Exploring climate change through the language of art

In 2013 Prince Edward Island fabric artist Catherine Miller joined a panel of scientists and government officials to lend her voice to a discussion about the effects of Anthropogenic climate change on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her installation entitled Changing Environs hung just outside the lecture hall, including Rising Sea Level, PEI, 2010, demonstrating blatantly and poignantly what will happen to the beloved Island when the Northumberland Strait inevitably rises. Artists will go to great lengths to protest the ways in which humans ravage the environment – and to demonstrate the results. This is hardly new: for centuries writers and artists have been producing work that brings social issues to the fore. Sometimes what they create reaches audiences at the intellectual level, but more often it grabs people emotionally. At the same time, artists are acutely attached to their landscapes, and wish to tend what geographer Edward Relph calls "fields of care," the places they call home, documenting them before they change irrevocably or disappear altogether. This chapter explores how humans convey information through the language of art, and highlights some of the efforts artists have made in protesting climate change. The chapter will segue into presentations by Island visual artists Rilla Marshall and Brenda Whiteway, who create art in response to how they see Anthropogenic climate change impacting their island.