The Art of Sustainability

By Paige Aldenberg

May 6, 2021

Sustainable art can be a figurine whittled from locally harvested wood, an outfit made from upcycled clothes, or a painting made with reused canvas. It can serve as a cornerstone for cultures, activism, and individuals worldwide. It does not leave a large carbon footprint compared to more mainstream mediums of art, such as acrylic paints. While acrylic materials are accessible and cost-effective, the impact of their production and disposal has a carbon-intense life cycle. Despite the added challenges of navigating sustainable art practices, artists Bill and Sherry Gould and Anne Cummings express their activism, passions, and culture through recycled or natural materials.

Indigenous Art

The use of natural materials has long been ingrained into Indigenous ways of life and artmaking. Abenaki artists Bill and Sherry Gould express their culture through traditional Indigenous basket weaving. In their practice, they harvest sweetgrass from Indigenous sites in New Hampshire and Maine. Bill Gould is a lumberman by trade and harvests brown ash trees. He states that working with these natural elements and sustainable harvesting are important practices to pass down to generations. He explains that when he first entered the logging industry, “there really were no foresters involved with anything.” In the 1980s, when foresters first became involved with lumber harvesting, tree health improved following the establishment of harvesting laws and forestry knowledge. Through his lumber practices, Gould has learned to identify brown ash trees and to harvest them for multiple purposes, including making furniture and slabs for syrup boiling. He explains the thought process behind his sustainable foresting practices, saying, “you need the ash to make baskets, so you have to harvest the ash in a responsible way to continue to do that through the generations.”

Sherry Gould describes how ash and sweetgrass “are two materials that complement each other really well. They both smell really nice, they're really wonderful to work with, and in the end, you have a beautiful basket— something people treasure and use.” In basket making, the brown ash wood is removed from its bark, and the logs are pounded to split the tree rings, which are then prepared for basket weaving. 

Bill and Sherry Gould have passed down this skill to their family members and apprentices, while also leading school programs where they pound and weave the ash with their students. Sherry Gould uses her focus on fancy work baskets and knowledge of utilitarian baskets as a foundation for her artwork and creativity. The Goulds also conduct demonstrations with community baskets, where members of the public have the chance to add rows to the basket until it is complete. Afterward, the baskets are then auctioned to raise money for an organization. Sherry Gould states that she wants these community events to serve as a “continuation of our culture and a statement about how each basket maker has their own thing they do that makes their baskets them.” 

Eco-Art

Anne Cummings is an eco-artist based in Westford, Vermont, whose primary mediums include post-consumer waste and recycled materials. Eco-art is a form of sustainable art grounded in politics and activism, often bringing awareness to legislation, projects, or practices that are harmful to the environment. Cummings’ journey to eco-art started when she began examining her ethics as an environmentalist while teaching high school art classes. Cummings states, “I stopped doing oil painting because I felt that the fumes from the solvents were toxic — which they are — and it's not good to have those in a school environment.” From here, she learned about the microplastics generated from acrylic paint disposal, which ultimately inspired her decision to work with post-consumer materials. Acrylic paints, which are soluble in water, are often disposed of down sinks. With the wear and tear of these paints — particularly in outdoor settings — small particles are released into the environment. When acrylic residues enter wastewater systems from these sources, they are hard to filter out and easily lead to environmental contamination.

While eco-art and sustainable art are genres of environmental art that focus on the carbon footprint and source of materials and methods, Cummings explained that for some environmental artists, the art is more about the message or the physical appeal than the materials used. Early environmental-based art used the earth as a canvas. For example, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped landscapes with synthetic fabrics, and Robert Smithson, who made the Spiral Jetty, sculpted a spiral in the earth using the land itself. For Cummings, the underlying message is communicated through the use of sustainable materials. In her piece Vermont Wastescapes, she uses recycled and reclaimed materials from each county in Vermont to showcase the waste production from a state that advocates for green living and practices.

Although purely sustainable alternatives do not exist for some materials, such as adhesives for collages, Cummings believes that eco-art continues to develop each decade. She says, “I think that's where art, design, and science are ways of coming up with the solutions.” With communities coming together to create solutions for climate change, she sees modern eco-art as being at the crossroad of industrial development and environmentalism. The collaboration between artists and scientists is where solutions are made that connect community members to environmental problem-solving. Stormwater runoff systems, eco-infrastructure, and architecture all hold the potential to harness eco-art to create something functional, yet beautiful for the community.

Sustainability in the art community is a slowly but surely emerging practice. Although sustainable and biodegradable materials are foundational for Indigenous cultures in lifestyle and art, they are still largely unpopular amongst communities of artists who are accustomed to relying on mainstream, artificial art mediums with larger carbon footprints. The works of the Goulds and Anne Cummings exemplify sustainable art in New England while also creating spaces to share culture and expression through nature. They reveal the importance of supporting local and indigenous artists to encourage dialogue around the intersections between sustainability, environmentalism, and art.