Seiko Harima

About

Seiko Harima was born in S. Korea and lives and works in Japan, England, and the United States. Seiko is a contemporary artist with demonstrated skills in the methods of contemporary art (e.g., painting, drawing, and sustainable sculpture). Her primary artistic practice is painting, and she seeks to express the beauty of nature, through the power of colour, most often using oil and charcoal on canvas. In her paintings, she often takes inspiration from a real scene, mass media events, or from her imaginary world. Her artistic experience includes solo and group exhibitions, at international venues.

Her research project at the Royal College of Art investigated the use of visual art for communicating climate change by preparing oil and charcoal on canvas landscape paintings. The key objective of these paintings was to evoke a significant emotional response in the audience, such that they reflect on climate change. Each painting’s concept and composition were developed by questioning: how to express atmospheric effects; how paintings raise societal awareness; and what art reveals about our influence on the Earth’s climate.

The project climate change artworks show the dynamic interaction of the atmosphere with the landscape. The process for capturing this atmospheric state, was achieved by control of the fluidity of the painting media, and its application. The fluid-like nature of the atmosphere’s motion is forever captured on the canvas, once the painting media has dried. The colour palette used in these paintings was often highlighted with red and pink, to evoke a strong sense of warmth.

When viewing a painting, our minds are free to imagine what our eyes take in, and our imagination about what we see in front of us, is truly set free. Our emotional engagement, and emotional response, to the artwork are unconstrained and we are free to reflect on everything that the artwork is trying to express. While the artist may have a particular concept in mind when creating the work, the audience patrons who view the artist’s work may see an alternate vision. In creating her paintings, Seiko tries to imagine how the paintings might communicate to the audience, in ways that she cannot initially imagine, in her mind.

Abstract

Global warming is of anthropogenic origin (human-caused), due to excess greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. To avert a global warming-driven climate apocalypse requires a transition to renewable energy sources. Achieving this goal will require effective, behavior-changing communication, across all levels of society. This project investigated the efficacy of visual art for communicating climate change by preparing two-dimensional oil on canvas landscape paintings, and each painting’s concept and composition were developed by questioning: how to express atmospheric effects; how paintings raise societal awareness; and what art can reveal about the influence of humans on the Earth’s climate. Exhibition quality paintings were prepared and displayed, and the artworks engaged viewers by expressing the environmental impacts of climate change: global warming, wildfires, glacial melting, sea level rise, and climate migration. The research conducted shows that art is effective for communicating the impact of anthropogenic climate change.

Motivation

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns. According to the United Nations (UN), climate change is the defining issue of our time, and its impacts are global in scope and unprecedented in scale.

As an artist, one of the key objectives of artistic expression is communication. We know that the use of fossil fuels is problematic, yet still we continue. Can an artist contribute to the subject of climate change communication? How can the artist who paints landscape scenes represent the effects of climate change on the landscape? Given the proliferation of digital imagery presented online, which instantly shows the impacts of climate change-related events, how do these images compare to the static scenes portrayed in an oil on canvas landscape painting? The impacts of climate change drive extremes in the climate; higher temperatures, along with bitter cold spells that result in tremendous amounts of winter snowfall. The impacts of climate change are all due to a common thread, global warming. Thus, one aspect of the work conducted in this thesis was to artistically represent the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this project, the visual arts and the field of science meet, with the primary objective of using oil on canvas landscape paintings to communicate the effects of climate change. The paintings seek to engage the public to invoke new ideas and new ways of thinking about the subject of global warming-driven climate change. Following from this primary thesis objective, substantial research and planning were done on how to use contemporary oil painting methods, such that an oil on canvas painting effectively represents the effects of global warming-driven climate change. The key metric was to evoke a significant emotional response in the audience, such that they reflect on climate change. Time is of the essence.