MENU
FURTHER CONTEXT - RELEVANT ARTISTS/ ARTWORKS
World of Matter
World of Matter is a collective of artists who document broken ecologies in the Global South and beyond (India, Philippines) and by exposing cycles of matter in their context, critically engage via their digital platform in posing questions related to the value of nature and the nature of value. This is paramount to my work. World of Matter's approach is of documenting each ecology in segments, in video, writing and mapping. This makes the discovery wholesome, and a little like as if it were a book, as each chapter tells each part of the story allowing for individual entitlement. This allows the audience to put together the pieces becoming much more gratifying than being spoon-fed the overarching theme by a narrator.
Andy
Goldsworthy
The centre point of Andy Goldsworthy work is ephemerality and the playfulness with which he uses the natural elements of light, chance, material and change. I do acknowledge that what he is doing is rather noble, which is to make his work part of the natural system, and ideally, from the perspective of ecology this is perfect: he doesn't waste because all of the materials are still in place to be reused by Nature herself. However, to me, as an artist, he is rearranging rocks and sticks to make it look nice. There is one element in his work that relates to depth and surface which is the hole element. He frequently arranges his materials with a circular shape in the middle. In Dandillions and Hole, it is apparent that there is depth to it, but in other works such as Rowan Leaves and Hole, I see a nucleus, flat, not something with depth. I see a centralised shape, which conceptually drives me away from Ecology and systems thinking. In the context of "land art" I find Chris Drury or Cornelia Konrads' work more satisfying: there is a strong presence of "parts of a whole" delivered by their suspending techniques, investigation of change and the interruption of life, which they deliver in an exquisitely inquisitive and pensive way.
Ackroyd & Harvey
Polly Higgins' battle is embodied in this Ackroyd & Harvey production of a mock trial of the 5th Crime against peace: Ecocide. Based on the Deep Horizon BP oil spill disaster and the tar sands in Alberta this is the very embodiment - via performance - of an idea that needs to be inserted in the system, this case our judicial, legal and consequently societal system.
JOhn Latham and the APG
The Artists Placement Group's activities between the late 1960's and early 1990s were concerned with giving the artists more inclusion in decision-making inside the institution inclusively governmental bodies. This was done via placements, in which the artists would research the workings of companies and write all manner of reports and/or produce artwork that would inform such companies of other ways of looking at their institutional attitude.
​
Barbara Steveni was the main player in the establishment and public relations of the APG, but it was side by side with John Latham and with much of his theories in mind that the principles of the APG were established. The incidental person was a central example of this: ‘‘representer of the non-visible’ within the structure of democracy (…) with the capacity to unify a fractured civilization" (Latham).
​
There is much in the artists intellect that comes from a capable place. However, the way in which artists experience life - through Art lenses - artists are able to (pardon the cliche) think outside of the box and be an active participant in democratic life. Why isn't there a seat in parliament for artists? Artists constitute a side of living - of experiencing - that is misunderstood by society in general, making it artist living another excuse for social exclusion: see the current examples of aggressive gentrification in Hackney Wick and Peckham.
Birgit Oigus
Birgit Õigus is an architecture student in Estonia and he produced these megaphones to enhance our experience of the forest by making use of acoustics and this way amplifying the sounds of nature. It looks very clean and manmade in these pictures, which is a striking contrast, but I am looking forward to see if with time, the creator is going to allow for the forest to take over, or if maintenance is going to take place.
Bryndis
Snæbjörnsdóttir &Mark Wilson
Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson are a duo of artists working with poetry, movement, animals and the environment. In this case they walked for 10 days to end up realising that rocks - cairns in this case - were the closest thing to Home, as the various landmarks were the only reference that allowed them to realise where they were, in a rather misty and disorientating landscape in northern Iceland. I suppose the art is in the making - yourself - because one could argue that in pre-history, humans used caves as homes, defining the rock as home. And this could be counter-argued by the fact that we do need to look at our ancestral counter-parts to re-learn the best ways of inserting us in the environmental system, providing a shift from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric world view.
Ernesto Neto
Ernesto Neto's Flying fern, cater-boa-pillar, cleaning air, cleaning earth is to me a good example of a representation which has a system embedded. The title stresses the importance of the cater-boa-pillar being made of plants, which is to clean the air, and it further advances that cleaning the air will help cleaning the earth: a consequential art form, represented by an insect which so famously is transformative because of its metamorphosis, another function that nature primes itself to achieve continuity.
Jason deCaires Taylor
The work of Jason deCaires Taylor truly embodies an ethos and creates its own system. The critic on destruction of coral reefs is in his work surpassed by the implementation of actual coral reefs. To me, this is the purest form of activism. The sculptures in the background image - The rising tide - shows a more overtly political edge and these sculptures, initially set up in the Thames but now residing at Eden Project, are the perfect illustration of the oil hierarchy in our society, especially the UK (the horse heraldry is associated with monarchy). Taylor's work is pretty amazing: the underwater works incorporate eco-friendly technology (the statues are made with engineered cement that is designed to attract corals, and initiate this way an ecosystem), it's designed to be useful to the ecosystem, by allowing fish to hide from predators like in natural reefs, and it has an unique timeframe to it. In its initial years, the photographs show impressive sculptures in a sub-aquatic world, as if a dream long lost by archeologists and a nearly cinematographic fantasy. With time, but the shapes being still recognisable, the coral paints the surface of the sculptures, modifying its appearance. Eventually, exactly like the many species on Earth that weren't able to survive, the reef engulfs the totality of the statues: a living metaphor for the Earth's victory over species.