Tom Morton

Saving nature, one artwork at a time

In the mid-1990s, during her early teenage years, Haley Mellin would often take off alone into the hills near her family home in San Anselmo, northern California, equipped with a sketch book and a set of watercolor paints. ‘When you’re a kid, going outdoors is truly spectacular,’ she says over a Zoom call from her current base in New Jersey. ‘There’s so much mystery in the natural world, so much that’s unknown. I’d sit there and make little observational paintings of the landscape, and I discovered that it was a good way to explore what I was looking at, and to experience my own thoughts.’ 
A self-described ‘curious person,’ whose socially conscious father encouraged her to engage in volunteer work from a young age, Mellin became fascinated by the fact that many of the local wild spaces she encountered, such as the Point Reyes National Seashore, only remained wild because ‘people in the past had the forethought’ to give them legal protection. Fast forward to the present day, and Mellin’s adolescent preoccupations have evolved into an artistic practice that encompasses a very 21st-century form of plein-air
painting, and ecological projects that not only address, but also measurably ameliorate, humanity’s exploitation and despoilment of the natural world.

Founded by Mellin in 2017, Art into Acres (AiA) is a volunteer-based, nonprofit initiative whose name neatly describes its purpose: to transform the proceeds from the sale of donated paintings, sculptures, and other artworks into acres of conserved land. If this sounds like a form of alchemy, or even a conceptual art piece, the reality is that AiA supports what is a lengthy, often arduous process, which includes advocacy, donor and stakeholder education, site mapping, biodiversity surveys, and many hours of complex legal work. 
Nevertheless, in collaboration with partners ranging from Indigenous communities to local NGOs to national governments, Mellin’s initiative has supported the permanent conservation of great swathes of wilderness across the Americas and Australia, with a focus on the cloud, rain, and boreal forests that are crucial to capturing and storing the carbon emissions that so threaten our shared Earth.&nbsp;Conservation partners are central to the work, and Mellin collaborates closely with Re:wild, Andes Amazon Fund, and the Wyss Foundation, the Wyss notably a lead funder of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.

During a 2023 Q&A with Mellin at the American Academy in Berlin, the director of the city’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Klaus Biesenbach, described her as a ‘one-person army’ in the work against looming environmental catastrophe, and stated that, were each individual on the planet to replicate her efforts, ‘we wouldn’t have a problem.’ If anything, this actually undersells Mellin’s impact. To date, AiA has supported the conservation of some 30.2 million acres (12.2 million hectares). What the artist has achieved is, by any measure, nothing short of extraordinary. 
A recent testimony to AiA’s support is the Parque Nacional Natural Serranía de Manacacías, a new national park in Colombia, teeming with anteaters and anacondas, savanna hawks and great horned owls. Its creation was made possible through the sale of a sculpture donated by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8052/Carol-Bove" target="_blank">Carol Bove</a>, one of a number of contemporary artists who have gifted works to land conservation through AiA, among them <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7870/Camille-Henrot" target="_blank">Camille Henrot</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/24191/Loie-Hollowell" target="_blank">Loie Hollowell</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6942/Jenny-Holzer" target="_blank">Jenny Holzer</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7139/Rashid-Johnson" target="_blank">Rashid Johnson</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7431/Robert-Longo" target="_blank">Robert Longo</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7878/Darren-Bader" target="_blank">Darren Bader</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/22032/Anicka-Yi" target="_blank">Anicka Yi</a> and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/19477/Dana-Schutz" target="_blank">Dana Schutz</a>. I suspect the fact that Mellin is an artist herself is what makes her so successful at communicating AiA’s mission to her peers – at demonstrating how an artwork measured in feet and inches can help protect many acres of vulnerable, biodiverse land. Her conversations with artist donors often take place during studio visits, which she describes as joyous. ‘We share our earliest experiences of the natural world, our thoughts on climate justice and individual activism,’ she says. ‘As a community of people, artists are very engaged.’

AiA also fiscally sponsors a number of organizations – Art+Climate Action, Artists Commit, BARDER.art, and Gallery Climate Coalition – that are working toward making the production and dissemination of art more sustainable, while Mellin has provided pro bono carbon-emissions assessments for museums across Europe and North America with the support of a grant from the Teiger Foundation. In 2017, away from the sometimes-rarefied environs of the art world, she and her brother Joe co-founded Conserve.org – an initiative that enables anybody who can spare USD 49 to fund the purchase of an acre of land in Oregon, which will be conserved in perpetuity. As the artist says, ‘My father taught us to be egalitarian. If you had a birthday party, you invited the whole class.’
How does Mellin conceptualize the relationship between land conservation and painting? For her, both a landscape and a work of art are ‘artifacts’ that should be protected long into the future. Such efforts may leave no visible trace on the artifact itself – Mellin finds that the most desirable outcome of the years of labor that feed into a land-conservation project is that ‘you go back to a place, and nothing has changed.’ Conservation, however, is not about stasis, but about keeping possibilities in play. Just as we do not know how the life forms that populate a landscape will eventually evolve, so we cannot anticipate how the artworks that hang in our museums will shape the visions of artists yet to be born.

For her 2022/23 solo exhibition at The Journal Gallery, New York, Mellin presented a suite of meditative gouache paintings of trees in a Guatemalan cloud forest supported by AiA, which she produced on site while sheltering beneath a rain-lashed bivouac. She chose her medium, she tells me, because of its non-toxicity, having once seen ‘an insect struggle through oil paint.’ Yet, gouache is also notably water-soluble, causing the moisture in the air to seep into her canvases, and making the ecosystem a collaborator in its own depiction. 
Unlike most traditional landscape paintings, these works do not employ a horizon line and, in contemplating them, it feels like we’re being absorbed into a verdant, aqueous, endlessly fertile world, where human concepts of beauty do not quite apply, and other, more ancient concerns abide. ‘It’s a 100-million-year-old forest,’ says the artist, ‘so, when you’re there, you’re confronted with a visual of time compounded. Painting while observing it, you can never get it right, but you can mark your presence looking.’

In late 2023, at Giovanni’s Room in Los Angeles, Mellin presented a series of large-scale charcoal drawings on primed canvas depicting a desolate landscape of scorched earth and broken, blackened trees. Based on images of Eastern Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion, these works are a reminder that the cost of war is measured not only in the loss of human lives, but whole ecologies. The artist is currently participating in ‘The Flesh of the Earth’ at Hauser & Wirth New York, a group exhibition curated by the writer Enuma Okoro that focuses on the human body’s intimate relationship with the rest of nature. Her contribution, Cerro Amay, Guatemala (2023), is a painting of a forest floor, strewn with rocks and fallen leaves. Looking at them, we can almost feel their textures beneath our feet. 
We might wonder how Mellin balances her conservation work with her painting. These, after all, are very different modes of being. One demands an unwavering focus on the outer world, while the other demands a turn inward, toward the self. ‘I think the interior is the exterior,’ says the artist, ‘and the exterior is the interior. The notion that I stop here and then everything else begins is a fallacy.’ In our age of crisis, these are words we should surely all heed.

Haley Mellin is an artist and conservationist based in New Jersey. Her work is on view in ‘The Flesh of the Earth,’ at <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1153/Hauser-Wirth" target="_blank">Hauser & Wirth</a> New York, February 1 to April 6, 2024. She has a solo show at Dittrich & Schlechtriem Berlin opening in April 2024.
Tom Morton is a writer, curator, and regular contributor to frieze and ArtReview based in Rochester, UK. 
Published on January 31, 2024.
Caption for full-bleed image:&nbsp;Courtesy Google Earth Engine, 2024.

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