by Basia Irland
about Basia Irland
Basia Irland, author, poet, sculptor, installation artist, and activist, creates international water projects featured in her book Water Library. She works with scholars from diverse disciplines restoring riparian zones; filming and producing water documentaries; connecting communities along the lengths of rivers; building rainwater harvesting systems; and creating global waterborne disease projects. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, where she established the Arts and Ecology Program.
Eco-Art
Eco-art involves a transdisciplinary, multimedia, activist-oriented process, which addresses environmental and sustainability issues. There is a shift away from art as commodity and toward new creative possibilities of art in service to communities and ecosystems. Eco-art includes artists who consider it their role to help raise awareness and create actions about important issues and natural processes; invite participation and devise innovative strategies to engage diverse communities; work directly with others to augment the knowledge associated with particular fields; and produce works that inspire people to reassess the notion of commons. Eco-artists emphasize collaboration. Many of these artists work with indigenous and local community members, as well as specialists from a range of disciplines, including media, education, architecture, performance arts, sociology, engineering, and the gamut of sciences. Ethics is at the core of this practice and has been explored from multiple perspectives by writers in systems analysis, deep ecology, and complexity theory. Eco-art is flexible, adaptive, far reaching—theoretically, philosophically, methodologically, and geographically—with extensive legacies, abundant intentions, and widely (wildly) variable parameters. Works might be sited, or unsited, anywhere in the world—within old mines, under water, on top of utility poles, in forests, throughout digital media, in the air, at a massive...