10 Artists Creating Recycled & Eco-Conscious Art

With sustainability and the concern over the climate crisis increasingly entering the artistic discourse, the question of sustainable art is now ever-present. In light of ecological art, we turn to artists who engage in sustainable artistic practices to tackle the urgency of climate change.

Having waste and the absurd volume in which it is being made as one of the main concerns around the act of consumption and creating art, many artists now turn to more environmentally conscious ways of being creative. In honor of Earth Day, The Artling showcases 10 artists who work with recycled material, creating eco-conscious art.

Fuen Chin

Fuen Chin is a Malaysian artist who takes inspiration from horticulture, a nostalgic reflection of her childhood. Her works tell compelling stories using her visions of plants that provide endless inspiration for calligraphical floral paintings. In Lamella V and Petal 1, the artist created figurative mixed-media paintings, promoting the merging of non-traditional materials with traditional. Having seen the fabric waste piled up into huge mountains, the project up-cycles fabric waste and yarn ends from fabric landfills in China and India to create a beautiful new painting.  

Jennifer Bell

Australian artist Jennifer Bell frequently works with recycled paper and breathes new light into the material to create a masterpiece. Blue Lake and Day Misty Lake are inspired by the New Zealand landscape and are made up of recycled security envelopes lining with layers of texture, lace and color washes that formed the lake. Bell is known for her highly decorative paintings and paper weavings highlighting the beauty in the ordinary. Her works explore patterns and visual perception influenced by her experience with a neuro-ophthalmological condition which makes her see patterned dots in her visual field.  

Zoltan Gerliczki

In the ‘Broken Planet’ series by Zoltan Gerliczki, the artist creates 13 ‘planets’ based on common human feelings or behaviors by photographing various shreds of colored glass and other detritus he picked up on the streets of Atlanta during the lockdown. The artist then reassembles these pieces of unwanted materials in his studio to symbolize the current environmental and political issues the world is facing. The artist contends that the most pressing questions of the times are about us and the future of our culture and planet.

Leticia de Prado

Leticia de Prado is a Spanish artist who is known for creating Picassoesque artworks from everyday used and mostly disposed items, bringing them back in glitter and glamour. She is best known for her extraordinary, recycled collage monumental artworks on discarded cargo wood pallets indulging in various uncommon media including dried tree branches, steel bars and anything the artist can find in the trash, transforming them into luxurious works of art. The sustainable artist is an accomplished painter whose portraits are surreal with a glow of elegance through her ingenious use of unusual elements.

Aphra Shemza

Aphra Shemza is a UK-based multimedia artist whose works explore Modernism, her Islamic heritage, sustainable practice and creatine art for all. D2/D3 Hybrid is part of the Diffuser series where the light sculptures are made from recycled lighting fixtures into an interactive artwork. The pieces are sound-reactive, using a microphone to collect sound data which is then converted into a light animation. The light sculptures respond to the sound a viewer creates and also react to live or recorded music. The works in the series engage the viewer immediately as there is a direct relationship to the sound they are producing and creating their own art piece with the lights.

OVSKA

OVSKA (Anna Wieckowska) is a Polish artist living and creating art in Berlin, Germany. In FADE INTO YOU and LET ME GO, the artist references humans and our interpersonal relationships. The works are part of a series of paper artworks depicting everyday people in various shapes and arrangements. The medium of choice is cut-out pieces of paper that are a few decades old, vintage, new, and recycled material. The artist is constantly searching for new meanings of craft and shifting her focus to fine art.

TOMAAS .

Photographer TOMAAS . captures the ethereal beauty of a woman adorned with disposable everyday plastic items such as plastic bottles, plastic bags and plastic straws. The idea behind this photographic journey is to explore and demonstrate the beauty and artistic potential of both natural and artificial objects. The recycled plastic worn by the model marks a significant symbol of versatility and necessity in our lives. The material is one that is most used by society and the images are an exceptional artistic depiction of plastic awareness.

Nanaki Singh

During the COVID-19 lockdown, artist Nanaki Singh turned her bathroom into a mini darkroom with chemicals she could procure. The artist experiments between cyanotype print and painting which the artist explains brought back routine and discipline during an unprecedented time. Through her exploration of the artistic process, cyanotype became the blueprint for Singh’s work. The big piles of delivery packaging have become a playground. Collecting bubble wrap, cardboard, recycled paper, and thermocol has become part of her creative process. The results are abstract forms, interesting textures and shapes that carve out a new language between light and color.

Jasna Barisic

Jasna Barisic is a Croatian visual fine artist who creates eco-conscious sculptural paintings. Contemplative space no. 2 is part of the Metamorphosis of Nature series which explores the themes of the coexistence of man and nature. Nature is the artist’s greatest source of inspiration and ideas as well as the artist’s preferred place for contemplation. The artwork itself is made of discarded paper which Barisic recycled herself. The artist is known to create artistic expressions using recycled materials and arranging them in indefinite orders to give the impression of a multidimensional space on the canvas.

Olga Radionova

The Kyiv city and Paris sculptures by Olga Radionova are part of the artist’s Goroda Series. The artist works with textures and different materials to create a piece of art that reflects the hills and nature in her native city of Kyiv and the stone facades, the sun reflecting off the windows, and chestnuts in Paris in the crisp October air. The artist works from observations of her city and her personal memories using a combination of colors and recycled fabrics, bringing discarded material back to life.

Browse the full sustainable collection here.