Making Waves features eleven artists whose work celebrates and champions our oceans. The gathered objects shed light on the impact of climate change on the bodies of seawater across the planet, the hazards to life within them, and their vitality to our survival. Along with all that we have faced over the past year, the ongoing and surmounting climate crisis remains one of the largest existential and physical threats to life on Earth. From global warming and rising ocean levels to microplastics, carbon emissions, and overfishing, the issues are numerous and urgent. The group of artists featured in this exhibition use various craft media to reflect the richness of the natural world that exists underwater. They remind us about the need to protect these resources before we are left with nothing more than their artistic likenesses.
Craft-based artists are particularly honed in on materials and process. Materials can be rich with metaphorical potential. Artists often evoke these messages in their choice of media. In representing nature through delicate, intricately manipulated materials, these artists echo how precious and delicate our environment, its natural assets, and aquatic life truly are. Works in clay, glass, and other materials can endure for millennia but they also have an inherent fragility. In other featured examples, artists adapt and reinterpret discarded materials to give them new life.
As artists who are addressing concerns for the environment, these individuals make every effort to weigh the eco-impact of their own practices. This includes the sourcing of art materials and the carbon imprint of their methods of production. In this era of climate crisis, these artists give shape and form to the environmental issues facing the globe by echoing the transcendent beauty of nature in their work.
Linda Gass - Cooley Landing: Life in Water