Confronting environmental sickness: disease metaphors in ecological art

This article turns to a particular mode of analogy: the deployment of medical metaphors in feminist ecological art. It foregrounds ecofeminist artworks produced from the late twentieth century onwards to demonstrate how women artists were among the first to visualise the entanglements of human and environmental health, anticipating concerns that now occupy a central place in contemporary artistic and cultural discourse. Through metaphorical representations of environmental disease, these works interrogate entrenched cultural assumptions about medicine, care, vulnerability and the imagined boundaries of the body. Drawing from the visual and material lexicon of medicine, these artists deploy images of bleeding, open wounds, pathology slides, medicine capsules and intravenous drips to frame plants and landscapes as sick or injured bodies. Moving beyond simple lamentations of environmental damage and climate change, these disease metaphors recast the ailing environment as a site where anxieties about control, permeability and responsibility converge. They expose how we narrate damage, and who and what we imagine as worthy of care, at a critical moment when the health of the planet can no longer be imagined as separate from our own.