Houston-based artist Cindee Klement depicts otherwise invisible systems and their interconnections to encourage local ecological recovery in the Energy Capital of the World.
Houston, Texas | cindeeklement.com | @cindeeklementart
“‘Start where you are,’” says artist Cindee Klement, quoting one of her favorite environmental writers, Judith Schwartz. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems we face—late capitalism, climate crisis, mass extinction—so Klement has turned her focus to her immediate environment of Houston, Texas.
The nation’s fourth-largest city and a global center for the oil and gas industry, Houston is situated in a major migratory pathway for birds and butterflies. Transforming and regenerating the landscape of Houston, from asphalt and concrete to biodiverse and green, could make a tremendous impact and, as Klement puts it, “fast-forward ecological recovery.” Through her research-based art practice, which manifests in mixed media, sculpture, and printmaking, Klement aims to depict otherwise invisible systems and their interconnections—natural, social, and economic.
Klement stresses this idea in the sculpture Interdependence (2024) with a column of Texas-stamped bricks holding up a delicate bell jar containing a still-life composition of shells, butterflies, a bird nest, and other natural elements. At the very top sits a small globe bank, emphasizing the links between local actions and global consequences.
To many, the butterfly will bring up associations of chaos theory and the “butterfly effect”; for Klement, it also represents the predominant feelings of eco-anxiety among younger generations who have grown up under the weight of climate catastrophe while deprived of interactions with natural systems. In 2024, Klement worked with students from Houston’s San Jacinto College on an eco-art soil workshop, resulting in The Power of Collective Action (2024), a multimedia immersive installation with layered images of butterflies and aquatic life and monotype portraits of the students interacting with plants, roots, and soil. The video projections show wildlife that has returned, attracted by ecological restorations Klement has created, which she considers “living sculptures.”
“I think of myself as a shaper of society. So I create things that I hope will change the way people do things,” Klement says.
