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Nature and art are two threatened species that from the earliest times were revered and often intertwined, but in recent history have drifted apart and each suffered at the hands of social and political indifference. Historically in western culture, the church, as art's chief patron, ensured that nature assumed a symbolic rather than a central role in painting and sculpture, its beauty signifying evidence of divine power. With the rise of secular art over the last two centuries, nature's metaphorical role in art has become manifest in a diversity of art practice, from German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich to American installation artist James Turrell. Though no longer linked to religious doctrines, nature has been invoked as a vehicle of personal enlightenment, its portrayal in art designed to inspire a heightened awareness in the viewer.

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While oblique reference to the natural world is found in geometric abstraction of the Modernist era, it wasn't until the 1960s, when a renewed sociopolitical interest in the environment inspired a young generation of revolutionary artists, that nature again became valid subject matter in contemporary art. The land art movement of the 1960s, led by Richard Long, was, like the work of Turner over a century earlier, based on immersing oneself in the landscape. For forty years, Long has created performance-based 'landscape sculptures' in the English countryside and abroad, creating ephemeral works from natural materials sourced on his journeys into the land. Long's premise is to explore the variables of nature - transience and evolution, context and perception.

In Australia, 'land art' has an ancient history in Aboriginal culture, with knowledge of the land as depicted in art practice gained not only through oral histories, but, like Richard Long, by walking through ancestral lands. Yukultji Napangati is a young Aboriginal artist with a special insight into her native land. In 1984, aged fourteen, she was amongst a family group of nine who walked out of the Central Desert region west of Lake Mackay, where they had been living a traditional lifestyle entirely devoid of contact with the outside world. Napangati and her family were confronted for the first time by white settlement when they arrived in the Western Australian town of Kiwirrkura.

Napangati is one of the youngest artists with the Papunya Tula cooperative and her paintings are inextricably linked to nature. She first paints her canvases earth red, the ground of the painting matching the ground of the desert country that she calls home. This base is sometimes overlaid with a black ground. The earth and the body become a single, integrated ground. For a non-Indigenous audience, the coherency of the surface's all-over patterning is reminiscent, like the work of much Western Desert Aboriginal painting, of modern abstraction. But Napangati paints an insider's view of the land, conveying a deep empathy with place and emphasising the process of painting from within her lifetime experience of that place and its stories.

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In the last twenty years, certain curators have attempted to bring nature into the mainstream discourse with exhibitions that focus on the significance of land and place in exploring perceptions of cultural identity. 'Magiciens de la Terre' curated by Jean Hubert Martin in 1989 at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, was the first major international exhibition to exhibit the art of 'primitive' societies alongside the work of mainstream western artists. Though not entirely persuasive, the premise was a shared connection to the natural cycles of the different environments in which we live. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 'Spirit + Place', curated by Nick Waterlow and Ross Mellick in 1996, presented an historical overview of spiritual connections to place, overwhelmingly to land, in art from or about Australia. More recently the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, 'A Grain of Dust, A Drop of Water', took a relatively didactic approach to issues of nature and the environment. International artists such as Anish Kapoor, Lucy Orta and Marc Quinn created installation-based works that referred to global environmental issues, but it was the South Korean artists working in collaboration with local environmental activists who created the most pertinent and provocative works.

Internationally, it is the works that refer to a specific place or situation that are best heard in terms of the environmental debate. Though there have also been examples of very poignant works based on a more abstract premise. Some artists, for example, use elements of nature - light, atmosphere, natural materials - to confront pressing environmental issues. The work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has been prominent over the last decade. His installations optically seduce viewers to facilitate a psycho-sensual experience. In Double sunset, 2000, the artist erected a glowing yellow egg on Utrecht's city skyline, which shone in tandem with the setting sun in the background. In The weather project, 2003, he transformed the cavernous Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, into a golden mist, a huge sun motif emanating a haze that was utterly seductive visually and sensually. The work exuded an atmosphere of meditative calm but also made reference to issues shrouded in fear and anxiety: the parable of Icarus who flew too close to the sun and, of particular contemporary relevance, the spectre of global warming.

Eliasson's Tate project represented a shift to a more politically engaged interest in nature by contemporary artists. In her new film-based work, Black wind, 2006, Australian artist Susan Norrie uses archival footage of the Maralinga atomic tests undertaken by the British in the South Australian desert in the 1950s and 1960s. The Aboriginal people who witnessed the atomic testing described it as 'black mist', which Norrie sees as a metaphor for the profound psychological as well as environmental devastation caused not only then, but more generally by colonisation and other dark forces of human existence.

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Janet Laurence is one of Australia's leading artists and her work, like Yonetani's, combines scientific research and political urgency in installations that are poetically - of particular importance for Laurence - connected to the cultural context in which they exist. Her practice explores the nebulous intersection between the natural world, cultural history and personal memory, creating sensory links between public and private spaces, natural and built environments. For Sydney's Olympic Park, she created a water-based installation that restored life to the neglected natural setting, a toxic swamp. Drawing on her interest in science, alchemy and environmental sustainability, the work was conceived as a metaphor for the remediation of water that was crucial to the site's Olympic-driven redevelopment. A series of transparent poles are sited at various heights along the waterway, which the artist surrounded with Bulrush and Casuarina, plants that in the past would have grown there in abundance.

For Sydney's Object Gallery in 2006, Laurence created a floating, spiral-shaped shelf on which, arranged by species and wearing their museum tags, an array of native Australian birds were laid. Birdsong (made in collaboration with Ross Gibson) was a poignant and timely gesture, one that alluded not only to threatened species, but to the disastrous impact of humankind's ultimately futile attempts to organise and control nature.

Brisbane artist Madeleine Kelly also brings a lyrical approach to artmaking with political purpose. Again, the futility of attempting to control nature is a recurrent theme. Ground control, 2005, refers to the threats we face from oil wars and global warming. Vegetation, water and oil are joined in an apocalyptic whirlpool, the inevitable result of society's self-destructive path. Symbols from the Carboniferous era, the ancient club moss, have merged with those of their modern exploiters (Shell Oil) in a fatal swirl. The diagrammatic nature of this painting reminds us that the earth's environment is subject to change - specifically, in today's context, climate change - and is ultimately cyclical in nature. Madeleine Kelly's paintings describe human vulnerability in the face of environmental collapse
As environmental issues rapidly assume centre stage in world politics, nature is once again emerging as a predominant theme in global contemporary art. An interest in the natural world - its fragility and exploitation at the hands of human society - appears across a number disciplines, even those at the at the most traditional end of the spectrum, such as painting. The use of archetypal and mythological symbols remind us that the world revolves on forces greater than politics, and that there exists universal truths over which we have no control.
 
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the article in full in the March 2007 issue of Art & Australia.