Ceramic and Climate Change

Pictured above is a porcelain ceramic sculpture by an artist named Kate MacDowell. She is known for blending humans and animals together to make her art thought provoking.

Her sculptures show her view on how we as humans senselessly damage our world usually with themes of climate change, pollution, and other subjects important to her. In this sculpture, a scene of vegetation and nature are depicted inside of a human brain.

The nature scene inside of the brain is very eye catching. There are trees, flowers, birds, and in particular a koala in the center. Koalas are native to Australia, and back in 2019, there was a major concern for koalas because of the wildfires wreaking havoc on their habitat in Australia. Climate change is the root of all wildfires and the koalas in Australia had to all go through these wildfires.

Holding the nature scene is a brain. The fact that the scene is inside a brain gives meaning and depth to how we as humans are responsible for our actions and how our actions can determine the future of this Earth.

The question posed by the sculpture is an interesting one.

Will we be responsible human beings and change our actions, or will we continue following the easy path of not changing until it is too late?

Another striking thing about this sculpture is that there is an ear but nothing else. This ear has significance and it is very artistic that MacDowell decided to leave only an ear instead of other head features. An ear hears things and then the brain processes what the ear hears. When you go through a forest, it is very loud because there’s a lot going on.

A forest is very lively and full of animals and organisms. There is a beauty in that because it's natural, and without all of the forest, there wouldn’t be any animals or trees, which means that there wouldn’t be noise, because nothing would be going on in a barren land.

This art piece has rhetorical devices in it, but the most prominent one is pathos. The overall art piece itself is a little shocking, because the nature scene inside a brain is not natural. That gives a new depth to it that makes people looking at it want to look at it more, and all pathos therefore becomes amplified.

The nature scene is pretty self explanatory, in that it gives the people who look at it a sense of warmth or happiness. Right after looking at the nature scene, people tend to look elsewhere and that will make them end up looking at the ear.

The ear seems out of place because nothing else of the head is there. This gives the person looking a sense of wonder why things aren’t making sense. I think that this was the artist’s intention, for people to see her work and to think about what the art means.

The sculpture pictured above may seem like just a nature scene in a brain on the surface, but the artist has a much deeper meaning in play for those who look beyond the nature scene and the brain.

She gives a message of warning about climate change and its disastrous effects it could have on Earth. It leaves us with the question asking if we as humans are willing to change our ways and listen to science.