In Review
Contemporary Art as a Spiritual Tool for Facing Eco-Crisis
Harvard Natural History Museum Next of Kin exhibition reflected in Next of Kin Portrait: Siberian Tiger, Panthera Tigris Altaica—Endangered. Kris Snibbe/Harvard University
By Christina Seely
I am 18 years into a rigorous visual art practice that bridges the worlds of science, design, and architecture. My context is that of a contemporary artist whose practice is situated in deep relation to the Earth far from the walls and confinements of the academy, but who has simultaneously navigated the internal complexities within those walls as an artist/scholar. As an educator, I have also been teaching photography, visual literacy, theory, and art practice in a range of contexts, in community college environments, and in art and liberal arts schools at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For the last eight years I have been a tenure-track professor at Dartmouth College and I am currently a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School in the master of theological studies program. I begin by naming this multifaceted lens to illuminate the nuanced perspective from which I speak.
My work increasingly sits in relation to Indigenous ways of knowing. I feel it is essential to acknowledge these ancient philosophies and their shepherds as powerful and important guides with deepest gratitude and humility. I also want to acknowledge the land as a living entity in its own right. And lastly I wish to acknowledge that we are all unequivocally an interconnected and entangled family of both human and nonhuman life on this planet. I say all of this, not just to show due respect, but to set a tone and encourage a habit of naming so much that is left out of the room when we gather, write, and share in academic spaces. There is an expansive range of wisdom and so many voices that have been violently silenced and ignored, including our intrinsic connection to and dependence on nonhuman life and the Earth itself. We so often forget to keep these truths present (and to treat them with deserved reverence), although they are profoundly related to ensuring our survival as a species.
I have spent the past 10 years working in the far reaches of the planet as a photographic artist focused on issues related to the climate crisis. At the start, I went north alone, self-funded and organized, to build a life out of a deep communion with the Arctic, and then later with the equatorial belt of the planet. I was called to make work that would draw a public’s attention to our severe disconnect with the natural world and its systems. Early on, I could see that climate change was throwing off natural cycles with increasingly concerning effects. In response, I intuitively sought out, befriended, and began working regularly alongside climate scientists. Through our different professional forms of paying deep attention, collectively we came to witness firsthand the impacts of the climate crisis unfold. At that time, the media only mentioned climate change as some distant, peripheral, seemingly controllable agitation that was up for debate and existed in the faraway background. Now, here we are, inside this raging crisis.
What became clear to me in all the stillness that COVID enforced (or allowed, depending on how you look at it) was that a great deal of embodied knowing and related grief had accumulated in every cell of my body during those years. And it had clearly also accumulated in my scientist friends who worked alongside me, not to mention in the people we came to know and care for and the communities who live (and have lived) in these regions (for thousands of years). As the impacts we were witnessing became more exaggerated in the far north, a sense of growing grief would regularly and inevitably be named when we were together, even within the analytic-minded scientific community.
Once I was back in the academic context, I could feel an unspoken bond build between those of us from any discipline who regularly worked in these regions. This kind of knowing, and the grief that is part and parcel of it, can become especially heavy when a broader world, even in light of crystal clear evidence, won’t acknowledge something that all of us experientially know with certainty. Bearing witness this way with a fullness of self over a long, slow span of time is at once grounding and humbling. It is also something that changes a life.
I soon recognized that the work I had been doing, the unusual life I had been leading over the last couple of decades, while never named as such, had been inherently and in fact profoundly spiritual. It was as if a sizable puzzle piece in my life suddenly began to click more fully into place. A room in me had been opened that I had protected but had not yet dared to fully enter. I decided to come to Harvard Divinity School to gain in-depth spiritual literacy to focus on the need for numinous yet grounded approaches to the ecological crisis. In my current research I seek to unpack the untapped potential that contemporary art has as a powerful conduit for meaning making and a space of spiritual holding, in conversation with science, as we grapple with the most pressing existential questions brought on by global environmental devastation.
If we are truly honest, we academics and students mostly dance around the fringes of meaning making. The sacred and emotional make up tricky territory inside the rational framework of knowledge-building in the academy that was crafted so conscientiously during and after the Enlightenment. I am finding that, even in divinity school, we often shy away from true embodied reverence or direct reference to the spiritual and the sacred. We have so little practice at knowing how to bring them into the room.
But the truth is that inside the complex web of global crises that we are now experiencing, we have to bring these elements—the emotional, the existential, the spiritual—into every conversation about the climate crisis. It is a distinctly spiritual conversation for the religious and nonreligious alike, ripe with urgent questions about our future as a species. Rational science, with deepest respect for all it explains, clearly cannot singularly do the job of communicating with any true impact the severity of what is unfolding. I ask you to trust me on this. I come from the front lines. And the truth is that now the front lines are anywhere and everywhere.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, explains that in broad terms the brain has two very different processing systems: the experiential system and the analytical system. Western culture has long privileged the analytic system centered on rationality, logic, and analysis, which is slow, deliberate, and encodes reality with abstract words, symbols, and numbers. Our experiential system is automatic, unconscious, and intuitive. It encodes reality with associations, images, and feelings connected to values, judgments, and attitudes that are ultimately tied to deeper narratives and worldviews. This privileging of analysis over experience, reason over emotion, has profoundly influenced Western culture, yet these systems are inseparable as, in reality, we experience a continuous dance between the two. Leiserowitz goes on to explain that the public learns about climate change through science, which is based in analysis and data and is not effective for the activation of the emotional brain. Art, on the other hand, has long been the most effective tool in translating our experiential processing system. It helps connect us to our most intuitive selves and is one of the most effective in engaging us emotionally. Art also provides us with a vicarious experience of something we cannot experience directly, so it helps us to imagine, learn, process, and pass information on from one generation to another.1
In response to my direct experiences with the world, my practice-based research has evolved to investigate how to create new forms of ecological narratives to evoke a much-needed emotional reaction to the urgency of now. I have come to consider it a form of “soft activism,” as this unique research path, augmented by research done in natural history collections, forms an interchange between art and science and is focused on eliciting lasting and potent emotional understandings of anthropocentric climate change. While I increasingly work in a range of media, in all my work I am trying to tell you through mediation that there is more than what you see. I’ve always felt a vital pull toward drawing attention to what is just beyond the visible.
Experiential design is a central component of the work. Scaling the planetary to the human, positioning the audience within natural and human-made systemics (systems in relation to other systems), and keeping in mind the limits and workings of human sensing and cognition, I aim to amplify our sense of entanglement and ecological belonging.
In 2016 I was invited by the Harvard Natural History Museum to design an exhibition and make a new body of work in relationship to the topic of the current extinction crisis. This was in partial collaboration with the Canary Project, a mission-driven studio, run by artist duo Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris, that works with artists as well as designers, scientists, writers, and volunteers to produce art and media to deepen emotional understanding of ecological issues.
Harvard Natural History Museum Next of Kin Exhibition. Hannah Nelson/courtesy of the artist
The exhibition, Next of Kin: Seeing Extinction through the Artist’s Lens, was designed as an experience of both mourning and discovery, using as a provocative foundation a series of artworks that served as emotional portals between the viewer and the threatened or extinct species that were represented. Central to the exhibition were two portrait projects that amplified this exchange through the use of mirroring and the empathic gaze: the Next of Kin Portraits project, comprising a set of mirrored portraits, and the Species Impact project, a set of 10 daguerreotypes of species impacted by climate change that I photographed in the wild between 2012 and 2016. The exhibition also included charismatic specimens (specimens chosen that, due to specific qualities, are imbued with a sense of wonder or intrigue) of extinct and endangered species that were curated into nine conceptual sculptural installations, as well as audio (designed by audio engineer Mathew Patterson Curry) centered around bird calls of extinct species, to create a multisensory immersive experience.
The overall exhibition investigated a set of design elements used to formulate a collective series of experiences that move beyond the cognitive grasp of scientific data to activate a deeper response. These elements included mirroring (reflectivity), scale (one-to-one / one to the whole), the suggestion of narrative (viewer plus animal as characters), and the experiential (multisensory). Additional central concepts included the power of the language of the traditional portrait, the empathic gaze (through direct eye contact and mirroring), as well as the “charismatic specimen.” The exhibition came to serve as an urgent and successful intervention—a space of mourning—reenergizing the concept of the current extinction crisis and deepening its impact on the public.
The nine sculptural installations used carefully selected specimens of extinct and endangered species to activate a range of poetic narratives. These works reference the language of display and archiving to create for the museumgoer the familiar sense of a science museum, while their design leans away from the strictly educational to focus on eliciting emotional reactions. A solitary egg of the extinct heath hen sits gently in a sea of archival cotton. A broken narwal tusk is laid out on three royal blue pillows, a red thread wrapping around each segment in a mending gesture and a nod to the practice of medieval sword display. A segment of a tree trunk that both an imperial woodpecker and a thick billed parrot—two different species of extinct birds—once nested in sits alone in a vitrine with dark wood flooring. Across the room, a set of horns from an extinct species of sable (a kind of antelope) is sinking in black sand, and sorted parts of the recently extinct great awk are displayed straight out of the archive as brown bones set in a puzzle of brown boxes. The sound of extinct birds can be heard as they call out quietly in the background. Through one of the recordings we hear a bird, the last of its kind, calling out to a world that has no mates left to answer.
Beyond these installations, the Next of Kin Portraits, a set of 10 large, framed mirrors functioning as kinetic light boxes, lined two main walls that came together at a corner, with six on one wall and four on the other. The portraits are of taxidermized specimen of endangered species from collections on display in the nearby halls of the natural history museum. They use the empathic gaze as their central concept. Isolated in front of a dark background with each animal’s “face” centered in the frame, the portraits were taken from an angle that gives the sense that the animals are looking straight at the viewer. Printed as Duratrans (large-format slide film), they are set into light boxes that are fitted with a two-way mirror as their front panel. When the light boxes are turned low, the set of framed pieces acts as a hall of mirrors. The light boxes were programmed in the Harvard exhibition to brighten slowly so that the evolution is barely perceptible, and the faces of the animals beneath first register as a trace or ghost, and then slowly brighten to replace the face of the viewer. They would then cycle back down.
Species Impact daguerreotype: Arctic—Snowy Owl (Bubo Scandiacus). Phil Maisel/courtesy of the artist
My Dartmouth colleague Christie Harner describes the effect of both of these projects beautifully:
The superimposition of human and inhuman incorporates us into the specter of the sixth extinction, scripting us into states of endangerment, and as such, unsettles the categories on which phylogenetic distinctions and power hierarchies rest. Are humans, the images ask, witnesses to the demise of these species, or do we fade in and out of existence with them? The photographs prompt feelings of affinity—these species are, as the exhibition and series titles suggest, our “next of kin”—but they also constitute post-human hybridities that defy species boundaries. Unlike the prevailing discourse, in which the human presence is presented as all or nothing—the precipitating cause, the scientific solution, the solipsism to be avoided—Seely’s photographs evoke species connections that are difficult to untangle. Only at the extreme ends of the rotation do we see only ourselves or only the animal specimens; almost always we are multiple. In Seely’s portraits, by contrast, as one face layers atop another, we have a never-ending coupled metamorphosis, in which two species coexist. The process does not begin or end with a single species; rather, it projects a future in which human-inhuman interactions are perpetually reworked, in which no hierarchy or teleological progression can be presumed.2
The Species Impact project has a similar combining effect. It is a set of daguerrotypes of 10 species impacted by climate change in the Arctic and the tropics that I photographed in the wild between 2012 and 2016, before the “sixth extinction” had been coined. The daguerreotype is one of the earliest photographic processes and is made on a mirrored surface. The image shifts with light and angle between the ghost negative, the trace positive, and the direct reflection of the viewer. You cannot avoid the (literal) reflection of yourself intertwined with the subject you are seeing. The alternation between the ghost image, the trace positive, and the mirror was fitting to the early uses of the daguerreotype, as many daguerreotype portraits were made of soldiers heading off to war. These portraits quickly became postmortem images known as momento mori, associating this photographic process with a premature sense of loss.
I traveled to the Galapagos in 2012 to photograph the five species from the tropics. It took multiple trips over four years to encounter and photograph the five Arctic species, as they are rather elusive. The Arctic fox and walrus I photographed in the Svalbard Territory as a participant in the Arctic Circle Program. I traveled to Greenland for the first of three trips with the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, where I was able to photograph the musk ox and caribou. And I had the privilege of going out to work with the owl expert Denver Holt along the edge of the Arctic Ocean near Barrow Alaska to photograph the snowy owl. It is difficult to quickly list these experiences as if they are in any way normal. Each encounter with these animals in the wild not only changed me but reinforced my understanding of our mutual interdependence. While photographing each subject I waited and worked to capture the animal centered in the frame, looking toward, or posing as if for, the camera, speaking to the history of portrait photography and painting before it. The complexity of what the daguerreotype process, the experience of the object, and this history symbolize is meant in this contemporary set to act as a collection of metaphors reflecting the edge of the great loss in which we are now entangled. They reveal slivers of lives, registrations of light, drawn from a world that humans are inalterably changing and is now on the brink of the sixth extinction.
Artist Christina Seely at work, 2019. Greenland ice sheet near Kangerlussuaq. Hannah Nelson/courtesy of the artist
All of these components came together in the exhibition to create an experience that stood out in comparison to the educationally driven exhibits in the rest of the museum. The room became a space of mourning and contemplation, and the public response was both moving and telling. Multiple attendees expressed their gratitude to the director for the presence of space within a museum for this kind of emotional response, reflecting a need for time and space to be with the complex emotions that environmental issues prompt. For an article on the exhibition, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, James Hanken, told The Harvard Gazette that when the Museum of Comparative Zoology was founded in 1859,
few scientists were concerned about extinction and biodiversity loss. Now most are, and part of the museum’s mission is to educate the public and policymakers on urgent scientific issues. An artist’s perspective helps the museum accomplish that goal. . . . “Scientists go about it [education] with charts and graphs and hard facts,” [Hanken] said. “It’s not terribly effective, not enough to change [public] consciousness. Artists have a different way to approach a problem. They appeal on a gut level, an emotional level.”3
The public reaction to the Next of Kin exhibition calls for a new line of inquiry, in which I am now engaged, centered on artistic techniques that can activate tenderness, empathy, and human vulnerability (i.e., allowing a space to grieve and move through the difficult emotions) in the public and more readily elicit a yearning to get involved in the issue beyond the museum walls. The interweaving of artistic and scientific perspectives has enormous potential to influence productive behavior in the public. While artists have the powerful and innate ability to regularly create new knowledge pathways by bridging a range of disciplines, our capacity to dramatically impact current vital conversations is highly undervalued, especially in the United States. And there is currently a lack of scholarship around the role artistic research can play in climate communication. Engaging in this wider conversation in the midst of what we must acknowledge is a radical cultural shift, art has the power to offer new ways of sensing the self. New ways of seeing and sensing are needed as we face into the interconnected web of social, racial, political, and environmental crises of these complex times. Without the space to process our reactions, we become paralyzed and/or numb.
I end with a provocative thought from one of my favorite thinkers of the day Bayo Akomolafe, Nigerian-born author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster). In a beautiful piece of writing, “What I mean by Postactivism,” he posits, “What if the world kicks back?” He writes:
Postactivism is not the way I describe a superior form of being that guarantees solutions. It is not “post-” in the sense of being a successor narrative, a deeper truth, a surer track to utopian worlds, a formula for saving the world. Instead, it is the site where continuity becomes impossible, where “the world” in its colonizing completeness feels less compelling than that one riven place that sprouts alien notions, and where the solutions of the highway seem inadequate to a now unusual, more-than-human, arrangement.
A frothing crack opens in the ground, enacting a break in the seamless totality and knowability of things, disrupting the exclusivity of human agency and inquiry, dispersing vitality, and expanding sociality to include things we hadn’t considered. Everything changes, becomes stranger. Alien.
This is postactivism. When we have come to the end of the rope, to the very end of the world, and there are no more words.4
This is where art comes in and does the work that words, data, and the academy simply cannot do to open up new ways of being, “dispersing vitality,” thinking, and feeling that we desperately need right now.
Notes:
- Alexis Frasz, “Can Art Change How We Think about Climate Change?: An Interview with Anthony Leiserowitz,” GIA 27, no. 3 (Fall 2016), www.giarts.org.
- Christie Harner, “Phylogenetic Alterities in the Photographic Anthropocene” (forthcoming, 2023).
- Alvin Powell, “Drawing The Eye To Extinction,” The Harvard Gazette, January 31, 2017.
- Bayo Akomolafe, “What I mean by Postactivism,” www.bayoakomolafe.net November 13, 2020, (italics in original).
Christina Seely has been teaching at Dartmouth College since 2015 and is now a tenured professor in the Studio Art Department. She is also a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School in the MTS program and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. This piece is an edited version of a presentation given at the Ecological Spiritualities Conference at Harvard Divinity School in April 2022. Her referenced artwork can be viewed at: www.christinaseely.com
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