A new MassINC/Boston Globe poll finds that Massachusetts residents are concerned about climate change, but fewer than half of residents list it as a high priority. Climate change trails behind concerns about health care, jobs, the economy, education, taxes and the cost of fuel.
Jane Winchell of the Peabody Essex Museum said many people feel overwhelmed by the issue. She understands why those people opt to disengage with the numbers, statistics, charts and mounting evidence — from more heatwaves to an increase in coastal flooding — that a global crisis is unfolding. But she sees her role as a way to get people to reengage.
“We’re being barraged … with information,” said Winchell. “And the art provides a way of connecting with it at the human level, at the personal level, at the emotional level.”
Winchell is the Sarah Fraser Robbins director of the Dotty Brown Art Nature Center at PEM. She also leads the museum’s Climate + Environment Initiative, and is currently curating exhibits that will educate visitors and inspire climate action.
“What are the exhibitions, what are the objects, the works of art, that will touch people?” Winchell said. “That they will feel something. And not in the way that you feel when you’re looking at a graph on a wall, or hearing a science report. It’s just a very different kind of experience, and that’s why I feel like it’s really important.”
In celebration of Earth Day, we’re assembling our own exhibition, featuring five artists from the Greater Boston area who are working to address climate change through their work.
Yuko Oda: Exploring the beauty of nature and its destruction by human activity
Yuko Oda is a mixed media artist whose work includes mediums of animation, drawing and sculpture. Much of her work exists at the intersection of fine art and technology, combining techniques like 3-D printing and Nihonga, which is the traditional form of Japanese painting. Her pieces explore the beauty of the natural word, as well as its fragility.
In her work, Oda often fuses natural objects like tree roots, rocks and soil with synthetic materials like 3- D printed plastic sculptures.
“I find bringing together those two very different materials — almost opposite materials — as really a response to what’s happening to our environment and the world around us,” said Oda. “Because if you look inside our soil, it’s actually infiltrated and mixed up with some of the human-engineered elements and human byproducts, such as plastic garbage. And so I feel like I’m depicting a slice, or a moment, of what’s happening to our environment right now.”
Oda grew up in Japan, where she was exposed to traditional artforms such as kimonos and watercolor paintings. She said while she appreciates those traditional artforms, she could “never” follow all the cultural rules surrounding them.
“I love having the Japanese traditional influence, but then kind of pushing against the norms to create something new and unique and kind of a new energy into what would otherwise be very unchanged, traditional asthetics,” she said.
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Read More: Meet the Greater Boston artists inspiring climate action through their work