Ecofeminist Art: Bridging Feminism, Art, and Environmental Stewardship
“Ecofeminism” is Almost Redundant
Women’s lives and the Earth itself both endure distortions arising from patriarchal domination. The Earth as a site of living communities will likely outlive humanity. Women are bound to humanity’s fate.
While women’s assertion of their right to equal presence and authority in social and economic spheres surely dates to their exclusion from those spheres, “feminism” as an organized movement dates largely from 1960s and early 1970s coinciding with the slogan “the personal is the political.” The term "écofeminisme" appears to have been first offered by French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974 in her book "Le Féminisme ou la Mort" (Feminism or Death). Simultaneously, the politics of Earth stewardship also emerged around this time resulting in part in laws that created agencies in many countries to establish measurable criteria for environmental health. Women-led organizations advocated Earth stewardship and connected ecosystem health to human community health and specifically the health of women. One powerful example is the Green Belt Movement founded by Wangarĩ Maathai.
“Ecofeminism” is simply feminism with the connection to Earth’s health and productivity explicitly stated. The term could almost be considered redundant, but it’s worth underscoring the parallels of respect for women and respect for the Earth. While men possess the capacity and willingness to destroy for an illusion of personal gain, the Earth and women possess space that can grow life. That capacity to grow new life implies a set of values such as the interconnectedness and the cyclic nature of phenomena.
Ecofeminism and patriarchy aren’t opposing ideologies as much as different dispositions or habits of mind. I map aspects of these habits thus:
patriarchy
might makes right
war
ownership and theft
enslavement
domination
ecofeminism
centrality of life
cultivation of human and Earth productivity
interconnectedness and collectivity
democracy
curiosity
Societies organized through dominance by the group with the greater capacity for violence will always be limited by the whims of the powerful. Societies that value individual lives within collective health and well-being have a broader range of perspectives with which to address issues and develop. Research supports the value of diversity in decision making bodies.
What Constitutes “Ecofeminist Art”?
We can’t build the future we want without visualizing it. “Visualizing” an ecofeminist world isn’t just imagining women in powerful social roles, and good art communicates more than what can be expressed through words alone. Ecofeminist art supplies images and textures of ecofeminist values of interconnectedness, support, and kindness permeating our bodies, speech, and minds and reflected in the world around us.
Artworks are evidence of the artist’s efforts to relate with her inner and outer worlds. Ecofeminist art highlights relationships that thrive outside of and despite the dominance of patriarchy. As such, perhaps ecofeminist art carries elements of surrealism, but I don’t think ecofeminist artists, or feminists themselves, strive for some recognizable style. Ecofeminist artists feel the interdependence of phenomena and express this interdependence in forms that mingle human and non-human life; conjoin the animate with the so-called “inanimate”.
Ecofeminist art tends to blend the figure and the ground, or a subject and the environmental context of the subject. If this is an artwork of “systems” rather than solitary “subjects”, the systems may not be linear. Relationships between the rendered subject and unrendered contextual elements are implied. Ecofeminist art brings the entire world into its art objects.
A Male Feminist Manifesto
As a feminist, I believe that men’s subjugation of women is humantiy’s root oppression. In the distant past, women’s capacity to give birth was not understood biologically, and birth was dangerous, magical, revered, and nurtured or worshipped as was the capacity of Earth itself to give and support life. At some point, as illustrated in the biblical story of Abraham ordered by God to murder his son, men began to value their capacity to kill over women’s capacity to birth, and our entire value system transformed into the slogan attributed to the ancient Greeks: the strong will do what they wish; the weak will endure what they must.
Feminism seeks more than the elevation of women in the social and economic spheres. It provides a healthier perspective on what human power is (see “Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals” by Marilyn French) and promotes ethics based on kindness and interdependence. Ecofeminism recognizes that the values of power and domination applied to people have been applied to the entire Earth. Everything is either a “resource” with wealth generating potential, or it is “extraneous”. Feminists are content to work with the world as it is and change only what is appropriate for the broader health of the community, and our “community” includes non-humans.
I don’t believe that men are genetically predisposed to war, but our history (“his story”) is replete with examples of men successfully using violence to take what we think we want. But the wanting is never satisfied and so our violence became endemic while we ignore the costs and forget the beauty and miracle of life itself. We live in a patriarchal world with enormous lifesaving and life-giving technologies while nuclear arsenals await the signal for mass destruction and human-made pollution distorts the global processes on which we thrived for millennia.
Giving time and money to support women and the organizations that support women partially address the benefits I have received by being a white man in a white patriarchal culture. Men should be exploring ways for us to empower women, and time seems to be a simple factor to work with. Give women more time to speak and listen to them when they do.
Men must take responsibility for our value of domination. We must transform our use of power from a force to a tool. If we open our hearts to ecofeminism we can learn to feel the beauty of kindness and the strength of interconnectedness. If we continue our quest for domination, we may obliterate most of what makes living worthwhile. Women and Earth cannot force us to change before the damage is done. We must do this ourselves.
Ecofeminism in My Sculptures
I embraced ecofeminism as a guiding philosophy long before I saw it reflected in my sculptures. With the hindsight of 45 years of artistic production, it seems that inherent connections between people and our environment have been a repeating theme for me. When I add figures to my scenes, I imagine they represent people who are kind and curious. The four arms of my figures are meant to represent people with broader and deeper connections to each other and the environment than maybe is typical with most of us now. Kindness, curiosity, and deep connection are qualities I associate with ecofeminism.
“Burn”, 34” x 40” x 16” deep (photo by Ron Carran)
My sculpture titled “Burn” is a rendering of a charnel ground, or burial ground practiced in the mountainous regions of Tibet where rocky soils are frozen in long winters and dug graves may not be possible. In these areas, bodies of the deceased are left for carrion to consume. In my rendering, I imagine the scene depicted within a woman’s lower torso. The cycle of ovulation and menstruation is as natural as the cycle of life and death.
“Development #2”. 52” x 31” x 16” deep (photo by Ron Carran)
“Development #2” presents a personal interior world intermingled with a landscape. The pyramids covering the “skin” of the head and hand are my schematic for American suburbs. The black lines represent major roads. Suburbia is a form of land “development”, and my culture considers land without human-made structures as “undeveloped”. The head is rendered in a way that it could be studying the hand. In the hand resides a small pond, with some figures standing around in it. Inside the head is a three-story palace with figures posed as if they were talking, playing, kissing, and meditating. In the upper portion of the head figures are placed in a garden. Development is a way we work the land and a way we work our minds.
Ecofeminist Artists
Many artists work with ecofeminist themes, although many of them might not be comfortable with the label. I find Georgia O’Keefe’s work inspiring and evocative of ecofeminism, but I’m certain she and her patrons would reject the label.
Installation view of a Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2008.Paul Cooper/Shutterstock
While Louise Bourgeois may have considered her work “pre-gender”, her famous spider sculptures (“Maman”, et. Al.) conjure a central figure (spider-shaped) occupying a web or network, although some of them stand alone. Bourgeois is quoted as imagining the spider as a reference to her own mother, but spiders are the nexus of the webs they create. This metaphor applies to all of us, and combinations of power, communication, and care strike me as ecofeminist. Bourgeois’ work often mingles simple naturally-occurring forms in group arrangements, evoking community and ecology in images that can be visually absorbed in an instant while the conceptual and non-conceptual meanings take a little longer to emerge.
“Two Canoe” by Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu’s enormous body of artwork includes images of female shaped or sexless figures in various realistic and surrealistic settings. Often the forms are rendered in ways that explicitly include the actual social and environmental context of women’s lives. In addition to rendering women in artwork, and so speaking up for women, Mutu implies the power and pain that women work with over and over again. Sometimes the damage of patriarchy is explicit. In “Two Canoe”, sexless figures are depicted simultaneously floating and rooted. Here Mutu describes the journey of life and its connection to the Earth in a composition that includes textures and shapes evoking ecofeminism without any words needed.
Conclusion
The depth and breadth of life that emerges when men support women and cultivate the Earth surpasses our ability to catalog or understand it. Making and discussing ecofeminist art contributes to our understanding of how to build an ethos of interconnectedness, support, and kindness in our bodies, speech, and minds so that this understanding can be manifest in our broader world, and men can recognize futility of violence and domination.
All my generalizations regarding the sexes do not reflect the actual individual diversity of capacities and predispositions of individuals within the sexes. I understand that humanity is more diverse than I am characterizing in this essay.