This is the ninth week Gill Nicol, as an independent arts consultant specialising in contemporary art, has looked at an artist who has engaged with environmental issues through their work. These ‘posts’ are designed to be ‘inspirational prompts’ for those considering applying for the award.

Mark Dion

Mark Dion’s work has an investigation of the order of things at its core, and this is seen in much of his work for museums. He examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Within this, he also looks at how we construct nature, questioning the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society. He has been influenced by the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, co-founders of the theory of natural selection. He says: Museums of history are one of the most essential sites for any investigation into how a dominant cultural group constructs and demonstrates its truth about nature. My work is not really about nature, but rather it is a consideration of ideas of nature.

His series of mobile wilderness units shows a wild animal- a wolf, or a bison – on a trailer, able to be moved around as we think fit, taking the animal away from its natural habitat, and satisfying our desire to control and manage nature.

Much of my artwork attempts to negotiate the shifting nature/culture boundaries established and demolished by our postcolonial and political landscape. I also have a personal passion for wild places and have traveled extensively to remote sites in the Neotropics as well as equatorial Asia.

In 2005, he worked on Human/Nature, a project closely aligned to his values around international wildlife conservation. See here for his inspiring writing about it. He says ‘I have never worked on a project closer to my heart’.

Mark Dion is an artist who has much to say about how artists can work with or about the living world. He wrote a manifesto about this in the catalogue of the Serpentine Gallery’s Greenhouse Effect exhibition in 2000. It was entitled Some notes towards a manifesto for artists working with or about the living world and includes this:

‘Artists working with living organisms must know what they are doing. They must take responsibility for the plants’ or animals’ welfare. If an organism dies during an exhibition, the viewer should assume the death to be the intention of the artist’..

Written by invitation from Los Gázquez and their opportunity/residency award AGUAZERO/Joya: arte + ecología.

We are pleased to announce that Joya: arte + ecología has been selected to participate in the Granada Millenium Biennale. Contemporary Art and Heritage (Bienal del Milenio Reino de Granada. Arte Contemporáneo y Patrimonio) with the project ‘The Unseen Exists and Has Qualities’.

The Granada Millenium Biennale is a biannual itinerary of contemporary art that uses material and immaterial heritage of the city and its surroundings. Twelve ephemeral and contemporary art projects will be made throughout the city in order to spread the cultural heritage of Granada. The works will be shown in places like the Alhambra, the Bañuelo, the Casa de los Tiros, the Palace of the Counts of Gabia and the Darro river. The event started last 6th of November and will finish the 17th of December.

Joya: arte + ecología‘s contribution is called ‘The Unseen Exists and Has Qualities’ and manifests itself as a protracted performance/installation by the banks of the river Darro in Granada. The work will involve excavation and ‘rammed earth’ construction and a ‘pit kiln’.

The Granada Millenium Biennale is organized by the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Granada, the Consortium For The Commemoration Of The First Millenium Of Granada’s Kingdom Foundation and the ARTES Asociation.

Click HERE to find out more about the project.

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This is the eighth week Gill Nicol, as an independent arts consultant specialising in contemporary art, has looked at an artist who has engaged with environmental issues through their work. These ‘posts’ are designed to be ‘inspirational prompts’ for those considering applying for the award.

Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno is an artist whose art practice rethinks how we live in relation to one another, in an attempt to rethink our built environment and to explore the sky and its possibilities.

An example is Air-Port-City, an ongoing project that imagines networks of habitable platforms that float in the air. Sections of living space join together like clouds, creating aerial cities in constant physical transformation. As he explains, “Like continental drift at the beginning of the world, the new cities will search for their positions in the air in order to find their place in the universe . . . [this structure is] capable of imagining more elastic and dynamic border rules (political, geographical, etc.) for a new space/cyberspace.”

Saraceno’s inspiring vision is to reshape social space and our behaviour – it’s about both how and where we live. Air-Port-City is all about balance, with an idea of “cities and civilizations encouraging a continuous mobility” – a nomadic living arrangement that overturns traditional notions of earthbound national and social boundaries between people. “Utopia exists until it is created . . . the idea of utopia is in constant mutation and changes according to the era,” and Saraceno’s material, formal, and conceptual investigations advance his proposition for a possible untethered future in the sky.

Relating to Air-Port-City is the Flying Garden series: a cluster of PVC balloons joined with elastic rope and fabric webbing, that are able to host a small garden containing rootless plants, native to Africa and South America, that take in all their nourishment through their leaves.

In collaboration with the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute he has realized the largest solar-powered geodesic balloon ever built. He has also worked with a new material called Aerogel, a sponge-like insulating substance developed for use in the aerospace industry. Its incredibly light weight (only three times that of air itself), coupled with its strong structural properties, affords a host of possibilities for future construction and engineering of airborne vehicles.

Saraceno was born in 1973 in Argentina. He trained as an architect and now lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. For more info about him, see his website.

Another blog post written as part of an invitation by Los Gázquez and their opportunity/residency award AGUAZERO/Joya: arte + ecología.

This is the seventh week Gill Nicol, as an independent arts consultant specialising in contemporary art, has looked at an artist who has engaged with environmental issues through their work. These ‘posts’ are designed to be ‘inspirational prompts’ for those considering applying for the award.

Mierle Ukeles

Mierle Ukeles’ work is about the everyday routines in our lives. In 1969, after the birth of her first child, Ukeles wrote a Manifesto for Maintenance Art that proposed her undoing boundaries that separate the everyday life from that of being an artist.  In it she stated, “Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials. . . . I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order.) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” (Ukeles, 1969)

In 1976, as artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation, Ukeles began a series of long-term projects incorporating dialogue, community participation and ecological sustainability. Touch Sanitationdrew attention to the maintenance of urban ecological systems in general and the use of pejorative language to represent “garbage men” in particular. She visited all 59 of New York’s districts to shake hands with over 8500 sanitation employees or “sanmen” saying to each of them ‘thank you for keeping New York City alive’.

Ukeles’ work is created through a process of participatory democracy that unites people in open dialogue about important community ecological issues. Another work, Waste Flow Video, follows New York’s rubbish from people’s houses through to landfill. “By creating a point of access, Ukeles enables members of the public to make more incisive connections with the physical dimensions of their urban and natural worlds. Both the city and the river are seen as relational; Flow City serves as the suture that draws the extremes of the natural-culture dialectic into visible coexistence.” Phillips (p.188)

In 1993, in Givors, France, she created RE-SPECT – in her words,  a ‘ballet mechanique’ – whereby 27 sanitation, park and fire trucks were choreographed as a procession along with 100 school-children through the town, in an attempt to bring the town together to think communally about its relationships, especially with its waste and its safety.

Artist, mother, wife, cleaner – Ukeles has spent most of her life bringing our attention to the small things in life that add up to the bigger issues.

Phillips, P. (1995). “Maintenance Activity: Creating a climate for change.” In Nina Felshin (Ed.). But Is It Art: The Spirit of Art as Activism. (pp. 165-193). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

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‘We have been collaborating as artists for a few years now. Sometimes working very directly with each other and at others times in a looser role; acting more as a kind of sounding board for each other. Our working relationship is based on a common sensitivity and a fluency in the way we create and also how we read ours and others work. We use this and our knowledge and experience of making to define and refine ideas for new work through dialogue. So far the work we have engaged with has been very diverse, ranging from large and permanent public commissions through to short intimate films.’

Kate Davis & David Moore

Click HERE to find out more.