Did You Get the Message? How Abstract Artists Communicate Environmental Urgency

Without a figure, without a narrative, without literal representation: how do you pass a message in visual art? This is the activist's dilemma in abstract art, and it explains why truly activist abstraction remains remarkably rare. Figurative art can show us a melting polar bear, a flooded city, a protester's face. Abstract art offers only color, form, gesture, material. Yet as the climate crisis accelerates and demands all voices, a pioneering group of artists has proven that abstraction can indeed be activist, not despite its resistance to explicit messaging, but because of what it uniquely offers.

The challenge is real. Conventional climate communication (catastrophic images, overwhelming data) has reached its limits, often inducing what researchers call "climate fatigue" or emotional paralysis. Abstract environmental art offers an alternative strategy: rather than depicting disaster, it models environmental processes (flow, dissolution, accumulation) and engages viewers through direct sensory and emotional experience. It doesn't show you the crisis; it makes you feel it.

This article explores how abstract artists communicate environmental urgency through six distinct aesthetic strategies. Through the work of pioneering artists (Jaanika Peerna, Reiner Heidorn, Olafur Eliasson, Mandy Barker, and others), we'll examine how abstraction's apparent limitations become unexpected strengths in environmental advocacy.

Two Models, Six Strategies

Abstract environmental activism operates through two overarching models: the Affective Model, which uses ritual, participation, and collective mourning to make viewers feel environmental issues through shared emotional experience; and the Cognitive Model, which uses visualization, immersion, and scale to make viewers understand invisible ecological systems and processes.

Within these models, artists employ six core strategies:

1. Making the Invisible Visible: Some of the most destructive environmental forces remain invisible to the naked eye: atmospheric carbon, temperature shifts, microscopic ecosystems, geological time moving too slowly for human perception. Abstract artists have found ways to translate these hidden phenomena into perceptible forms, rendering tangible what we cannot otherwise see but desperately need to understand.

2. Material Witness: Rather than depicting environmental crisis, some artists let their materials become active participants in the message. They use ecologically significant substances, or allow natural processes like erosion, dissolution, and decay to shape the work itself. The artwork becomes a forensic trace, physical evidence of environmental events rather than a representation of them.

3. Scale and Immersion: Monumental formats and immersive installations can overwhelm viewers, forcing a bodily confrontation with the vastness of ecosystems. This strategy breaks down the comfortable distance between observer and environment, using physical scale to combat the alienation that fuels ecological crisis. When you're surrounded by or dwarfed by the work, intellectual understanding gives way to visceral experience.

4. Color as Data/Witness: Color in environmental abstraction often functions less as emotional expression and more as coded information. Artists use specific palettes to translate data (pollution levels, temperature changes, biodiversity metrics) or to serve as symbolic witness to biological vitality. A particular green isn't just beautiful; it carries testimony about a specific forest, a specific moment of ecological observation.

5. Repetition and Accumulation: The repeated gesture, the accumulated object, the serialized form can model ecological phenomena that unfold through time and quantity: cellular growth, plastic fragmentation, the cumulative impact of industrial production. When individual elements multiply into thousands, the work makes visible the scale of environmental crisis in ways that single images cannot.

6. Embodied Experience: Some works demand more than visual attention. They require physical participation, engage multiple senses (touch, smell, temperature), or create collaborative rituals. By transforming viewers from passive observers into active participants, these works provoke affective responses (grief, calm, anxiety, connection) that live in the body rather than the mind, creating the kind of deep understanding that motivates ethical action.

Let's see how these strategies work in practice.

The Affective Model: Jaanika Peerna's Glacier Elegies

Jaanika Peerna, an Estonian-born artist, working between New York, Berlin, and Tallinn, has developed one of the most sophisticated approaches to environmental witness through participatory performance and controlled dissolution. Her practice underwent a deliberate pivot around 2017 to address climate breakdown directly, transforming her earlier studies of natural forces (wind, water, light) into explicit climate activism.

Peerna's technique involves grasping bunches of pencils in each hand and executing spontaneous, whole-body gestures across large Mylar sheets, creating kinetic drawings that record natural forces through pure movement. The pencils become extensions of her body, transforming the artist into what critics call "a vessel that captures natural processes." But the activist power emerges in the performance's second act.

In her ongoing Glacier Elegy project, Peerna invites audiences to collaborate in creating these large-scale drawings. Then she introduces blocks of natural ice onto the surface. As the ice melts, it actively dissolves the drawn lines and pigments, erasing the collaborative creation in real time. This process collapses decades of glacial melting into an immediate, embodied experience of loss.

The genius lies in mandatory participation (Strategy 6: Embodied Experience). By including audiences in creation, Peerna guarantees emotional investment; the subsequent destruction becomes shared, tangible loss rather than abstract data. The work doesn't depict glacial melt; it enacts it, transforming viewers into witnesses and mourners. Her approach recognizes that conventional catastrophic imagery often induces paralysis; her ritualistic method provides a structured "way through" overwhelming climate grief, transforming engagement from passive observation into what she calls "an act of ethical responsibility and care for the planet."

The melting ice functions as Material Witness (Strategy 2). Water isn't just a medium; it's an active agent of transformation and destruction. Gravity and flow dictate the final composition, making the artwork a forensic document of the dissolution process itself. Peerna has also developed a sophisticated temporal dimension (Scale/Immersion, Strategy 3). While her earlier work celebrated slow natural processes, Glacier Elegy deliberately accelerates geological trauma, compressing decades of glacial retreat into the brief duration of a ritual performance. This compression simulates urgency in a way climate data cannot.

The resulting artifacts (titled "Tipping Point," "Big Melt," "Meltdown," "Ablation Zone") present a powerful paradox. Peerna archives these ephemeral performances on Mylar, a durable plastic material. This creates what scholars call a "paradoxical archive": a permanent synthetic monument that records a momentary natural tragedy, underscoring the longevity of human-made materials against the fragility of natural processes.

The accumulation of kinetic lines and gestures on the Mylar (Repetition/Accumulation, Strategy 5) reflects the complexity and intensity of recorded natural forces. And though Peerna's aesthetic is minimalist (often black on white), her activism is anchored in precise vocabulary (Color as Data, Strategy 4). Her titles reference critical processes from glaciology and climate science, fusing emotional aesthetics with objective data points and grounding abstract work in scientific reality.

The Ontological Model: Reiner Heidorn's Bio-Divisionism

Reiner Heidorn, a German artist based in Bavaria, employs a radically different approach. Working from his studio surrounded by the Bavarian Alps and forests, Heidorn has developed what he calls the "Dissolutio" technique (dissolution in Latin), a process that explicitly aims to dissolve the boundaries between humanity and the natural world.

Heidorn's activism is not centered on pollution or material degradation like Peerna's, but on restoring a healthy ontological relationship with nature. His paintings are what he calls "passages" or "openings" toward living matter, aspiring to create "a space without borders" between observer and observed. This quest to dismantle the subject/object dichotomy, identified by ecological philosophers as a root cause of environmental crisis, defines the political efficacy of his work.

His technique provides an exceptional example of Making the Invisible Visible (Strategy 1). Heidorn transforms microscopic cellular structures and freshwater ecosystems into vast immersive fields of color. His style, which art historians call "Neo-Expressionist Bio-Divisionism," employs what he terms "Microscopic Pointillism": thousands of tiny, precise points of color organize into soft gradations, transferring the visual language of scientific microscopy into emotional expression. He renders perceptible the complexity and interconnection of life that normally escapes the human eye, making visible the invisible networks sustaining ecosystems.

The Dissolutio process itself functions as Material Witness (Strategy 2), though implicitly. To maintain his works in a state of movement and incorporate transience as an aesthetic quality, Heidorn deliberately violates classical oil painting rules, mixing colors directly on canvas and accepting "errors" like bubbles and craters. This alteration of the medium ensures the work embodies flux and change, reinforcing the idea of living, mutable matter and surrendering control to natural processes.

The format of his works is a critical advocacy mechanism (Scale/Immersion, Strategy 3). His canvases are monumental and oversized, designed to "overwhelm viewers," functioning as "portals" that immerse the spectator in living, mutating matter. This monumental scale is an intentional activist strategy to combat anthropocentrism. By forcing viewers into bodily confrontation with the immensity of the ecosystem, the work insists on what Heidorn calls the "total insignificance of the individual." Far from nihilistic, this approach encourages humility and fosters what he describes as "psychological recovery." Feeling insignificant before biological vitality invites viewers to dissolve their separation from nature, the antithesis of the alienation fueling environmental crisis.

Heidorn's work is strongly based on Color as Data/Witness (Strategy 4). His visual language is dominated by green, not as background but as subject and voice. Art historians associate this with a "sacred green, the witness of the blessed, profound life of the world." His palette, enriched with blues and ochres, explicitly evokes forests, lakes, and autonomous biological worlds. These colors are not decorative choices but witnesses to specific places, specific light, specific moments of connection between artist and environment.

The Repetition/Accumulation (Strategy 5) is intrinsic to his method. Microscopic Pointillism is based on thousands of tiny, precise color points that accumulate to form complex ecosystems. This use of repetition models the density and structural complexity of living matter at the cellular scale, an aesthetic representation of necessary interconnection and biological richness at the microscopic level.

Finally, Heidorn's ultimate goal is both moral and psychological (Embodied Experience, Strategy 6). His paintings are designed to provide moments of "psychological recovery and profound calm." By inviting viewers to traverse these "passages" and dissolve boundaries between self and nature, the immersive experience becomes therapeutic action against ecological anxiety and alienation. Critics report a feeling of "unexpected tenderness" experienced by viewers, demonstrating the effectiveness of this non-confrontational approach. In an era of environmental emergency, Heidorn's insistence on slowness and contemplation becomes a form of resistance against accelerated ecosystem destruction.

Expanding the Vocabulary: Three More Approaches

Conceptual Abstraction: Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist, uses abstract and minimalist forms as his primary language for environmental communication. While he's fundamentally a conceptual artist, his work qualifies as abstract activism through its manipulation of natural phenomena (light, water, atmosphere, perception) into non-figurative experiences.

Eliasson excels at Making the Invisible Visible (Strategy 1) and Embodied Experience (Strategy 6). Works like Wavemachines or Regenfenster (Rain window) replicate water phenomena and weather conditions, allowing audiences to experience invisible or uncontrollable natural forces in controlled museum spaces. Moss wall (1994) directly engages embodied experience by introducing sensory materiality (aroma, texture of lichen) into the sterile museum environment, making visitors acutely aware of living biological presence.

His work on color illustrates the fourth strategy listed above (Data/Witness). The Colour experiments (2019) deconstruct historical figurative landscape paintings (like those of Caspar David Friedrich), treating them as quantifiable data sources. By analyzing, extracting, and proportionally distributing colors onto abstract canvases, Eliasson creates a pure chromatic "dataset" of landscape. He validates the idea that nature can be translated into coded abstract form, a kind of forensic art history.

His project Your planetary assembly (2025) employs Scale/Immersion (Strategy 3) through eight abstract polyhedra whose colors and arrangement are inspired by solar system models. Designed as a public assembly space (referencing the agora), the installation's spatial arrangement forces participants to consider their immediate environment within a larger cosmic context, linking abstract geometry and cosmic mapping to the idea of local community.

Eliasson's practice consistently asks: How can art make climate crisis not just intellectually understood but physically felt? His approach proves that conceptual artists can use abstraction as their primary conduit for environmental messaging, creating visceral experiences that bypass intellectual understanding.

Data Visualization: Making Statistics Tangible

A growing movement of artists uses abstraction as a tool for translating complex ecological data into accessible forms. This "eco-visualization" practice, a term coined by artist Tiffany Holmes in 2005, reinterprets data (energy consumption, pollution levels, species loss) through technological and artistic means to influence behavior. This directly employs Making the Invisible Visible (Strategy 1) and Color as Data/Witness (Strategy 4).

Alicja Biała and Iwo Borkowicz's installation Totemy provides a direct example. These nine-meter-tall pillars use color, form, and texture to represent specific climate statistics: fishery exploitation, air pollution, timber harvesting. This is a clear application of Scale/Immersion (Strategy 3) through imposing height, Color as Data/Witness (Strategy 4) through coded colors for statistics, and Making the Invisible Visible (Strategy 1) by rendering overwhelming statistics tangible. Viewers can visualize the scale of problems, then scan QR codes for complete documentation, linking abstract aesthetics with factual information.

ScanLAB Projects, the London-based artist-led studio founded by Matt Shaw and William Trossell uses 3D scanners to create abstract digital time-lapse works of natural sites, such as a saguaro cactus collapsing in the Sonoran Desert. Climate change often manifests on timescales too slow for human perception (glaciers melting over decades, erosion over centuries). ScanLAB's abstract time-lapse solves this by manipulating and compressing time, rendering visible a process usually invisible at human scale. The work serves as a dynamic archive, making concrete the notion of Invisible Visible (Strategy 1) through the abstraction of duration.

Forensic Accumulation: Mandy Barker

British artist Mandy Barker has developed a striking conceptual and photographic practice that uses accumulation to materialize the global scale of marine pollution. Though her final medium is photography, her abstract compositions are created through intentional assembly and layering of thousands of collected plastic debris.

Barker's work directly employs Repetition/Accumulation (Strategy 5) and Material Witness (Strategy 2). The accumulation is not merely aesthetic; it's forensic, aimed at quantifying the unsustainable scale of the problem. Her series PENALTY: The World assembled 992 pieces of soccer balls and marine debris from 41 countries to illustrate the global extent of the issue. The series Hong Kong Soup: 1826 - Spilt documents massive spills by integrating plastic pellets (nurdles) into the composition, acting as visual witnesses to contamination.

Each individual piece of debris transforms into a unit of the global micro- and macro-plastics crisis. The choice of materials (waste) becomes an ethical act, transforming abstract work into physical proof and inviting audiences to rethink their approach to materials and consumption. Historically, repetition and accumulation in art were associated with psychological themes (Yayoi Kusama's obsessive accumulations, for example). In the environmental context, accumulation takes on critical political meaning, directly linked to the accumulation and fragmentation of waste, particularly plastics.

Barker's abstract compositions are beautiful and horrifying simultaneously. The careful arrangement of debris into mandala-like patterns or constellation forms creates visual seduction that draws viewers in, then delivers the gut punch: every element is trash, every piece evidence of ecological crisis. This strategy proves that abstraction can hold beauty and urgency in the same frame, using aesthetic pleasure not as distraction but as the hook that keeps viewers engaged long enough for the message to register.

Why Abstract Activism Works: Affect and Cognition

Comparative analysis of these practices reveals that abstract environmental art succeeds through two primary models, each employing different combinations of the six strategies.

The Affective Model (exemplified by Peerna) demonstrates the superiority of ritual practices (Strategy 6). By proposing an aesthetic structure for ecological grief and collective loss, Peerna provides a pathway to transform sorrow into ethical action. This strategy successfully circumvents media saturation and the emotional paralysis induced by catastrophic imagery. It offers what conventional climate communication cannot: a way to face overwhelming facts while healing the soul and motivating action.

The Cognitive Model (exemplified by Heidorn, Eliasson, and eco-visualization artists) uses abstraction to restore a healthy relationship with the world. Heidorn achieves this by dissolving observer/observed boundaries and using monumental scale (Strategy 3) to teach humility before biological vitality. Eco-visualization uses abstraction to render invisible information (data) visible (Strategy 4), enabling cognitive understanding of complex or slow processes (like ScanLAB's time-lapse). Eliasson creates controlled environments where invisible atmospheric forces become tangible experiences.

Both models share a crucial insight: abstraction bypasses intellectual understanding to create visceral, bodily knowledge. When you participate in creating a drawing that then dissolves before your eyes, when you stand overwhelmed before a monumental canvas of microscopic life, when you encounter carefully arranged ocean debris, the response is somatic, not cerebral. This creates what researchers call "somatic empathy," a deeper form of understanding that lives in the body and motivates action in ways that statistics and catastrophic images cannot.

Abstraction as Urgent Witness

Can abstraction be activist? The work of Jaanika Peerna, Reiner Heidorn, Olafur Eliasson, Mandy Barker, and others proves definitively that it can. But these practices also reveal why activist abstraction remains rare: it requires solving the "message problem" that figuration sidesteps. Without figures or narratives, abstract artists must find other strategies: making invisible systems visible, using material transformation as metaphor, overwhelming through scale, coding information in color, accumulating evidence through repetition, creating experiences that transform observers into participants.

The challenge remains real. Abstraction will never communicate with the immediate clarity of a photograph of a clearcut forest or a painting of a climate refugee. But these approaches demonstrate that abstraction offers something equally valuable: the ability to witness environmental crisis through form, material, and process; to create beauty that carries urgency; to speak a universal visual language; to make felt what cannot always be seen; to provide structures for grief, healing, and ethical action.

For viewers and collectors, engaging with activist abstraction is itself an act of witness. When you spend time with Peerna's glacier elegies or Heidorn's microscopic ecosystems, when you encounter Eliasson's atmospheric installations or Barker's debris mandalas, you participate in a different kind of environmental awareness, one that lives in the body, in sensation, in the space where beauty and urgency meet. As these artists demonstrate, this participation can transform climate engagement from overwhelming despair into structured mourning, from passive observation into collective healing, from alienation into reconnection.

Activist abstraction is possible. It's difficult, it's rare, but when achieved, it offers forms of environmental witness that figuration cannot match. As climate crisis demands all voices, these artists prove that abstraction has essential contributions to make, not despite its resistance to explicit messaging, but because of what that resistance, when overcome, makes possible.

Jaanika Peerna and Reiner Heidorn are represented by IdeelArt. 

Featured image: Wetland by Reiner Heidorn (2023)

By Francis Berthomier

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