Green is the colour of loss: How artists are looking closely at climate anxiety and environmental grief

Across India’s major art platforms, a stubborn question has been asserting itself repeatedly: What does it mean to make art in the midst of an ecological crisis? When statistics seem impersonal, and advocacy sounds alarmist, artists step in, offering ways to process what is going on.

RB Shajith’s 50-ft-long painting, which is part of his series Wiping Out , is on display at the KochiMuziris Biennale in Kerala, which will be on till March 31. Using oil, acrylic and watercolour on wooden boards and canvas, it is built from his recollections of growing up in the Malabar region. It reframes the forest not as a resource to be exploited but an ecosystem to be revered. His art invites the viewer to get lost in the wilderness. With green spaces disappearing rapidly, his work is a plea to pause and prevent further damage in the name of development. It allows the viewer to mourn in solidarity with nature. The scale of the work might look exaggerated at first but it reflects the scale of loss that it bears witness to.

Eco Crisis


A similar approach was evident in Santanu Debnath’s exhibition “Morphology of Water” at the Emami Art gallery. After completing his art education in Kolkata, when he returned to live at his village, Betpukur, about 100 km away, he was saddened by the declining role of ponds and reservoirs in structuring communal life. His Construction over Waterbodies , an acrylic painting on canvas, is a visual elegy bemoaning the distance that has crept into the relationship between humans and nature.

With American psychologist Thomas Doherty emphasising the impact of ecological crisis on mental health, it is critical to understand how artists are developing their practice in the face of climate anxiety and environmental grief arising from the destruction of livelihoods, homes and landscapes.

The harm caused to land, water and air eventually affects humans. At the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in December, Delhi-based photographer Chinky Shukla’s project“When Buddha Stopped Smiling” documented the human and environmental costs of the 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests in Pokhran. She went there in 2015 to understand the impact of nuclear radiation. Her photographs of people living close to the India-Pakistan border draw attention to how narratives of scientific progress and national security can endanger human life.

Tremors from the tests conducted in 1998 “made deep cracks in their mud huts, burst the village water tanks, contaminated ponds and farmland”. She met people facing severe health issues, including cancer patients, women who had miscarriages and parents of children with cerebral palsy and cognitive disorders. Her work was exhibited as part of the Serendipity x Arles Grant supported by the French Institute in India. She says, “Nearly 20 years after the Smiling Buddha mission, the villages near Pokhran have joined a tragic global circle of residents of nuclear test sites that grapple every day with the aftermath of radiation. The test got India the world’s ear, but the residents of these villages are still waiting to be heard.”

Hope sprouts

This grim reality was countered with a hopeful vision at Art Mumbai, an art fair held at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in November. Vadodarabased Tito Stanley SJ’s paintings Flowers from A Dream and Midnight Love seemed to depict nature in a magnificent, almost prayerful way, with the human figure reduced to a speck in them, inviting viewers to adopt a stance of awe and humility while considering their place in the vast cosmos they are part of.

Meanwhile, Delhi-based Digbijayee Khatua’s paintings Moments between the Walls and Stories Growing Through Windows at the same fair, put the spotlight on feats of human architecture, revealing how barren everything looks when homes are made of just cement and concrete until the plant and animal kingdom declare their presence with monkeys trying to sneak into homes and plants trying to grow out of crevices. This is irony at its finest, making viewers ref lect on how humans might be seen as intruders from the perspective of other species.

As Mukul Sharma, professor of environmental studies at Ashoka University, has pointed out, Indian environmental discourse tends to obfuscate the centrality of caste in determining how waste is handled and who handles it. Thankfully, Delhi-based artist Niroj Satpathy’s installations at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale go straight to the heart of the matter due to his five-year stint as a night supervisor at the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s Solid Waste Management Department. Using discarded objects found in garbage dumps and landfills to create installations, collages and archives, he challenges ideas of what is valuable and what needs to be thrown away. Apart from holding up a mirror to consumption and excess, he also shows a way out of despair, celebrating human creativity.

The writer is a Mumbai-based art critic.