Blue Tremor, and acrylic and wood composition by Barbara Takenaga, is part of Natured Anew: reflections of the natural world at the David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence. The show explores connections between art, nature and technology.

The creative dialog between art and nature goes back a long way. Just think of our cave-dwelling forbears, who happily decorated their Stone Age cribs with stick-figure drawings of deer, elk, bison and other animals. Contemporary artists, too, draw inspiration from the natural world, although their methods and materials often reflect more recent art-world trends such as video, installation and conceptual art.

Many of today’s artist-naturalists also use their work to address social and environmental issues such as global warming, genetic engineering and deforestation. But as a new show at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery reminds us, some artists manage to make interesting, approachable art while still trying to save the planet. For them, Mother Nature may be beleaguered, but she’s just as beautiful as ever.

Organized by gallery director Jo-Ann Conklin, “Natured Anew: reflections of the natural world” features the work of five artists who explore the natural world from a variety of perspectives — ironic, poetic, even mystical. Two, Doug Bosch and Bruce Chao, have strong Rhode Island connections. Bosch, whose tree-pollen “chandelier” is one of the show’s highlights, lives in Providence and teaches at Rhode Island College. Chao, a Rehoboth-based sculptor and glassmaker, teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The show’s other contributors hail from Boston (Brian Burkhardt), New York (Barbara Takenaga) and England (Neeta Madahar), although both Takenaga and Madahar have New England ties. (Takenaga teaches at Williams College, while Madahar attended Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.)

IN TODAY’S globalized art world, knowing where artists live or what school they attended doesn’t always matter. But here it does. Each summer for the past few years, Conklin has put together an exhibit that highlights the work of local artists. And while she acknowledges that some of this year’s selections stretch the meaning of “local,” the fact that all five artists are current or former New Englanders is no coincidence.

After all, America’s most famous nature lover — Henry David Thoreau — was a New Englander. So was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the noted philosopher and essayist whose writings celebrate nature’s spiritual powers. (Emerson’s ideas, in turn, deeply influenced the artists of the Hudson River School.)

Certainly, tree-huggers like Emerson and Thoreau would appreciate the display that greets visitors as they enter the gallery’s outer lobby area. Here, Chao has installed a series of color photographs, each documenting a different sculptural “intervention” he’s carried out in a remote part of Seekonk.

Synapse, for example, consists of a series of five treetop-skimming catwalks that Chao constructed about 50 feet off the ground. In both the photograph and an accompanying video, Chao can be seen trying to walk across one of the catwalks with the help of a rock-climbing harness. It doesn’t look easy.

Other photographs provide glimpses of Aether, a giant basket-shape sculpture Chao constructed between two tree canopies, Beechwalk, another catwalk installation that (thankfully) stays closer to the ground and Phantom Limb, a work in which Chao cut down a dead tree limb then replaced it with a “limb” made from PVC plumping pipes. (Both the dead limb and a copy of the PVC limb are included in the show.)

IN THE 1970s, artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria created monumental sculptures and earthworks, many of which were deliberately situated in remote, hard-to-get-to locations. In his photographs, Chao echoes those earlier pieces while adding both a do-it-yourself esthetic and a palpable sense of personal danger. At the same time, his work illustrates one of the basic drawbacks of the genre — namely, that secondhand photographs and videos can never fully capture the experience of actually being there.

The show’s other Providence-area artist — Bosch — is also an outdoorsy type. Indeed, Bosch’s sculptures often feature a material that can only be collected in the great outdoors: tree pollen.

Bosch’s Chandelier Swarm, for example, consists of hundreds of thread-like filaments, each of which was dipped several times in a mixture of tree pollen and plant cellulose, a liquid binder. The process, which is similar to candle-dipping, leaves a delicate little bulb — a pollen polyp — at the end of each filament. When the filaments are tied together, the result suggests something a swarm of alien insects might leave behind.

Speaking of alien life forms, a visitor from outer space might feel homesick looking at the abstract swirl and spiral patterns in Takenaga’s paintings. Each one seems to depict a tiny universe of whirling stars and planets — or is it an even tinier universe of swirling cells and molecules? The elegant pinwheel pattern Yellow Sprial, for example, might be a distant crab nebula — or a colorful bit of bacteria. The rippling patterns in Blue Tremor, meanwhile, recall the swirling, star-filled skies in Van Gogh’s famous Starry Night.

Boston artist Brian Burkhardt takes a more satiric approach.

U.S. DOT Butterflies, for examples, consists of a display of faux-butterflies whose colorful markings turn out to be based on the colors and patterns of state license plates. Several other works feature strange jelly-fish-like creatures that Burkhardt concocted from castoff bits of garbage and household detritus. All have appropriately wacky names such as Transporta Enrootus and Outrageous Electroparasitic.

FINALLY, THERE’S Neeta Madahar, a British-born photographer whose work — mainly close-ups of birds roosting and feeding outside her backyard window — manages to be both beautiful and vaguely unsettling. Indeed, the same qualities that make Madahar’s work so fascinating — the gem-like clarity of her photographs and the rich, saturated colors she bestows on her feathered subjects — also tend to make everything look slightly surreal.

Rather than real birds in a real backyard, they suggest wax-figure versions of themselves — the kind you might find in a natural history display showing how birds and backyards used to look in the days before global warming pan-seared the planet.

“Natured Anew: reflections of the natural world” runs though July 8 at the David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, 64 College St. in Providence. Hours: Mon.-Fri. 11-4 and Sat.-Sun. 1-4. Phone (401) 863-2932.

bvansicl@projo.com