As a curator who often works closely with contemporary artists to commission new projects, I am constantly learning from those in my own community who are shifting their material practices toward more sustainable processes. 

The pressing need for sustainability in the visual arts and beyond requires a holistic approach. There is no singular solution. Every aspect of the systems that uphold the production, circulation and presentation of contemporary art must be reimagined to lessen the field’s carbon footprint. Areas for reconsideration include everything from the global travel habits of arts professionals and the energy consumption of maintaining exhibition spaces to the decarbonization of funding. 

Sustainability is not a “trend”— not for 2025 nor any single year. Rather, it is a way of thinking and doing that needs to be fostered in order to mitigate the negative impacts of a field that, paradoxically, holds immense potential for increased awareness of critical issues.

I work with a group known as the Centre for Sustainable Curating, which was founded by Kirsty Robertson and is housed in the department of visual arts at Western University. Among other things, we develop resource guides and toolkits for low-carbon exhibition making in the interest of environmental and social justice. 

This research is critical — and a world of its own — yet I always find myself coming back to the ways artists are working through the climate crisis to respond to the escalating troubles of environmental degradation. I spoke with artists Gwenyth Chao and Lisa Hirmer for insight into the ways they are embracing decay and growth through their work with garbage and gardens. In a field where thoughtful problem-solving abounds, these are just a couple of the artists I find inspiring for the ways they are reducing their environmental impact and exploring the possibilities of alternative creative practices.

The matter of waste 

Artist Gwenyth Chao looks to the everyday flow of waste as a source for the material basis of her practice. She often works with perishable matter diverted from the machinations of our globalized consumer market. She collects crates of produce as it begins to rot, working with merchants who would otherwise dispose of stock in large volumes. 

Purple cabbage stems and kiwi skins are among the materials that she may dry or freeze, grinding them down and then reconstituting them into moldable forms using common food binding agents like xanthan gum and methyl cellulose.

Having recently relocated to New York City from Vancouver, I asked Chao how the transition affected her sourcing. Both cities are supported by the same international trade, driven by a demand for the year-round availability of seasonal goods from all around the globe. Yet there are differences in the patterns of waste, she told me. The patterns are perhaps formed in relation to the make-up of local consumers as demographics shape business practices, determining what parts of a particular food plant are relevant to a community’s culinary traditions and therefore valuable. In this way, the waste that comprises her material vocabulary is a portrait of a place. 

It is a sourcing strategy that is not without its own challenges, she says, as large-scale supermarkets and corporations sometimes find the requests to adopt their waste suspicious. In the scarcity mindset of extractive capitalism, these parties are concerned above all else with whether the recipient could turn a profit from their loss.   

Alternatively, her material sourcing also responds to forms of seasonal abundance. The bloom and bust of cherry blossoms in her hometown of Vancouver, for instance, might prompt her to collect fallen petals, which will go on to yield multiple experimental outputs — from paper-making to a range of bio-composites. What remains the same is the artist’s commitment to being responsive to the ecologies that surround her, bringing waste back to the studio to develop material experiments which she then draws on in the creation of work. 

These forms of material sourcing support low-carbon art-making, but they are also strategies for survival, conjuring a likely future where human resourcefulness will be forced to contend with what remains. In her ongoing series, symbionts of capitalist ruin, started in 2022, a viewer encounters what Chao describes as “a body in flux.” Strange hybrid forms containing biocomposites of coffee grounds, onion skins, egg shells and bean husks give the impression of the kind of beings that might emerge in a post-human landscape after total climate collapse. 

The lifecycle of artworks

Time is always a medium in every art object. The practices of collection building and conservation support a fallacy that our material cultural heritage will last forever. This belief is tangled up with the art object’s status as not just a commodity but an investment that will appreciate. However, even the most sophisticated facilities for climate control — systems which themselves account for a significant portion of the environmental impacts of major museums — only postpone inevitable degradation. 

Garlic peel paper, carrot skin clay and gelatin rope are just some of the reconstituted materials Chao creates and uses in her work. These biomorphic forms are always shifting in relation to one another and to variation in climatic conditions. The behaviour of an artwork will depend on what it’s made from. For example, the gelatin rope that Chao uses to hang her works both in the studio and the gallery will stretch or falter on a particularly hot and humid day. 

“[When] we think about permanence versus decay, so much of it has to do with the scale and perspective,” she told me during a recent conversation. “If you’re a mayfly, my works seem permanent; they last ‘forever.’ But from the lifespan of a tree or a human, their presence is more fleeting.” 

If all matter, artwork included, has a life cycle, how can that death contribute to the human and more-than-human network of which it is already a part? Working with material that naturally decomposes allows for a different kind of transition in the process. For one such iteration of symbionts in capitalist ruin, shown at the Doris Crowston Gallery in Sechelt, B.C., this past summer, Chao’s work was laid to rest at the end of the exhibition. The art was buried in a garden plot on the grounds of the gallery, enriching the soil and supporting future growth and rebirth in the following spring. 

The fleeting nature of the physical work does not erase the impact of this process-based work. Chao has made a habit of facilitating collective learning and public engagement as a part of her practice. She invites disparate kinds of makers from across generations to spend time in the studio with her to explore the possibility of material applications outside of the contemporary art world. Given the limited reach of small-scale community events, the artist is keen to develop a biomaterials recipe book. Publication represents a way to disseminate her experiments more widely, encouraging folks from various fields and bioregions to adapt and respond to their own conditions. 

A seed of hope

The image of Chao’s buried, decomposing work bursting forth with new life has a particular kinship with the second approach that comes to mind in the move toward more sustainable art-making: the artist-made garden. Lisa Hirmer and Christina Kingsbury are coming to the end of their third year of Moth Garden, a collaborative endeavour in Guelph, Ont., that explores interspecies relationships through multi-sensory experience. 

Conversations around endangered species and environmental degradation have disproportionately focused on the popularity of representations of animals like elephants, polar bears and wild cats, with photography playing a key role in supporting rallying cries for conservation efforts. 

What began as an interest for Hirmer in how to photograph moths differently (popular high-resolution macro images of moths are achieved by placing insects in a light trap) yielded to a desire to “meet [moths] in their own sensory world,” she says. “[To] meet them in darkness.” 

Through the peak of the garden in the summer months, Hirmer and Kingsbury invite small groups to gather and experience the garden at night, offering prompts for reflection and guided sensory engagement (noticing, for instance, the vibrations of moths as they flutter about). Participants recognize the night as fully active; it’s just that different beings are out. While pollinator gardens have boomed in popularity, one wonders how much this owes to an aesthetic appreciation we’ve developed for beings we share the day with. By contrast, nocturnal insects and animals are less familiar, and our interactions with them in green spaces are limited.

When asked about the future, Hirmer shares that “it will never be a permanent project because gardens are always a conversation between people and other beings.” The hope remains that the species that the artists have now established there (all native species), will continue to flourish even when programming of the space for humans ends. 

There is a rich lineage of artist gardens that have similarly had a fleeting existence, such as the incredible pollinator gardens of Mi’kmaw artist Mike MacDonald, which at one time were dotted across Canada. Since 2019, Sheila Colla and Lisa Myers have revisited the legacy of MacDonald’s work in their initiative Finding Flowers. The project develops art, ecology and educational programming, while mobilizing knowledge through online and on-the-land platforms.

From my conversation with Hirmer, it became clear that one of the major challenges of working with gardens as artworks is that securing the funding to care and maintain for these projects in the long-term is difficult. As a result, such works are often temporary, though they can produce lasting and profound impacts on those who experience them. 

To this end, I often reflect on my visit to the 2021 MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, which invited T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss to create a garden of traditional plants outside the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal. Planting a seed is an act of hope. It is an investment in the future that strengthens our relationship with the land. Gardens as artworks continue to redefine the forms contemporary art can take in a way that is more aligned with the cyclical nature of the seasons and the passing of time.

Ultimately, I see the artistic approaches represented by Chao, Hirmer and Kingsbury as distinct yet interconnected. Although they take different material starting points — waste on the one hand, seeds and soil on the other — they share an embrace of ongoing cycles of growth and decay. 

As we head into the darkest months of the year, reflecting on their work holds the promise of spring, and of a future, however uncertain. Alongside the care work that defines their relationship to the more-than-human world, their art enables a social space of gathering and experiential learning. It encourages those it touches to replace climate anxiety with curiosity.