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Looking at Beauty
In 1963, Rachel Carson, the matriarch of the
modern environmental movement, addressed
detractors of her now-classic book Silent Spring.
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In it, Carson raised alarm bells against a danger-
ous new class of pesticides and their potential-
ly irreparable ecological effects. Many, includ-
ing lobbyist and business interests, disputed her
book’s claims. In response, Carson delivered a
brilliant speech leveeing not only hard scientif-
ic facts, but a moral call to protect the natural
world and its beauty. “In this rather tough and
materialistic world, how much room is there for
concern about our wildflowers? About all of
nature?” she asked. “Are we being impractical
when we protest the substitution of the ‘brown-
out’ for the color and beauty of flowers along our
roads?... I am confident that the verdict of history
will show that we—far from being the heedless
sentimentalists—were indeed the tough-minded
realists.”2 As Carson reminds us, nature’s beauty
is not a secondary notion but rather a primary
force. Within the colors of a roadside wildflower
lie the wonders of life itself.
To be, as Carson suggests, a “tough-minded real-
ist” is to know that beauty, far from trivial, is at the
heart of what matters. In Beauty Is Resistance: art
as antidote, fiber’s materials and processes trans-
form in radically different ways as artists channel
ideas around the shapes beauty can take. Some
critique, some shed light on the unseen, others
carry the past forward, and still others offer re-
minders of the pleasure that beauty can bring, es-
pecially in times of great uncertainty.
Artists who rely on nature’s creation for their ma-
terials know that their work cannot be untangled
from the seasons and cycles of life. As a result,
their expressions often directly reflect of the state
of nature and thus, the state of the world. Gyöngy
Laky’s artistic production serves as a key example.
Laky has spent a lifetime bringing light to issues
of the environment—joining branches and tree
prunings, often from agricultural sites, with in-
dustrial materials. Laky’s work takes many forms,
from baskets and vessels to text-based sculpture
like Lie Ability, 2019 (pp. 60-61), which spell out
her feelings on the current political climate in lit-
eral terms. At times, Laky’s work evades nature
entirely in favor of telephone wire (Transmission,
2007, p. 127) and in the case of Graceful Exit,
1994 (pp. 62-63) plastic waste. Provided to the
artist in the 1990s by Johnson Wax, the corpora-
tion sought to give their plastic scraps a second
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