From Waste to Aesthetic Meaning in Developing Ecological Awareness through Installation Art in Contemporary Art Education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59944/postaxial.v3i4.2221Keywords:
Aesthetic experience, Contemporary art education, Ecological awareness, Installation art, Waste-based artAbstract
This integrative literature review explains how waste-based installation art may connect aesthetic meaning-making with ecological awareness in contemporary art education. Drawing on a purposively assembled corpus of 50 academic sources published primarily in 2016–2026, the review synthesizes research on eco-art, creative reuse, aesthetic experience, place-based learning, and sustainable arts pedagogy. Five interrelated mechanisms are identified: material encounter, material inquiry, aesthetic transformation, spatial narrative, and reflective ecological dialogue. Material encounters foreground the histories of consumption embedded in waste; inquiry and aesthetic transformation invite experimentation and reinterpretation; spatial narrative makes ecological relations perceptible; and dialogue links interpretation to responsibility and possible action. The article's original conceptual contribution is a Transformative Aesthetic-Ecological Learning Framework that integrates these mechanisms while preserving artistic experimentation as an educational goal. It situates discarded materials, local-flora exploration, and ecoprint within a broader eco-material inquiry approach without treating them as pedagogically identical. The reported relationships are interpretations of existing studies rather than effects established by testing this framework. The model offers design and assessment propositions for future empirical investigation
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