What is Environmental Art? 7 Iconic Environmental Artworks You Should Know About

If you’ve ever wondered how to bring climate, ecology, and creativity into one conversation—environmental art is a great place to start. It’s not just about landscapes or nature-themed works. Environmental art includes painting, sculpture, installation, and performance that reflect on our relationship with the world around us, often in ways that are poetic, critical, or deeply grounded in place.

The term can feel broad—and it is. It includes everything from 19th-century cloud studies to contemporary works that challenge global extraction systems. In this post, I’ll walk you through what environmental art means, how it intersects with other movements like land art and eco art, and share seven powerful environmental art examples that can expand how we think about art’s role in the world.

If you’re an educator, this is also an incredible space for cross-curricular learning. Environmental art invites science, geography, ethics, and visual culture into the same conversation. I’ve included links to articles on art and activism, why we teach art, and how to use art to explore difficult topics to help you bring these ideas into the classroom.

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What is Environmental Art?

Environmental art is not a fixed category but a shifting field shaped by how we define both “art” and “environment.” Rather than a singular style or movement, the term refers to a wide range of practices that engage directly with natural, atmospheric, or built environments—sometimes through representation, sometimes through action or experience.

At its broadest, environmental art includes traditional landscape painting, process-based installation, ecological activism, and ephemeral interventions in the natural world. What ties these works together is their attention to the environment as subject, medium, or setting—often all three at once.

The field encompasses works that observe and record natural phenomena (as in the atmospheric studies of Constable or Monet), as well as those that intervene, provoke, or decay within a landscape (as in Richard Long’s walks or Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas).

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Beyond “Landscape Art”

Historically, representational landscape painting—especially in Europe—served to frame nature as a passive, distant subject, to be viewed and appreciated. But from the early 19th century onward, artists like John Constable and J.M.W. Turner began to reject the picturesque in favor of direct engagement with environmental process. Constable’s cloud studies, for example, were not just aesthetic experiments—they were empirical records of meteorological data, sometimes annotated with time of day, wind direction, and weather conditions.

This shift toward environmental observation marked a turning point: the landscape was no longer an image to be composed, but a dynamic system to be understood.

From Object to Process

In the late 1960s, this attentiveness to environment deepened into a more performative and immersive relationship. Rather than depicting the environment, artists began working in it, often outside the gallery, using natural materials or working directly with land and weather. This marked the rise of what Thornes calls nonrepresentational or “performative environmental art”—a category that includes works like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), James Turrell’s Skyspaces, and Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967).

Crucially, this new approach challenged not only formal conventions, but also assumptions about where art happens, who it’s for, and how it interacts with the world. It blurred boundaries between sculpture, ecology, and geography.

At the same time, it raised questions: Can environmental art cause environmental harm? What does it mean to extract materials, bulldoze land, or wrap entire coastlines in fabric under the banner of “nature”?

Experiencing Environment: From Sight to Sensation

While landscape art relied primarily on visual representation, environmental art often appeals to multiple senses. Influenced by phenomenology—particularly thinkers like Merleau-Ponty and Tim Ingold—many environmental artists and scholars emphasize experience over image. In this view, the environment is not a scene we look at but a space we inhabit. Wind, sound, moisture, air pressure, and temperature become part of the artwork.

James Turrell’s installations, for instance, do not depict the sky—they frame it, altering how we perceive light and space. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) created a vast, collective environment of fog and light that viewers physically entered.

This embodied approach reflects a deeper shift: from the landscape as visual backdrop to the environment as a lived, dynamic, and often precarious system. It also underscores a central tension in environmental art: the desire to make the invisible visible—whether it’s climate systems, ecological decay, or our own embeddedness within nature.

John Constable – Cloud Studies (1821–22)

Between 1821 and 1822, John Constable painted over a hundred studies of the sky, many of them from Hampstead Heath, often with notes describing wind direction, temperature, and time of day. He was deeply influenced by the science of his time and treated clouds not as compositional elements but as central subjects worthy of serious attention.

These paintings reflect a meticulous effort to understand the movement of weather and light, and they reveal a sensitivity to the atmosphere that was rare in landscape painting. Far from being generic or idealized, his skies document real meteorological conditions and show an early attempt to bring observation, emotion, and environment into a single artistic language.

Agnes Denes – Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982)

In the spring of 1982, Agnes Denes planted two acres of wheat on a landfill site in Lower Manhattan, just steps from Wall Street. Over four months, she cultivated 1,000 pounds of grain in a space otherwise marked for speculation and development.

The work was labor-intensive and intentionally temporary. It posed a direct question: what does it mean to grow food on some of the most expensive land in the world?

Denes’s wheatfield was not meant to last. It drew attention to the contradictions of land use, economic priorities, and ecological neglect in urban planning. The piece is widely recognized as one of the earliest and most powerful examples of environmental art that intersects with systems thinking, addressing sustainability, inequality, and the ethics of progress without offering a simple resolution.

Ana Mendieta – Silueta Series (1973–1980)

Ana Mendieta created the Silueta Series over the course of several years, imprinting or carving the shape of her own body into earth, grass, mud, flowers, and even fire. These works were documented in photographs and videos, but the gestures themselves were ephemeral—washed away by water, eroded by wind, or consumed by flame.

Working between Cuba and the United States, Mendieta drew on Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and ritual practices to explore themes of exile, belonging, and the relationship between body and land.

Her art challenged the distance between viewer and environment, insisting on direct, embodied presence. In doing so, she expanded environmental art beyond Western land art’s monumental scale or formal minimalism, introducing feminist and decolonial perspectives that have reshaped how artists engage with nature, place, and disappearance.

Andy Goldsworthy – Rain Shadows / Icicle Star (1980s–present)

Andy Goldsworthy’s work is grounded in direct interaction with natural materials—stones, leaves, water, ice, and light. He often creates his sculptures on-site, using only what is available and never leaving a permanent mark.

In Rain Shadows, he lies on the ground during a rainstorm, leaving behind the outline of his body once he stands. In Icicle Star, he coaxes delicate patterns from frozen water, built with his hands in cold air. These pieces last minutes or hours and their disappearance is part of the work itself.

Goldsworthy approaches nature not as raw material to shape but as a collaborator. His practice emphasizes sensitivity, process, and impermanence. His work has become a reference point for artists seeking sustainable, site-responsive ways to create without extraction or spectacle.

James Turrell – Skyspaces (1970s–present)

Skyspaces are enclosed chambers designed by James Turrell, each with a carefully measured aperture in the ceiling that opens directly to the sky. The structure is engineered to control ambient light and influence how viewers perceive color, depth, and space.

The experience changes depending on time of day and weather conditions. What might appear as a flat patch of blue can shift into an illusion of weight or motion as the surrounding walls respond to subtle changes in light.

Turrell’s work draws attention to the atmosphere as something we inhabit but rarely notice. He uses architecture and light to heighten awareness of the environment, focusing on how our senses shape our understanding of place.

Otobong Nkanga – Carved to Flow (2017–ongoing)

Carved to Flow is a long-term project centered on soap-making. Nkanga begins with raw ingredients like palm kernel oil, clay, and charcoal, sourced from regions historically shaped by colonial extraction. The work follows these materials through networks of trade and production, connecting land use, human labor, and the politics of sustainability. The project also funds agricultural and educational initiatives in areas affected by extractive industries.

Nkanga treats environmental questions as inseparable from economic and historical ones. She focuses on how natural resources are distributed, who benefits from them, and how local systems of care and knowledge are disrupted.

The work challenges Western definitions of sustainability by foregrounding lived realities in postcolonial contexts.

Installed in the vast Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, The Weather Project used light, mirrors, and mist to simulate the presence of a low-hanging sun inside the museum. The space was filled with haze, and a large semi-circle of yellow light was reflected on the mirrored ceiling to form a complete sun. Visitors lay on the floor, looked upward, and saw themselves in the artificial glow.

Eliasson’s work focused attention on how we experience weather and climate as shared phenomena. By recreating the atmosphere indoors, he shifted the viewer’s role from observer to participant. The installation coincided with growing public discourse on climate change, but it offered no slogans or directives. Instead, it created a space where perception, collectivity, and environment came together. It highlighted how deeply weather shapes human behavior and how rarely we pause to consider our relationship to it.

Read also:

• How to Use Art to Discuss Tough Topics 
• Color Theory for Kids: How to Make It Fun, Personal, and Meaningful

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