Earth: Art of a Changing World

Royal Academy of Arts, London Until 31 January 2010

Photographs of our blue planet, taken during the 1968 Apollo 8 lunar mission, transformed our grasp of its fragile equilibrium. In 2009, we need similarly defining images to galvanize interventions to mitigate climate change. Aiming to provide just that is the exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World, organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in collaboration with Cape Farewell, a charity that encourages artists to engage with the science of climate change. It examines how the global-warming debate has influenced the practice of more than 30 international contemporary artists, some of whom have participated in Cape Farewell expeditions to the Arctic.

On entering the exhibition — aptly on show in the building formerly occupied by the now defunct Museum of Mankind — visitors are confronted by the UK sculptor Antony Gormley's Amazonian Field (1992), which comprises 15,000 fired clay figures with questioning expressions. “I wanted to make a work about our collective future and our responsibility for it,” Gormley has said of his sculpture, hand-modelled by people living in the Amazon basin. In contrast to this cooperative work, the Palestinian sculptor Mona Hatoum's Hot Spot (2006) alludes to human conflicts at contested borders. A skeletal globe is tilted at the same angle as Earth, its stainless steel latitudes and longitudes supporting continents outlined in glowing neon tubes. Hot Spot hints at the increasing global unrest that could be caused by water shortages resulting from climate change.

Mona Hatoum's Hot Spot globe. Credit: K. WIGGLESWORTH/AP

Also on show is the work of the UK artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, participants in several Cape Farewell expeditions. As part of their ongoing project, Beuys' Acorns (started in 2007), they have planted young oak saplings — grown from acorns collected from trees planted by the pioneering German ecological artist Joseph Beuys in 1982 — on the portico outside the exhibition. Growing more trees, rather than felling the world's forests, is their symbolic and optimistic act in the face of justifiable pessimism about climate change.

“We have come to this ship in a frozen fjord to think about the ways we might communicate our concerns about climate change to a wider public,” said UK writer Ian McEwan of the purpose of his and other artists' 2005 Cape Farewell expedition. His latest novel, to be published next year, deals with climate change. For now, his text The Hot Breath of Our Civilisation (2005), is exhibited on the gallery wall as a scrolling display. It provides an epilogue to the exhibition: “Are we at the beginning of an unprecedented era of international cooperation, or are we living in an Edwardian summer of reckless denial? Is this the beginning, or the beginning of the end?”