Takayuki Hori’s intriguing project Oritsunagumono uses x-rays of endangered birds folded origami-style to call attention to the amount of waste discharged into the ocean and its effects on the wildlife. The translation of the title of his project means “folded and connected”. 

Beautifully heartbreaking: Industrial Scars by J. Henry Fair. This project documents the damage caused by industrial pollution, but it also captures how toxic waste can produce unnaturally vivid colors and abstract patterns.

Anthropologist Felix Pharand’s amazingly beautiful diagrams transcend the realm of mere infographic.

These silvery threads stretching around the dark globe create a dramatic spider’s web showing the patterns of our global sprawl.

The stunning images are the result of 13 years of devotion by Canadian anthropologist Felix Pharand who uses them to show how human technologies such as data cables, aeroplanes and roads are colonising the surface of our planet.

Using an ordinary home PC, Pharand input data from agencies such as the Geospatial Intelligence Agency and Atmospheric Administration to create accurate illustrations of how humans have ‘domesticated’ our planet - superimposing the data on images of the earth’s cities lit up at night.

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Exposure by Antony Gormley

Gormley explains his project:

My concept of how sculpture works in the landscape is that it is a still point in a moving world. The whole idea of EXPOSURE is that this work, made at a particular time, rooted to ground, reacts over time to the changing environment. One of the known environmental changes that is happening is the rising of the sea level through global warming. It is critical to me that at the time of its making this work reacts with the viewer, the walking viewer, on the top of the polder and that the surface that the viewer stands on is the surface that the work stands on. The work cannot have a plinth. Over time, should the rising of the sea level mean that there has to be a rising of the dike, this means that there should be a progressive burying of the work.

This impressively large recreation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in the Arctic Sea was made by artist John Quigley in collaboration with Greenpeace. It will slowly melt away over the coming years until barely anything is left.

Greenpeace said they designed the art to represent how ‘climate change is eating into the body of our civilisation’.

The environmental campaigners claim that this September could mark the lowest sea ice levels on record. They say that world leaders need to take urgent action on climate change.‘We came here and created The Melting Vitruvian Man , recreating da Vinci’s famous sketch of the human body,’ Mr Quigley  said.

‘When Davinci did this sketch it was the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the dawn of this innovative age that continues to this day, but our use of fossil fuels is threatening that.’

Mary Edna Fraser uses the process of batik silk dying to tell the story of climate change in both pictures and process. You can find out more about the project here.