Communicating Through Art Practice

This is Artcast Aotearoa. Listen to artists and change-makers offer fresh perspectives on how they’re responding to global issues and trends affecting arts practice. Brought to you by Creative New Zealand’s International Programme – helping artists navigate the shifting tides of the evolving global context.

Chicago-based artist and lifelong environmentalist Margot McMahon has spent her career exploring how art can inspire a social consciousness around sustainability and demonstrate a brighter possible future for us - if we can take action now.

For decades, she has been using sculpture and painting (and recently fiction writing) as mediums to engage the public about the reality of what is happening to our climate and environments, both local and global.

McMahon started her career as a scientific journalist in the late 1970s, a time when scientific consensus was first broadly accepted that human-generated carbon emissions were warming our planet. Finding that her reporting on environmentalism and climate change became instantly politicized, McMahon chose art as a more direct and digestible style of communication of her environmentalism - one that circumvented language or political barriers.

Margot talks about the difficulty of a scientific issue becoming intensely political, the evolution of art institutions such as the Venice Biennale finally coming to the climate issue, and the crucial nature of creating art that communicates about a local context to a local audience.

Original music during the intro and out is by Pickle Darling

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