New Art Installation Examines the Aesthetics and Academic Importance of the World’s Oceans
Artwork by artist Sukey Bryan highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to addressing complex issues like climate change.
Sukey Bryan is making waves. The nationally recognized artist was welcomed to Encina Commons for a joint reception with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Global Studies (SGS), where several pieces of Bryan’s work were put on display in the Moghadam Atrium.
Speaking to the guests, Bryan expressed her thanks for the opportunity to share her work with the Stanford community. “I’m so honored to have my artwork in this space,” she told the gathering. “It’s an exciting opportunity for an artist to make work that’s in a place where there’s so much interdisciplinary work going on, especially around climate issues and all the different ways it’s touching our lives.”
Bryan’s artistic work has always been deeply connected to the environment and the elements. Whether working with pen and ink on paper or in large public installations that span buildings, the purpose of her work always comes back to raising climate awareness and exploring humanity’s spiritual connection with nature.
Donna Norton, a friend of the artist, commented, “Sukey is a committed environmentalist, but her paintings do not preach. [They] transcend nationality and evoke the timeless tectonic forces that either can bring people together, or pull us apart.”
The installation in the Encina Commons atrium includes several pieces from her “Sea Water” collection, as well as selections from her “Rain” series. Additional artwork from her “Iceberg” and “Glacier Water” collections can be found throughout Encina Hall and Encina Commons.
In a prior interview given in conjunction with the release of her 2013 “Glacier Visions” exhibition in Washington D.C., Bryan explained the connection between her art and the environment:
“I am passionately concerned about climate change . . . The disastrous effects of climate change are a worry to every community. This realization is a marked shift in human understanding of our place in the world. Both our power over the environment and our dependence is brought to a sharp focus in the problems we are starting to see in sea-rise, drought, superstorms, water issues, and stresses on wildlife populations. Ideas about power and fragility are a theme in my work. I hope we can turn the tide. We’ve got to slow the tide, at least.”
Those themes of power and fragility echo the work many scholars at Stanford Global Studies and the Freeman Spogli Institute are undertaking on climate change and climate-related issues.
Staying with the theme of water and oceans, Dr. Grant Parker, the Interim Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of SGS, shared how projects like the Oceanic Imaginaries initiative are striving to understand the complexities of climate change and related environmental issues through a holistic lens that includes the humanities and history alongside science and technology.
“When the possibility to host Sukey’s exhibit came up, we jumped at that chance because of the work we’ve been doing through the Oceanic Imaginaries project,” said Parker. “Two thirds of the Earth’s surface is water. The ocean provides so much to our materialistic and intellectual world both now and throughout history.”
Parker explained the value art like Bryan’s brings to academic study of the ocean and work like the Oceanic Imaginaires initiative. “The boundaries of the ocean are never distinct; there is an eternal motion of currents there. But the intellectual inquiries surrounding these waters are often confined to specific topics, specific historical periods, and to specific geographical regions. Art and artists help push us out of that rigidity and to encourage and inspire us to think about what connects the various parts of our ocean-human experience.”
The goal of the Oceanic Imaginaries project is to bring together diverse methodological tools, disciplinary orientations, and strategies of inquiry in a way that transcends traditional scholastic barriers and invigorates future studies of the global oceans.
Dr. Parker encouraged the reception attendees to think similarly beyond the normal narratives of study and inquiry. “How might de-centering land generate and complement other modes of rethinking and reorganizing power? What can the ocean teach us about how we think about flow and the currents that bring us together and the scale of global connectedness?”
“These are very fascinating stories to tell,” Parker continued, “and we are very grateful for the opportunity to pursue something that would not have been possible without the encouragement to think in an interdisciplinary fashion and to do together what no one of us could have done on our own.”
Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, whole-heartedly agrees. “It has been so interesting to hear more about all the fantastic things being done here at Encina, and we need to encourage more of it, and more collaboration,” he said.
As for Sukey Bryan’s future projects, she plans to continue exploring the themes of nature and its many facets.
“I still have real joy and appreciate the challenge of trying to figure out how I’m going to translate a particular element or substance into paint. Lately I’ve been doing these pond images, which are very humble and focus mostly on the water and leaves and how those are microcosms of life. But I’ve also just finished a woods image that’s just kind of wacky, and I’m not quite sure what it means. So maybe there are some more wacky things on the way, too!”
The Moghadam Atrium at Encina Commons is open to the public during standard business hours, Monday through Friday, except for holidays.
