Royal Academy to run climate change exhibition

The Royal Academy is to present Britain's first art exhibition dedicated to climate change.

The privately-run institution is joining forces with Cape Farewell, a body that has been sending artists to investigate the issue in the Arctic for the last eight years, to create Earth: Art of a changing world.

It will include work documenting the devastation of the planet as well as artistic responses to physical changes such as rising sea levels.

One work being shown in Britain for the first time was inspired by the mother of the French artist Sophie Calle who had always wanted to visit the Arctic but died before she could.

Calle took her mother's pearl necklace and diamond ring to the snowy wastes and documented burying them in a glacier and wondering where the melting ice flows would take them.

Other artists in the show will include Cornelia Parker with a sculpture from the charred remains of a Florida forest destroyed by fire.

Ian McEwan and the poet Limn Sissay will add literary responses to the green challenge.

Kathleen Soriano, exhibitions director, said all art institutions had been slow to make exhibitions a part of the debate on key public issues. But she said: "It won't preach and won't admonish. We want visitors to come away with a strong sense of having experienced beauty, but with a deeper message."

The exhibition is the second in a series of contemporary shows sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline at the Royal Academy. It will run from 3 December to 31 January with admission charge.

Tickets £7 (concessions available) – please visit: www.royalacademy.org.uk/earth

Antti Laitinen, It's My Island I

Emma Wieslander, Derwentwater I

Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot

Edward Burtynsky, Super Pit

Mariele Neudecker, 400 Thousand Generations