How to capture a feeling and make it real? Turn it into an object that others can see and touch and move around, comparing it to their own bodies and their own sense of that feeling? How to make the far away close? How to bring God down to earth?

I cannot think of a better way than delivering a cloud. Rendering a cloud both lifelike and impossible, modeling its shape from millions of calculations of atmospheric activity and capturing its weight equivalency in two and a half tons of marble. Because that’s how much a cloud really weighs. Up there, floating in the sky like a mountain-sized cotton ball. Two and a half tons. I cannot think of a better way.

Manifesting the weather is not the most complicated thing Prague-based, multidisciplinary artist Karen LaMonte has done. She did something even more complex during COVID, which she hopes will be a model other artists can follow. She has made her international artistic practice carbon negative.

Cumulus, 2017, Karen LaMonte. Marble. 94 x 87 x 70 inches. Photo, Steve Polaner. — *Cumulus*, 2017, Karen LaMonte. Marble. 94 x 87 x 70 inches. Photo, Steve Polaner.

Today is Earth Day 2021. President Biden is hosting a virtual Earth Day Summit for leaders of 40 countries which contribute to global warming, seeking to restore some sense of leadership on the world stage after four years of denial and regression. The President has committed the United States to cutting greenhouse gases in half by 2030. It’s a bold goal and reaching it will mean changes on all fronts. We all need to get involved and do our part. We all need to contribute to Earth Day’s 2021 mission: Restore our Earth.

The life and practice of Karen LaMonte provide a beautiful model for how to make a positive impact on the earth, how to restore not destroy it.

For LaMonte, every day is Earth Day. The elements provide the source and inspiration for her sculptures: sand and stone, mud and marble, atmosphere, weather and mystery. In addition to her study of technique and art history, LaMonte has devoted much of her research to science, collaborating in recent years with environmental scientists and engineers, mining the fertile space between the known and the unknown and finding continued inspiration in nature’s enchanting forms.

And now, with the help of her husband and Studio Manager Steven Polaner, LaMonte has committed to making her work carbon negative. For the artist, “Making art is my life’s calling and it’s important to me that I do it sustainably.”

LaMonte with cloud sculptures. Photo, Steve Polaner

Ever since she was a kid growing up in New York City, LaMonte had been intrigued by clouds. They fascinate her, making “visible the invisible forces of the natural world.”

In her early practice, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she made sculptures “capturing weather under bell jars.” She enameled clouds on glass flowers and blown glass dresses. She even “planted” the flowers in the ground of the Black Rock Desert near Burning Man in 1995, allowing her sculptural creations to take root in the very earth which inspired them.

A devoted student of art history, LaMonte was also inspired by the prevalence of clouds in the art of different cultures. In Chinese art, clouds are often used to represent female essence. In Middle Eastern art, clouds often stand in as the abstract expression of Allah. And of course in the western tradition, clouds have always represented divinity.

Ceiling painting in the Palace of Versailles. Photo, Adrianna Geo.

LaMonte laughed on our Zoom call, “Whenever you go into a cathedral and look up, all the Gods and angels are always sitting on this cumulus cloud. There’s always been a connection between clouds and femininity, religion, spirituality - whatever you want to call it - godhead.”

LaMonte’s impulse to make the immaterial material is evident in her work with the female form. The ethereal, goddess-like sculptures of her “Floating World,” “Nocturne” and “Etudes” series explore themes of womanhood and femininity through art historical, physical and cultural lenses. In glass, ceramic, stone and iron they capture our imaginations like ghosts of our unspoken thoughts.

Work from LaMonte’s “Nocturne series.” Photo Steve Polaner

Like femininity and the female form, clouds are full of allure and mystery, but impossible to contain. Like the body, clouds transcend geography, language, culture and time.

When LaMonte decided to return to clouds in her work, she turned to science. She formed a working collaboration with the Climate Dynamics Group at the California Institute of Technology. With her project in mind, scientists Tapio Schneider and Kyle Pressler, experts in atmospheric dynamics, created a proprietary computer program to run a five day weather model. From this model, they created a true simulation of a cloud from which LaMonte could design her sculptures.

For LaMonte, verisimilitude is important. “I’m not interested in making something out of fiberglass and covering it in red paint,” she said. To create the impact she wanted, she needed the exact specifications of a real cloud, including the dimensions, shape and weight.

LaMonte at work on a smaller scale cloud sculpture in marble.

LaMonte learned that Schneider and Pressel and others at CalTech were researching a specific type of cloud - stratocumulus - because stratocumulus clouds are a tipping point of sorts for global warming. She discovered that such clouds are in danger of becoming extinct if human activities continue releasing high levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. Stratocumulus clouds are the longer, flatter groups of clouds you see floating lower than the fluffy round cumulus clouds. They protect us from hothouse conditions by reflecting sunlight back into space. Without them we are, literally, cooked.

LaMonte also learned that those fluffy, cottony clouds she observed out her window in New York City have a weight to them. A lot of weight. In fact the cloud the CalTech scientists modeled for her weighs two and a half tons. Clouds are made of water and water, she knows from carrying buckets around her studio, is very heavy.

”I became inspired to make a cloud in stone that would be equivalent in weight to the real cloud on which it was based - a meditation on the paradoxes of weight and weightlessness, the material and the immaterial and presence and absence.”

All of LaMonte’s monumental sculptures require painstaking planning, resourcing and labor. The life-sized sculptures take years to complete. This cloud sculpture required her to learn new technologies including computer science and robotics. In order to carve the marble into a sculpture with the exact weight equivalency to her cloud, she had to rely on a robot to carve the shape from stone. The finishing was all done by hand, but she learned to trust her robotic partner in the first stages of materializing the cloud shape from the block of Italian marble.

The resulting sculpture, Cumulus was exhibited at Glasstress in conjunction with the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. People could not help but touch it, walk around it, think about it in terms of their own physical beings. The ineffable connection between our abstract thoughts and our physical reality is brought powerfully to life in Cumulus and in all of LaMonte’s ambitious sculptures.

Cumulus is in Italy awaiting transport to its permanent home at a museum in the United States. The museum is preparing a new building and the two and a half ton marble cloud will be installed in front of it.

Currently, LaMonte is working with scientists from NOA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the team at CalTech on a new series of cloud sculptures. With these she is collaborating directly with the environment, allowing the weather in various locations to create a unique patina on her iron statues. When the patina is where she wants it, she will reunite the statues, displaying her work along with that of mother nature, interconnection manifested.

Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest multihyphenate in history, wrote, “To develop a complete mind: study the science of art, study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

We celebrate LaMonte’s work on this Earth Day because of her exemplary multihyphenate commitments. Artist-art historian-scientist-climate protector.

“The things I keep thinking about over and over again are this idea of individuality and universality. It’s there in the individual body and the clothing and dresses. It’s there in weather. We all experience weather and it connects us globally,” LaMonte explained.

During the pandemic, the realities of climate change and the interconnectedness of existence on planet earth became very clear to LaMonte and Polaner. LaMonte reflected on the impact her artistic practice had on the planet. One cannot ship a two ton sculpture to the floating strip of land we call Venice without worrying about environmental impact.

Tearing the plastic window out of envelopes to recycle them, LaMonte says she thought about the heat generated from the kilns she uses to fire her sculptures. Her glass sculptures for example, will be in the kiln for as long as three months. She thought about her travel and shipping her work around the world. She decided to make a commitment to make her practice completely sustainable. And now, via the Sustainability page on her website, we can all follow suit.

LaMonte and Polaner calculated the associated carbon footprint of every work she had ever created. They put meters on all the kilns that she uses for her work with various materials. They calculated their travel, the shipping and associated energy consumption of moving her work around the globe, and added 20% for cutoffs. And at the end of their extensive - what Polaner jokingly characterized as extremist - calculations, they doubled the number.

“If we’ve made a mistake,” LaMonte determined, “by doubling the number we can more than cover ourselves.”

Once they had their calculation, LaMonte and Polaner began working with CoolEffect to develop an offset strategy. CoolEffect makes it easy to choose from projects which have both environmental and social benefits. LaMonte is excited about the carbon-reducing projects they chose: clean cookstoves in Uganda which reduce charcoal and wood use, reducing emissions and deforestation and improving air quality in homes and biogas digesters in rural Sichuan Province, China which safely decompose organic waste, reducing methane emissions and creating clean fuel. LaMonte says through Cool Effect they will be able to remain carbon negative for about a thousand dollars a year moving forward.

Karen LaMonte creates monumental works from stone, iron, ceramic and glass, elemental materials which bring a startling physical presence to her beautiful, audacious ideas. She renders feelings in materials from the earth, evoking something deep inside of us that cuts across time and space to remind us of our place in history and the unassailable fact of our global interconnectedness.

LaMonte’s message hit me like two and a half tons of bricks. Individually our actions and decisions impact the universal experience.

This Earth Day make a commitment to do your part to restore the earth. That way we can assure that generations to come will be able to look out their windows and marvel at the clouds, letting them inspire the artists and environmentalists of the future.

Karen LaMonte is represented globally by Gerald Peters Gallery.

Of course Misstropolis believes that every day is Earth Day. Pledge your commitment by signing up with earthday.org.