ABSTRACT
In the face of climate catastrophe, many artists are attempting to recalibrate our senses so that we might be able to imagine a world where attuned interconnectedness is the guiding principle: a world which centres care. Through art-making processes and artworks that nurture deep listening and inter-species communication, which often invoke the wisdom of First Nations peoples and at times entail projects of environmental reclamation, artists model ways of caring for ecological systems, and of cultivating a broader ethics of sustainability, through aesthetic languages. In so doing, they contribute to the development of care aesthetics. This chapter argues for care aesthetics in the realm of the Anthropocene through exploring the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña and Australian Indigenous artist Megan Cope. Vicuña describes her process as ‘attending to that which is around us…to the things that you love’, attention that she has trained on the damaged water systems of her native Chile. Cope notes that her artwork of regenerative aquaculture, in response to the cultural and environmental devastation caused by oyster extraction since colonisation, is ‘not for us’ but ‘for Country, for the oysters’.
