Season 2, Episode 12: Art Gives Ecological Grief a Body, with Daniela Molnar

Thomas and Panu were joined by artist and poet Daniela Molnar, who creates her paintings using scientific records of glacier retreat in the Cascade range and natural paints and pigments she gathers near her home and in her wilderness journeys. The trio discussed how art making is one way to “enfranchise” climate grief that otherwise goes unrecognized, where in Daniela’s case she confronts forces of grief and wonder, in dynamic interplay. “Making paint is a kind of ecology,” Daniela observed. When making your own pigment the “world becomes full of colors,” rocks and plants gain agency and different waters from rain or sea behave in a way that is very much alive. Daniela evoked the creative tension apparent in regeneration of damaged landscapes where a “wound is simultaneously an injury and a process of healing.”  “When we talk about non-resolution in a work of art and how it has that dynamic equilibrium, that's what beauty is. It's that tension. And the world is beautiful. You know, the world is incredibly beautiful. Even as it's incredibly wounded. And to allow ourselves to experience both fully is really a way to live in the world. And live our lives fully. And live in a way that moves us into different cultural territory that I think is essential.”