Throughout art history, artists have explored the body as a subject and theme central to our understanding of social identity, including gender, sexuality and ethnicity. More recently, artists have used the body as a tool and artistic medium to explore the vast material world and our identity, with the body as our interface with this world (O’Reilly, 2009, 7). The environment has long interested artists as a powerful metaphor and source of innate beauty, particularly within 18th and 19th-century romanticised grandiose landscape paintings that conjured the sublime (O’Reilly, 2009, 113). Similarly, in contemporary art, the environment became a physical art object and medium with direct interventions and earthworks questioning environmental degradation through the Land Art and subsequent Environmental Art movements. In the 1970s, feminist artists, in particular, reclaimed the body as an artistic medium concurrent to the Land Artists’ environmental interventions. There was an inevitability that both these areas would cross over. A range of artists, including Land artists and feminist artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris, Charles Simonds, Judy Chicago, Rebecca Horn and Ana Mendieta, pioneered early earth-body works.
In the fifty years since artists began situating their and others’ bodies in the environment, how have earth-body artworks evolved? This text will analyse the work both formally (in terms of media) and conceptually (in terms of their artistic contemporaries, the development of critical theories and the changing social and environmental issues). This text will analyse and examine the autobiographical, art historical and relevant contextual factors that have influenced artists to create earth-body artworks. This will be realised primarily through the analysis of three key artists in the context of two ecological and social intellectual critiques. Firstly, by analysing the earth-body sculptures and performances of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973-80) through an ecofeminist lens. Secondly, by examining Beth Stephens’ and Annie Sprinkle’s Ecosexual movement and ecosexual earth-body performance Dirt Bed (2012) and feature film Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2014) that evolved from ecofeminist principles and in response to the ecofeminist critique. Thirdly and finally, by moving beyond Stephens’ and Sprinkle’s notion of ecosexuality to explore an expanded postcolonial approach within the most recent ecosexual exhibition Sex Ecologies (2021-22) featuring Alberta Whittle’s digital earth-body collage works alongside her established Business As Usual (2019) series and ongoing project Congregations (Creating Dangerously) (2021-22). This text will situate their works within the context of ecofeminism, ecosexuality and postcolonialism before comparing and contrasting their modes of embodiment. The principle aim of this text is to chart the evolution of how artists have considered ‘the body in the environment’ over the last fifty years.
*Part of the 2022-2023 Fine Art cohort
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