US artist Molnar paints global warming grief through her work
PORTLAND: It had been a long day and Daniela Molnar’s mind was wandering when she saw the shape. The shape of what was already lost; the shape of something new that had just come into being.
Little did she know, it was a shape that would expose a profound feeling of grief within her — and then help her process it.
In literal terms, the shape was made up of missing chunks of the Eliot Glacier on Mount Hood that had melted away because of climate change, exposing land that hadn’t seen sunlight in hundreds of years. It flickered onto a projector screen during a lecture by a hydrologist that Molnar had started to tune out.
“I haven’t seen that shape before,” thought Molnar, an artist and professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. “Maybe I can use that.”
At home in Portland, Molnar projected the image onto her canvas, revealing the ghostly husk of a mountain. Then she began to paint it using crushed rocks mixed with gum Arabic — a binder — and water from the rain barrel in her yard.
Her goal, initially, was to draw attention to climate change and give shape to an oftenabstract issue.
“Here, look at this, you can see it now,” Molnar remembered thinking. “And you can see it in an artistic form that might provoke some feeling.”
Then, Molnar’s own feelings began to take over.
On an impulse, she painted the outlines of other diminished North American glaciers over the first, the geometries and hues piling up like scraps of tulle.
“I didn’t know where this was going,” Molnar recalled. The work grew more chaotic and the shapes, in their jaggedness, faintly violent. She too grew more overwhelmed and confused.
After Molnar had created more paintings of vanishing ice, it hit her: this is what it feels like to try to hold the enormous losses brought about by climate change.
Global warming is transforming Earth’s landscapes and ecosystems, swelling the seas and driving many species closer to extinction. It has already contributed to natural disasters, famines and wars. Even if you accept that humans are to blame, it can be hard to absorb the full weight of such unpleasant facts. But what if that’s the problem?
What if acting on climate change requires that we first let ourselves feel its true costs? Molnar was about to find out.
The studio where Molnar made the paintings is a small shed nestled among nodding hellebores in the backyard of her house in a quiet Portland neighborhood. It has a Scandinavian feel, with succulents in the windows, bare cork floors, and stacks of books everywhere, including a volume about historical tragedies called “Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness.”
Many artists, including Molnar, are now bearing witness to the changes unfolding in the 21st century.
Some have created overtly political works that evoke outrage or guilt, like a sculpture that was displayed in Paris during the 2015 United Nations climate talks: a polar bear impaled on an oil pipe.
Others pay homage to the beauty of the world, like Zaria Forman, who paints stunning hyper-realistic images of ice using her fingertips instead of brushes.
“The welter of emotions that people feel about the climate crisis, they can see in the mirror of art,” said Miranda Massie, director of the Climate Museum in New York City.
At first glance, it’s not clear what Molnar’s works are about.
She paints with translucent, often iridescent pigments that morph from yellow to green, teal to indigo, purple back to red. The shapes are vibrant and beautiful — culled from scientific studies and satellite images — and they cover the canvas in a colorful confetti of ruin.
But despite the paintings’ cheery palette, they give Molnar — and viewers — an opportunity to engage with the staggering scope and interconnectivity of climate change.
“You can’t extract one piece of receding glacier from another,” Molnar said.
To aid her audience, a brief description accompanies each piece, explaining that the shapes represent pieces of land where ice has melted away. Molnar adds that “this new earth is like a wound, or new, delicate skin that has formed over a wound and is now (ready or not) exposed to the world.”
As she immersed herself in these muddled geometries, Molnar, who is petite with curly black hair and a Bonnie Raitt streak of gray, began to tap into a turbid well of emotion. It is apparent by the third piece. Overlapping shapes bruise dark blue to black, and ragged crimson lines slash across the canvas.
“The project isn’t just a way to convey information,” she said. “It’s a way to confront grief.”
Grief is an unpleasant cocktail of emotions: sadness, anxiety, shame and helplessness, to name a few. Psychologists recognise it as a normal — even necessary — response to loss. And its growing prevalence is yet another impact of climate change.
Those on the front lines mourn the loss of homes burned by wildfires, landscapes altered by drought or melting ice, and traditions overturned by ecological upheaval.
Some grieve for lost futures, or for innocent animals that had the bad luck to exist at this particular moment in geologic time.
It can be an overpowering and ongoing source of pain, said Ashlee Cunsolo, who studies environmental change and mental health at the Labrador Institute of Memorial University in Canada.
“The environmental grief of climate change is often described as grief without end,” she said.