Artists are often called dreamers, sensitive, unconventional, and the ones who see life differently.
Sometimes that is said with admiration. Sometimes it is not.
For a long time, I underestimated what it meant to be an artist. I thought it was only about making pretty things. I didn’t fully understand that artists are also witnesses. That they pay attention to what the rest of us are too busy or too afraid to look at.
I’m still learning this. And the more I learn, the more I believe that artists are not just making art. They are making us more human.
Because World Creativity Day and Earth Day are coming up, I wanted to celebrate two artists whose work reminds us of something we urgently need right now. Our connection to the earth. To each other. To life beyond fear.
Ana Mendieta, the body and the earth as one
When I first came across Ana Mendieta’s work, it expanded my view of art and nature as one.
Ana was a Cuban-born artist who used her own body and the natural world as her medium. She pressed herself into earth, sand, water, and grass. She created silhouettes of her body in nature and let nature reclaim them. She believed in a universal energy running through all living beings, matter, space, and time.
Her work is not comfortable. It is not decorative. It is a conversation between a human body and the earth it came from.
Ana’s work continues to speak even though she is no longer with us. and what it says feels more relevant now than ever. That we are not separate from nature, we are one with nature, as shown below. Ana is becoming one with the tree.
Picture above: Ana Mendieta. Untitled: Silueta Series, Iowa From Silueta Works in Iowa, 1976-1978, 1976-78. Color photograph. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by the Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“The viewer of my work may or may not have had the same experience as myself. But perhaps my images can lead the audience to speculate on their own experiences of what they might feel I have experienced. Their minds can then be triggered so that the images I present retain some of the quality of the actual experience.”
She wasn’t asking us to understand her. She was asking us to feel something of our own. To let her images unlock a memory inside us of what it feels like to truly belong to this earth.
Carolina Caycedo,
the artist who listens to rivers
Carolina Caycedo is a Colombian, London-born, multidisciplinary artist who has spent over two decades doing something that most of us don’t think of as art. She researches and documents what happens to rivers, land, and communities when industrial projects take over natural systems. She makes that research visible. She turns it into something you can stand in front of and feel.
Her work asks a quiet but urgent question. What happens to us when we lose our relationship with the natural world? Not just environmentally, but spiritually, physically, as communities.
Writer Marissa Del Toro describes her work as revealing the interconnectedness between ourselves and the natural elements of rivers, stones, and trees, and extending the possibilities of how we co-exist within the natural world.
Photo above: Carolina Caycedo, River Book series, 2016. Installation view, 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. From left to right: Watu, Yaqui, Yuma, Elwha, and Iguaçu, all 2016. Marker on Canson paper; dimensions variable. Photo by: Ilana Bar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Via MCA Chicago.
The River Book series tells the stories of rivers through illustrations inspired by children’s books, a deliberate choice to make environmental urgency accessible to younger generations.
Carolina’s art is rooted in a deep respect for indigenous knowledge and a decolonial way of seeing the earth. Not as a resource. As a living system, we are part of.
Though their work is different, both Ana and Carolina are offering us the same invitation. To remember that we are not separate from the earth. That's how we treat the land is how we treat ourselves.
This makes me see artists as a gift to the world. They help us feel, see, and gain consciousness of who we are as we reflect, reconnect, and imagine new possibilities.
This Earth Day, I’m curious. Is there an artist whose work has shifted how you see the world? I’d love to know.
If you’ve been wanting to reconnect with your creativity, you can join my drawing community through the Stan Store link: https://stan.store/marulandaart or email me at claudia@marulandaart.com