein is just one of thousands of contemporary artists focusing their practices on climate change and its effects. They are tackling the topic in every part of the world and in every medium, form, and style, head-on and obliquely, abstractly and directly-through photography, painting, opera, theater, film, dance, installation work, and more.

As artists seek new ways to comment on climate change, some-myself included-have turned to spiritual idioms. Just as artists have done for thousands of years, we are incorporating ancient stories into our work in ways that speak to the existential issues of our times.

For those of us engaging with Western audiences, narratives from the Bible have proved particularly useful, in part simply because they are familiar. When Rubenstein refers to the Garden of Eden, for example, the common story offers a pathway into the work. Furthermore, biblical stories offer a very definite viewpoint on the relationship between human beings and the natural world-one so distinct that it tends to attract and draw out alternative viewpoints, resulting in fruitful conversation. And biblical stories themselves are highly dramatic and open to a variety of interpretations-which makes them a rich territory for artists.

I’ll focus on just a few of the many contemporary works that draw on biblical stories and spiritual forms of expression to address climate change: my own thirty-nine-panel narrative painting, In the Beginning There Was Only Water; Meridel Rubenstein’s Eden in Iraq; the Water Women collective’s installation Flood 2.0; Joan Sullivan’s Solastalgia photographs; and Jaanika Peerna’s Glacier Elegy performances.

As ecological disaster stories fill the news, many people are experiencing what psychologists now describe as climate anxiety. Artists attempting to express that anxiety and offer some degree of solace are developing work that is spiritual in nature and and serves as a type of prayer for the future of the planet.

Glacier Elegies

Glacier Elegies is also an ode to ice, a lament for vanishing glaciers around the world. Created by Estonian-born New York-based artist Jaanika Peerna, it is an ongoing, interactive performance project. At each indoor or outdoor performance site, Peerna, dressed in a black leotard and hat, clasps a block of ice in her hands and moves through the space gracefully, like a dancer. In complete silence, she uses her body to express the preciousness of the ice, then offers it gently to members of the audience to stroke or hold, as if it were the last piece of ice on earth.

In some performances, Peerna also incorporates rolls of Mylar, a transparent, durable, smooth material that, to her, imitates the qualities of ice. Through body language alone, audience members are invited to draw on the Mylar with water-soluble black crayons, then asked-again silently-to rub the lines with the melting ice, erasing what they have drawn, just as the ice itself is being erased. Peerna often interacts with pieces of Mylar hung from the wall, moving around and under them, shaking them to create a whipping, crashing sound, or draping them around herself.

As part of the Glacier Elegy project, Peerna has also completed numerous drawings on Mylar and paper, marking the surfaces with black lines that swirl and cross much like the lines carved into lakes and rivers by the blades of ice skates. As a child in Soviet-controlled Estonia, she felt an enormous sense of freedom skating on her own for hours and often recalls the impression these lines made on her as a developing artist.

Like Joan Sullivan’s ritualistic camera motions that give voice to ice, Peerna’s silent movements in Glacier Elegies are prayer-like. At times she holds the melting block of ice to her chest and raises it with straight arms to the sky or ceiling, appealing to the cosmos for solace and for relief from our collective guilt over the devastation we have caused to an irreplaceable natural resource.

So what does happen when artists like Rubenstein, Sobel, Baker, Sullivan, Peerna, and myself contemporize biblical stories and use spiritual forms of expression to address the most pressing existential crisis of our time? For one thing, our new stories and gestures model how we might construct respectful relationships with the nonhuman world so that we can serve as equal partners in repairing the environment and creating a healthier way of living on earth.

By using beauty rather than a more confrontational strategy as a way to speak about climate change, we are reminding our audiences how very much we are losing: In the Beginning There Was Only Water shows the inherent beauty of our planet and all of its living beings; Eden in Iraq is bringing beauty back to a devastated marshland; Flood 2.0 reveals the beauty in even the most destructive aspects of nature; Solastalgia and Glacier Elegies embody the beauty of and reverence toward water and ice.

While data are important to establishing the undeniable truth of climate change, appealing to viewers through their senses and emotions offers us ways to to heal our grief and guilt so that we can then act to heal our dying planet.