Chris Drury - microcosm and macrocosm

Three Things

2012-01-30T08:36:00.000-08:00

First thing: Landscapes of Exploration:
Here is the link: http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp?page=28345#landscapes
I am showing 5 works:

Albatross 1

Iceprint 1

Lake Concordia

Double Echo

Wind Vortex

Second Thing:

Last thing:
I have just completed a woven map of Wyoming:

detail

It is a topographical map woven with a Geological map of the state. The border is coal dust and Wyoming earth. The pattern is wind blowing off the Rockies. Size: 3’4” x 4’1.5”.

Thixendale image

2012-01-13T01:39:00.000-08:00

Last aired on Countryfile on 8th January. The grass still hasn't taken on some of the mounds. I think the seed was washed away in the rain. It will need to be re seeded in the spring and will open formerly in June.

Stromatolites rubbing

2011-12-23T03:19:00.000-08:00

STROMATOLITES FOSSIL RUBBING

This is a rubbing of a fossil found in the Cradle of Humankind, near Johannesburg, South Africa in October 2011. Stromatolites are fossilised layers of cyanobacteria algae, which formed here around 2 billion years ago. These primitive life forms were the first organisms to convert CO2 into oxygen, eventually giving the planet its atmosphere and creating the conditions for life on Earth and the biodiversity we know today. Cyanobacteria organisms still exist in our soils today.

Carbon Sink, The debate continues

2011-11-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

Four months on the Debate about Carbon Sink at The University of Wyoming continues. Jeff Lockwood was the man who put the idea for the work into my head a year ago, during a brief conversation. His article in Wyofile is brilliant and the comments are revealing. Check it out online:
http://wyofile.com/2011/11/art-energy-coals-reaction-to-carbon-sink-sculpture-reveals-the-power-of-art-%e2%80%94-and-the-essence-of-education/).

Here it is copied:

Art is science made clear.

—Wilson Mizner

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

—David Herbert Lawrence

A work of art is 2½ million times more noticeable than an open pit coal mine. I base this on the physical sizes of—and political responses to—Chris Drury’s “Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around” on the University of Wyoming campus and the Black Thunder coal mine in Campbell County. The coal mine is a monumental sculpture (broadly construed) visible from 700 miles above the Earth; Drury’s art installation fits into a single 270 square-yard pixel on Google Earth. But if you really want to see human handiwork from outer space, check out the swaths of beetle-killed forests stretching across 4,800 square miles of the West. Of course, that would be a rather environmentally sly use of imagery—which is precisely what Chris Drury was up to in using beetle-killed trees to form a vortex at the center of which is a pile of coal.

Chris Drury's "Carbon Sink" as installed on the University of Wyoming's campus. The 36-foot diameter piece of art, composed of scorched wood felled by pine beetles, has created a controversy: how much sway should politicians and industry representatives have over academic freedom? (Photo courtesy of Chris Drury — click to enlarge)

The point of “Carbon Sink”—or at least the message that the politicians and energy industry drew from the installation—was that burning fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is warming the climate (which is an intolerable scientific discovery), which has led to higher winter temperatures, which are insufficient to kill off the outbreak (which was fostered by drought and forest management practices), which results in mountainsides covered in dead trees. And to take this one step further, a recent study in Canada revealed that the decomposition of the trees is further adding to atmospheric carbon, making the winters warmer which means—well, you get the picture. Or at least the power brokers get the picture.

In a melodramatic response to the artwork, Marion Loomis, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, asserted that the University of Wyoming, “put up a monument attacking me, demonizing the industry.” Loomis claimed to understand academic freedom, but intimated that liberty has a price. State representative Tom Lubnau from Gillette employed the same sort of roundabout threat: “While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget—I’m a great supporter of the University of Wyoming—every now and then you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” (Translation: I’d sure as hell tinker if these uppity artists and impertinent eggheads continue to misbehave.)

All of this leads one to wonder how a small work of art in a corner of a university campus could warrant such outrage. Could the hegemony of Wyoming’s energy industry really be threatened by an elegantly arranged spiral of burnt logs? This whole hullaballoo could be the old ploy of powerful industrial interests playing the victim, but that explanation is too easy. I suspect that the panic was overblown but real. And it arose from Drury’s subversive work being featured in an educational setting. The university is corrupting the state’s youth — and we all know what happened to Socrates (hint: hemlock).

* * *

Anyone who has a soft spot for the underdog has to be doubly tickled by the fallout over “Carbon Sink.” Most obviously, the Goliath of the fossil fuel industry was thumped between the eyes. Even more delightful is that the rock was a piece of art. Not a regulation, or a lawsuit, or a technical report (e.g., an unflattering analysis of water and coal-bed methane) but an evocatively named arrangement of scorched wood. Of course, it’ll take a much larger aesthetic stone to do any lasting damage to Big Coal.

Satellite photo of the Black Thunder coal mine, which spans some 50 square miles in Wyoming’s southern Powder River Basin. (click to zoom)

In addition to admitting my deep feeling of schadenfreude, I should also make two other confessions. First, I had a lovely, long visit with Chris Drury when he first came out to Wyoming. And I just might’ve given him the idea about the beetle-forest-coal-climate connection. You’ll have to ask him about the details. Second, although I came to UW as an entomologist, my position is now split between philosophy (where I work on natural resource ethics and philosophy of ecology) and the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. So in terms of full disclosure, I fancy myself something of a literary artist.

Having worked in the sciences, humanities, and arts, I admit to some frustration when the latter two endeavors are dismissed as frivolous or largely irrelevant to modern life. This past spring, a university committee of scientists was trying to figure out if and how the arts and humanities could offer anything of value to an initiative concerning biodiversity conservation. There was something of a dog-and-pony show to explore the possibility, but there wasn’t much evidence that the scientists were convinced. And then along came “Carbon Sink.”

I suggest that those who doubt the relevance of art to contemporary society consider that Chris Drury might have done more to catalyze a serious conversation about energy, ecology, and climate change than any technical report or research paper produced by the university. And the same goes for those who cut the arts when school funding gets tight—and for those parents who wring their hands when their kid declares a major in art (or theater, dance, philosophy, English, or history). Turns out that art matters.

The irony, of course, is that it took a British artist to stimulate Wyoming politicians. At least we can hope that Governor Mead’s efforts to develop a state-level energy policy might include a recognition that burning fossil fuels has regional, national and global ramifications. Wyoming’s policy will affect others in profound ways. If it is “our” coal and gas, then it’s also “our” carbon dioxide—and “we” see both lucrative profits and dying forests.

* * *

The tradeoff between wealth and beauty is a lesson worth teaching to our children, which brings me to the another political consequence of “Carbon Sink” and other works that provide social commentary (such as the seditious documentary film, Gasland). Wyoming’s Joint Minerals Business and Economic Development interim committee recently took up the matter of energy education. The idea is to develop an “Energy Literacy Education Program” for K-12 students. Two important concepts emerged from the committee’s September 12^thmeeting in Casper.

A few red-needled pines, infested with bark beetles, rim a soggy meadow in the Medicine Bow National Forest. (Photo by Josh King with aerial support from LightHawk Aviation — click to enlarge)

First, the model for our venture is to be Oklahoma’s energy education program. It seems that Sen. Eli Bebout of Riverton is a real fan of the Sooners’ approach to education. Given that I teach natural resource ethics, I have a vested interest in seeing what students will have been taught when they arrive on campus. It looks like my job is not going to get any easier.

At the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board website, one is introduced to the educational program with a video of teachers singing the praises of the Board. The state has cut teachers’ supply budgets to zero, so the educators fawn over the boxes of cool stuff that the energy industry provides for “free.” The teachers seem blissfully unaware that if their state increased severance taxes to the level of neighboring Texas, perhaps there’d be enough state revenue to provide funding for classroom supplies. Then the teachers might not have to settle for the “free” things provided by the energy industry and they could decide to purchase art supplies. We can only imagine what might happen if the kids were able to think about their world and creatively express their hopes—and concerns—without the oversight of the energy industry.

If anyone wonders whether such an educational program in Wyoming might be just a tad tilted toward the views of industry, visit the Campbell County School District website dedicated to the Powder River Coal Company. Sixth graders from the gifted-and-talented program put this site together, and they’re certainly a capable bunch. The text is well-written and the design is quite professional. But try clicking on “Environmental Issues.” You’ll learn that PRCC’s low-sulfur coal is better for the air, that coal mines comply with the Clean Water Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and that, “Powder River Basin coal mines provide a kind of refuge for wildlife. Besides creating animal habitat with rocks and dead trees, the coal mines protect the animals that are living on the mine site [from hunters].” Coal mining appears to be just about the best thing that could happen to the environment. As for the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate, there’s not a peep. Maybe it’s time for a school field trip down to the UW campus to check out “Carbon Sink.”

The other important concept to emerge from the committee meeting was framed by Lara Ryan, executive director of the Wyoming Land Trust. It seems that the core message to our children will be: “Energy and conservation are not at odds. Rather they are mutually beneficial…We can have it all.” This might be true, depending on who “we” are. If it includes today’s K-12 students, then having it all isn’t so simple. “We” (adults) seek to have it all by externalizing costs—shifting our problems onto “them” (the children and future generations).

The core reality of the modern world of energy consumption is that we can’t have it all. My mother was an artist and wise woman. When people asked her to produce a calligraphic piece, she would tell them that there were three qualities in commissioned artwork: good, fast, and cheap. The client could pick any two of these. For example, if a bride-to-be wanted her wedding invitation to be good and fast, then it wasn’t going to be cheap.

The same limitations hold for energy. Pick whichever two you want, but you can’t have all three. What is good (for humans and the environment) and fast (available right now) isn’t cheap (e.g., solar home systems). What is good and cheap isn’t fast (e.g., large-scale alternative energy systems), and what is cheap and fast isn’t good (e.g., burning fossil fuels). No, you can’t have it all. Even an artist knows that.

* * *

Philosophy and art come together in the field of aesthetics. And environmental aesthetics is a rich interaction of science, philosophy, and art. The great ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote: “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” His concept has since been framed in terms of ‘thin’ beauty, which appeals to our superficial sense of what is pretty, and ‘thick’ beauty, which arises from our understanding of what lies deeper. The Tetons are postcard pretty to anyone who sees them, but when one understands the geological forces that pushed the mountains skyward and the ecological zones that are layered on the slopes, then a thick sense of beauty emerges. It’s the difference between listening to a lovely sonata and knowing the musical theory, historical context, and composer’s anguish that lie behind the composition.

Mountain pine beetles, roughly the size of a rice grains, spend most of their lives feeding under the bark of pines. At certain times of year, the beetles, en masse, take flight to find new trees to infest. (Photo by Jeff King — click to enlarge)

Many people are aesthetically offended by wind farms, although some find the form and motion of windmills to be elegant. In either case, the initial impression is just that—a hasty judgment. Understanding the marvelous complexity of engineering deepens one’s appreciation. But what makes these structures beautiful in my estimation is understanding that each day a windmill turns on the high plains of Wyoming, 4 tons of coal that are not incinerated—and each year a windmill churns means 4,300 tons of carbon dioxide do not enter the atmosphere. Now that’s a beautiful thing.

Perhaps we should be ethically offended by coal mines and gas wells, or at least by the fact that Wyoming has extracted such wealth while spreading the costs of burning fossil fuels into the future and around the world. Maybe it’s a good thing that our views are interrupted by windmills and that we won’t derive enormous riches from this energy source. Justice entails that we bear some of the burden—whether aesthetic or economic—of energy production.

Windmills are conspicuous. And that’s good. For too long Wyoming has externalized the costs of energy. Rather than shoving the aesthetic costs of energy into places where most of us don’t have to see the ugliness, or spreading health costs across the planet via the atmosphere (sick people aren’t very pretty), or pushing the environmental costs into the future when we don’t have to confront the unpleasant consequences of rising sea levels, windmills make us face up to our consumption and complicity. If carbon dioxide was colored a sickly chartreuse rather than being invisible, we might be much more pleased to see windmills. Of course, there’s another way of making the costs of burning fossil fuels visible—go look at the dying forests in the Rockies. Or perhaps just check out Chris Drury’s artwork tucked away in a corner of the UW campus.

Some pretty things become beautiful when you know the deeper story, but not always. I remember as a kid seeing a pretty, swirling rainbow along the edge of a lake and later learning that this was an oil sheen. The truth isn’t always pretty; sometimes knowledge makes the world a disturbing place. Merely ugly things can become truly awful when we learn more about their appearance—as with the beetle-killed forests of Wyoming. The thin sense of ugliness gives way to a thick sense of awfulness when we understand our role in the insect outbreak.

* * *

After the executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association claimed that his industry had been villainized and victimized by art, Mr. Loomis went on to insinuate that corporate monies to the university were put at risk by the artwork. After all, students could be led to ask hard questions (remember Socrates?). Given that political pressure worked to shut down a photography exhibit that offended the oil and gas industry (“The New Gold Rush: Images of Coalbed Methane,” at the Nicolaysen Museum in Casper) and political extortion worked to shape university policy with regard to unwelcome political views (i.e., the Bill Ayers debacle), Loomis’ warnings are understandable if profoundly disappointing. Of course, he hadn’t actually seen the artwork when he made his threat, but it seems that empirical evidence isn’t all that important when it comes to energy education in Wyoming.

A detail of ‘Carbon Sink’ as it is being installed. The sculpture is composed of timber felled by pine beetles. (Photo by Chris Drury — click to enlarge)

Loomis suggested that the university might, “put up a sculpture commending the affordable, reliable electricity that comes from coal on the other end of Prexy’s Pasture.” Perhaps Mr. Loomis has a good idea. But as much as education is touted by the energy folks, they don’t seem to be fast learners—at least when it comes to the subversive disposition of art. An artist with a keen sense of irony might be tempted to integrate the two messages. For example, s/he might install an electric light to illuminate Drury’s work. Leaving the light on continuously would convey to the viewer a sense that thanks to cheap electricity we believe that we can have it all. And perhaps it’s only fair that the energy industry would get to shed some light on “Carbon Sink,” given that the art did such a fine job shedding light on the energy industry.

* * *

Coda

As for representative Lubnau’s admonishment that, “you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” I’m well aware that my salary is largely provided through mineral revenues—and this is exactly why I was compelled to write this piece. That, along with a real appreciation for the challenge issued by Academy and Tony Award-winning director Elia Kazan: “The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don’t dare reveal.”

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Written by Jeffrey Lockwood | Published on November 8, 2011 | Filed under: Energy,Featured,Policy
Keywords: Black Thunder coal mine, campbell county, carbon sink, chris drury, coal, gasland, jeffery lockwood, University of Wyoming, what goes around comes around

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

Mark Northam November 8, 2011 at 3:34 pm: Carbon Sink is a piece of art. We are all entitled to decide whether we like it or not. Had the artist not explained what his “message” was, those of us who view it could easily have arrived at very different messages. My first impression – prior to the Trib spilling the beans – was to see it as an endorsement for co-firing coal and biomass as an energy source. But then, I’m not much of an art buff, and I am an energy geek. What shocked me was first that the art had to be explained in order to communicate the message, and second, how much the artist was payed for his week’s work. But, as I said I’m not much of an art buff.

The point is, the piece is just art – and the artist probably knows as much about energy and climate change as I know about sculpture. If Mr. Drury had real scientific understanding about the interplay of “beetle-forest-coal-climate” I suspect he would have titled it “Carbon Source”, not Carbon Sink. In his defense, he was quick to explain that his personal carbon footprint was as large as anybody’s so he is not ignorant on the topic.

Like it or not, Wyoming’s economy and way of life are absolutely dependent upon society’s continued use of fossil fuels. Mr. Drury’s message is not going to change that. Ironically, education and research – made possible by the investment of state revenue derived from the energy industry and appropriated by legislators like Mr. Lubnau – are the path to a sustainable future regardless of the energy source.

Mr. Drury flew in, delivered his message and left a sculpture that pleases some and irritates others. Mr. Lubnau makes his home here and like his colleagues in our state goverment, is a real sculptor. His legislative work is sculpting real solutions to carbon emissions, leads the nation in that regard, and deserves our respect. He and his colleauges are the custodians of Wyoming’s future made rich by an industry that people love to hate, and their track record shows they are doing a damn good job of it.

JDB, there is nothing in Rep. Lubnau’s comment that fosters hatred in his constituency against educators and Artists. I know him well, and that would be completely out of character. It seems you have as much intollerance for his message as you claim he does for Mr. Drury’s. Your suggestion of “shame” is completely misplaced.
Lon D. Lewis BS Cemical Engineering UW 62 November 8, 2011 at 10:53 am: Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! article and art work. It makes one proud of their University. Keep up and increase this sort of great work and effort.
Lon D. Lewis, BS Chemical Engineering U.Wyo 1962.
JDB November 8, 2011 at 9:30 am: “The hue and cry from the uppity eggheads would be deafening without qualification .
The uppityness, impertinance and arrogance of dismissing my words, and reading threats where none were made saddens me.”

No, Lubnau, you weren’t threatening anyone. You obviously have great respect for those who think differently than you–those who have dedicated their lives to learning. Art’s job is to start the conversation. When has the energy industry started the conversation about where it needs to improve? It has fought tooth and nail for deregulation and to spread misinformation. We all benefit from the energy industry in this state, which was admitted time and again in this piece, but the fact that you and the other pit-bull defenders of big-energy ignore that and try to draw black and white lines, try to foster hatred in your constituency against educators and “Artists” (nice quotes) is sickening. Shame on you for that, for your reaction to this piece.
Tom Lubnau November 8, 2011 at 6:50 am: I am often amazed at the presumptious nature of folks who want to read or imply messages in my words to construe them to their own meaning, for their own policital purposes and to create controversy where none really exists. Because I am conservative and because I represent one of the areas key in generating the revenue necessary to operate this state, I often have to preface my commentary with statements like, “I am a great supporter of the University of Wyoming, and I would never tinker with their funding stream” because if I simply said, “This sculpture gives me an opportunity to discuss from where UW’s funding comes” the hue and cry from the uppity eggheads would be deafening without qualification .
The uppityness, impertinance and arrogance of dismissing my words, and reading threats where none were made saddens me. I commented on the meaning a particular piece of art. And, isn’t that the point — for art to inspire commentary. Or, is there a double standard that art should inspire only the commentary desired by a particular group of “artists” with a particular point of view?

Some people with stories

2011-10-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

Rachel
Unknown San
Thomas
Stephan
Roger
Petrus
Michael
Lee
Benji
Alpheus
Maria

Layers of Time and Waves of Events

2011-10-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

This is my last day here. I have been collating all the research I have done. Lining up all my collected objects, and collecting stories from the various people here who have agreed to do a portrait.

Of the research, my hunch is that the work should be about revealing what is hidden. This includes the rock and cave systems that underlie the Cradle, which have been slowly giving up their secrets in the fossil layers of plants, algae, sea creatures, and the fossilised remains of animals and early hominids going back 2 million years. Within this time line have been several catastrophic events including 3 magnetic pole reverses, which will led to the deaths of the hominids seeking water under the ground.

Going back further to the Impact event 2 billion years ago, a time when plants were just beginning to create oxygen from CO2. This event will have altered the rock beds in the cradle creating caves which slope gently into the rock. This destruction may well have upset things enough to kick start more life forces, which you could say was a creative event. The Earth has seen cycles of destruction and creation. From melted rock created during the asteroid impact, you get a line of rock boulders which 10,000 years ago San people use as a rain making site to encourage the cycle of life of which they were a part.

Just as behind each person I have met here, is a hidden story, so the Earth itself reveals glimpses of its hidden layers of history going back to the formation of the Earths' crust 4 billion years ago:
layers of time and waves of events.

My intention is to try to encapsulate some of this in a small rock chamber, set under some trees and within a circle of revealed bedrock. The interior of the chamber will plot the movement of the sun over a year and will have drawings in iron oxide on the walls - alluding to plants, fossils, shattered rock, time and waves as in sound waves, shock waves, waves of events.

Over the coming months I will be planning these drawings as works on paper and as prints as well as using geological and topographic maps. I will also begin work on transforming the portrait images into the stories given me by the various individuals. Then it is hoped I will return to make the chamber and show the works on paper in a space in Johannesburg, perhaps during the art fair here next September.

Studio and objects

Tortoise shells
Creation Destruction rocks, from The Cradle of Humankind and Vredefort Impact dome

Stromatolites: plants which began the process of creating oxygen on the planet - Cradle

Drawings for Time/Wave chamber

San rock drawings

2011-10-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Bushman

In Johannesburg at Wits University is the Origins Centre, a remarkable museum of early man, displaying skulls, tools, rock drawings and some remarkable film of San bushmen killing an Eland, doing a healing trance dance and talking about the various aspects of the paintings, dance, healing and ways into another world, through cracks in the rock, or down a termite nest.

All of this came as a jolt to me because at Nirox I have been thinking along the lines of a chamber into another world; inside/outside, revealing the cracked dolomite paving rocks, and the significance of caves and the underworld, which have revealed the remains of very early hominids. Here at the museum and earlier out at the dome I have encountered just that in the San rock art.

My introduction to the Origin Centre came through Hugh Brody in London, who put me in touch with Ben Smith at the Centre, and Ben advised that I take a drive out to a farm 2 hours from here to see more petroglyphs and to the Drakensburgs to see rock paintings, copies of which he showed me at the museum. These paintings are going fast, vandalism, rain etc etc. so they are making meticulous tracings. They are also in the process of trying to get all of world rock paintings onto a web site because there are so many crossovers between cultures.

So today I drove out with Stephan to Bosworth Farm, just north of the impact Dome. There we were given tea by Dr Neil Orford and his wife. They have a stud farm for race horses and Sussex Cattle. Neil worked as a vet in Sussex, many years ago. He has also had many encounters with modern day bushmen who have worked for him on various farms and he has nothing but praise for them. he even reminded me that Mandela has strong bushman blood in his veins (you can see it in his face) which accounts for his compassion and intelligence.

So Neil then handed us over to Petreus who was to be our guide for the morning. The three of us drove up to a low boulder strewn hill. Clouds were gathering and the sky was looking somewhat black. We were a bit apprehensive because the rock has a lot of iron in it and attracts lightning!

At the gateway to the hill was a single standing figure with very obvious San features. From then on we threaded our way between rocks, Petreus pointing out drawings which we would never have noticed. Subtly pecked into the rock, these are the most delicate, tender and beautiful of images, drawn with great surety, not for the sake of art but to heal someone or to give a sense of power for anyone who later touches them.

Searching for drawings

Ostrich

Rhino

Lion

Hippo emerging

Eland

Hartebeest

Elephant

Zebra

Lovers

Eland

As well as the animal and human drawings there many more hallucinatory images which looked to be the kind of images which might come up during a trance dance. As well as these, there are the purely abstract patterns which Petreus says denote that here a healing took place.

Hallucinatory beings

Healing place

Many of the drawings are so faded in color, that without Petreus keen eyes and awareness we would never have known just what we were looking at. Most of the drawings face the slope down to the river where many of these animals were to be found. You stand in front of them, they may have been done 300, 3000, or 30,000 years ago, no one knows for sure, but tears come to your eyes and you are gripped by both sadness and elation.

As we return to Nirox the storm finally breaks and there is rain, hail, thunder and lightning. Nature demonstrates its power and the first rains of Spring have arrived.

Vredefort - an impact Crater

2011-10-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

As part of my research into the geology and archeology of the area I had asked to visit the Vredefort Impact Crater. 2 Billion years ago an asteroid hit the earth at this spot, creating a crater 300 km across with an impact dome in the middle 90 Km. across. This dome was formed by compressed rock coming back up again, like a rain drop does in a bowl of water. It was the remains of this dome which we were due to visit with the Geologist from Wits, Professor Roger Gibson. We spent the morning exclusively with him, looking at the rock at ground Zero, the various impact melt and fractured rock at the domes edge, and then after lunch joined a bigger tour looking at all the various rock, iron age settlements, Voer trekker farms, early gold mines, Boer war sites and ending up at a seam of melt rock, in the plains near the centre, called pseudotachylite on which were San petroglyphs of various animals and spirit creatures.

All the rocks on this hill at the edge of what was a dome have been lifted from the horizontal to the vertical and shattered.
On the edge of what was the dome looking at seams of pseudotachylite

We crossed the Vaal river and headed into the haze of the centre to what was ground zero and is now a shallow lake caused when an ice sheet, which was at some time responsible for eroding the dome, created a hollow. There are granite boulders strewn across the plain. These are some of the oldest rocks on earth, formed over 4 billion years ago when the earths crust solidified. These rocks formed the bedrock of the dome, ie the bottom of the impact. Everything else, including the asteroid was simply vaporised or hurled into the air. You would have had 4 K square blocks of rock hurled 40 k into the air. Everything beneath the surface was compressed and then sprung back up.

At the centre here, the impact of this 10 km. long flying piece of rock traveling at thousands of miles an hour was massive. The granite was heated, melted and fractured forming pockets of melt known as Granophyre in what had become a kind of plasticine rock. Its rapid cooling meant that this melted rock formed a kind of black glass, a tiny percentage of which is meteorite.
As the rock shattered it formed cracks which in grating together heated the rock to around 14,00 degrees, almost double the heat which will normally melt rock. The resulting liquid melt ran into all of the cracks, some of them several metres wide. this again is the fine grained, black pseudotachylite and is a conglomerate of all the melted rock around it. It takes this new form because it cools rapidly, so being unable to reform its original crystalline state.

pseudotachylite breccia within granite. Friction in the cracks, seconds after impact, melted the rock which ran into the cracks

After lunch we joined a bigger tour and headed for the old gold mines and Boer war sites.

Upended quartzite on the Vaal river which cuts through the dome. These layers of rock are ancient beaches.

searching for gold in the ancient river deposits.

Roger explaining the significance of the shatter patterns in the rock.

As the sun dropped lower in the sky we walked across flat farmland near the centre, headed for a small tree and a line of boulders on the horizon. This is a pseudotachylite fault line, eroded into a line of massive boulders. There is evidence here of massive destruction 2 billion years ago, but 10,000 years ago, San bushmen were using this place as a sacred rain making line. For some reason the rocks have attracted acid drips of water, either from trees, or from a since eroded porous rock. As a result these rocks have little depressions and cups within them which hold water. Rain brings the migrating animals onto fresh grass and so it is here on these rocks, which were once melted at 1,400 degrees centigrade, that the bushmen chipped images of animals and possibly a rain man.

Pseudotachylite fault line of melt boulders

Water cup rocks
Eland

Rhino

Hippo

Hyena

Wildebeest/Eland

Horned rain man?

As the sun sinks low we head back after a very long but extraordinary day, where we have looked at evidence of absolute destruction. A mountain sized rock traveling at 10 Km per second, blasts the Earth causing a fireball with temperatures up to 20,000 degrees centigrade and penetrating 40 Km into the bedrock, creating a 90 Km dome in a 300 Km crater. All this in about 10 minutes max. Early hominids will have lived in the area as they did in the Cradle 2 million years ago, and 10,000 years ago the San will have seen evidence in the rock of water and life. Perhaps the rocks allowed for the growth of trees which attract water and animals seeking shade. The San turned this site of destruction into a place of creation. Creation, destruction, creation, destruction, creation.

Sunday 9th and Monday 10th, Nirox

2011-10-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

I have been here 3 days now and Nirox appears to be somewhere with a lot going on beneath the surface. It is an exclusive place owned by the wealthy and seen by an invited few. It is mostly white and mostly Afrikaans: a lawyer, a developer, an old school land owner, and a black telecommunications owner. Then there is the manager, the curator and the families of black workers who garden, cook, clean, etc. Just two of them are black South African the rest are migrant workers from divers areas of the subcontinent.

Maria, who looks after us in the house comes from Malawi and lives nearby with her husband and 4 children. Most of these workers have their families with them and live in small houses within Nirox. Alpheous is about to be married and has just had the all clear on an HIV test.

It is a place of hidden dimensions and interesting. It is of course the cradle of humankind and I am beginning to think about revealing the human side of all this, of stripping away the layers and revealing what lies beneath - of doing this on many levels and in many ways. Using story, language and image from both people and place. Of stripping down to essentials and revealing a reality.

Into all this comes the wonderful Professor Lee Berger, The paleontologist from Georgia in The US. The guy we saw and talked to today at The University of Witswatersand in Joburg and who captivated us for two hours with tales of his remarkable find in the Cradle. This is the man who, bored with a law degree, left his Ivy league university to do a degree in Geology and Paleontology at a small university in the Southern States, with an enthusiastic teacher. His PhD was in the bones of the shoulder. His amazing journey, from working with Leakey at Olduvai, to his post in South Africa, which lost all its funding, which meant he spent his free time ranging the hills of the Cradle with his son and dog. Eventually he discovered some 500 possible sites which had never been excavated by looking at cave patterns on Google Earth.

So there he is one day in August 2008 with his 9 year old son Matthew and his dog, standing by a cave hole in the dolomite rock and he says to his son "lets go look for fossils". Within 3 minutes there is a yell from Matt who is standing several metres away from the hole holding a stone. Better humour him thinks his dad as he walks over. Then in his own words everything went black and white and in slow motion. From 5 yards away he can see a hominid clavicle sticking out of the rock his son is holding and he swears. This is the man who, if you remember, did a PhD on the bones of the shoulder, so he knows what he is looking at.

He takes the stone from his son, and turns it around. Protruding from the other side is a complete hominid jaw bone with teeth.These are teeth which are hardly worn because they are the teeth of a 12 year old child. The rest is history - Google 'Malapa Fossil site' and you can read more about it. In the end they found two complete skeletons, which look like they are a cross between Australopithecus and a hominid dated very precisely to within 300,000 years to just under 2 million years old. The missing link if ever there was one! There is even evidence of food on the teeth and perhaps even skin!

He took us into the lab, opened up the boxes and showed us what they had excavated to date. So remarkable and powerful are these objects, that what he was handling and showing us; fitting joint to joint, sacrum to pelvis, will be objects that in a thousand years from now will be treated with awe and reverence by all who see them because they changed the knowledge of our origins.

So yes Lee Berger adds a whole new dimension to Nirox.

NIROX, South Africa

2011-10-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

I arrived here on Thursday 6th at the invitation of Benji Liebmann, to do a residency at his amazing property in the Cradle of Humankind. Richard Long was here earlier in the year and Jem Finer before that. On the first day I went out on a landrover safari into the Cradle with a party of academics from Pretoria University. Here are some of the animals we saw.

Impala

Kudu

Henry, the Rhino

Wildebeest or Gnu

Academics on Safari

The first animal to appear was Henry the lonely white rhino. Two of his mates were killed by lightning last year and one was shot by poachers who arrived in a helicopter. Apparently the Chinese are now wanting to buy ivory and rhino horn, and have the cash to pay.

Nirox is a vast stretch of land owned by several households which are strung out within the forest close to the river. Benji's stretch of land has been landscaped with lakes and doubles as a sculpture park for changing exhibitions. The rest of the land is wild velt. The perimeters are fenced and what used to be farm land is now a private game reserve and most indigenous species of animal have been reintroduced, except the larger carnivores. You can hear Lions roaring in the night but they are in the Lion and Rhino reserve next door! There is accomadion and studio space in an old farmhouse with a cottage next door. I am in the cottage and Jurgen Partenheimer, a minimalist artist working with a South African black poet, is in the main house.

On the first evening I was surprised to see a large and very much alive warthog grazing on the lawn behind the sculptures of warthog looking creatures.

Warthog on the lawn behind the sculptures!

Whoa! as I write this a collobus monkey has just wandered past the open door!

My first morning, early, one of the gardeners, Alpheous takes me on a wander round the grounds and then by golf cart out into the bush. There is game everywhere.

Tortoise
Zebra
Oryx
male hartebeest
female hartebeest

Then we head up one of the furthest hills. There is a terrible smell of burning and the cart conks out. So Alpheus calls for help, meanwhile I walk the rest of the way up the hill and there is what must be the Richard Long!

Close by is a very poisonous plant. Don't even think of touching it. The San used to poke there arrow heads into this plant and it is the poison which would have done for the animal.

Thixendale udate

2011-09-19T02:11:00.000-07:00

If anyone notices a few gaps appearing in my work at Thixendale it is because a rights of way officer, who the council failed to consult during the planning application, has insisted that we do this.
While it is important that all rights of way be preserved, this work was commissioned to encourage walkers to use and visit the Wolds way and to enhance that enjoyment. To this end we put a huge amount of thought and physical effort into the work, complied with all the regulations, went through planning and worked with archaeologists, and consulted with local people. The work does not obstruct any right of way. If you are fit enough to walk even part of this trail, then you are fit enough to walk over a 60 cm high hump or detour 10 metres. This is pure bureaucratic pettiness, to the cost of the aesthetic line of a work of art.

Carbon Sink, A continuing saga

2011-09-13T02:27:00.000-07:00

Carbon Sink, University of Wyoming, Laramie

The students are now back on Campus and people continue to visit the work which is bedding in well. There are still comments in the press, which means it is generating its own conversation as Tom Lubnau points out in his comment in the Gillette News Record. Here is a copy:

Trying to make silk purses from sows

A few weeks ago, the University of Wyoming unveiled a new on-campus sculpture entitled “Carbon Sink.”
The artist,Chris Drury, is a worldfamous sculptor, the university paid $40,000 to install the sculpture on campus. The artist designed the sculpture as a series of dead logs arranged in a spiral pattern, which he hoped would symbolize the death of forests from pine beetles due to global warming.

Much has been written by journalists, bloggers and in some tersely worded emails about the comments Reps. Gregg Blikre, Norine Kasperik and I made about the hypocrisy of accepting dollars derived from carbon fuels to put up an anti-carbon sculpture. People, mostly from California and New York told we told us we should be “ashamed of ourselves” and that we are “ignorant bumpkins because we hate anything that resembles culture” and referred to us as “cow flops and road apples.”

It is important to understand what we didn’t do. We didn’t ask the sculpture be taken down. We didn’t take any steps to remove funding from the university. And we didn’t engage in any form of censorship.
What did we do? We defended our friends and neighbors. Prompted by the existence of the piece of art, we started a discussion. My old art teachers, from back in the day, told me that art was supposed to provoke discussion, to inspire and to affect the viewer.

And that is what we did. We used the existence of the art as an inspiration piece to let folks know that between 60 and 80 percent of the state’s budget is dependent on extractive industries.
We asked for some appreciation and kudos for the hard-working folks in the energy industry, who go to work day after day, meeting America’s energy needs and funding in large measure the University of Wyoming budget.
We told the university that we thought it was out of touch with the rest of the state, and that we wished they would spend as much time working with us to meet our educational needs as they did being critical of the industries that pay the bills in Wyoming.

And to their credit, the administration of the University of Wyoming listened. We engaged in a dialogue about the misunderstandings, misperceptions and missed opportunities that exist between the University of Wyoming and Campbell County.
University President Dr. Tom Buchanan, Trustees Warren Lauer and Jim Neiman, and senior UW staffers Don Richards and Mike Massie took time out of their busy schedules to travel to Gillette, to tour a power plant, the college and other community facilities, and to meet with community leaders and energy company officials to discuss opportunities for UW to offer educational services in the Campbell County area.
The discussions were positive. Dr. Buchanan left the citizens of Campbell County with a clear challenge. If we can define a specific set of needs that can be met by the university rather than a vague list of complaints, the university will work to meet those needs.
The monkey is now on the backs of the citizens of Campbell County. We have a great opportunity to advance the education opportunities and the quality of life in northeastern Wyoming if we are wise, and if we can specifically define our needs and put a plan in place to accomplish those needs.

Thanks to Chris Drury for your sculpture. While I don’t agree with your science, or what you believe your sculpture symbolizes, the burnt logs laying in a circular pattern on the grounds of the University of Wyoming were a catalyst to open discussions on a greater UW presence in Campbell County. Art prompted discussion. If we accept the challenge, discussion will lead to better education and an enhanced quality of life.

Rep. Tom Lubnau represents Campbell County. Rep. Gregg Blikre and Rep. Norine Kasperik of Campbell County also joined with him in signing this opinion piece.

I have to say that I am very pleased that the dialogue around this work has got the university and the people of Campbell County in a dialogue about what they all want from an education. For my part I am a little concerned that there is a pinch of climate change denial going on here.

The science is not mine, global warming is a phenomenon, agreed internationally by all leading scientists who are not in the pay of energy companies and they are based on incontrovertible facts. You can dispute what these facts might mean in terms of degree and speed of warming and you can dispute what you are going to do about them, particularly if it effects your industry, but it would be dangerous to continue to deny the facts. If Universities are to teach science then that teaching has to be empirical and not based on convenient belief systems. Belief has nothing to do with it.

For myself the work never symbolized anything. When you put two materials together in a particular form, then you make a connection. The form is a vortex, whirlpool or whirlwind. I guess you could say that with Catrina and Irene that is an apt metaphor. I used beetle killed pine and coal. Both originate from living trees, which were killed by climate change; the coal from natural warming and the more recent trees from human induced warming.

Anyone who switches on a light, uses a steel tool, drives a car, wears clothes etc, will have benefited from the burning of coal. That must be most people on the planet and we have all been pretty grateful for that. We can find technologies to burn coal in a cleaner way and this is a job for scientists and engineers, but burning all fossil fuels produces CO2 which is the direct cause of a warming planet. Trees breath in CO2 and give us back oxygen. If the trees are dying we are in trouble, not just for the oxygen, but for biodiversity too. Our children and grandchildren we never know of, or experience wild mountain forests.

We burn too much, our carbon footprint is way too big. The question is how can we lead sustainable lives with enough for all without, destroying this beautiful land on which all life depends? That is a good question to ask of future university students the world over.

Thixendale

2011-08-31T03:09:00.000-07:00

It is now a month since I returned from Wyoming and posted a blog.
At the beginning of August my show Land, Water and Language was installed at Dovecot in Edinburgh. It is a really beautiful space and this is how the work looked:

From 3 days at the Edinburgh Festival we drove down to Thixendale in the Yorkshire Wolds where I was due to start construction of a work in this stunning chalk valley. The commission was for The Yorkshire Wolds Way and I first saw this valley in November last year. My reaction to the valley was that this was the sculpture and anything added would have to be very subtle.The site was at the confluence of two glacial valleys and I noticed that a curve had been carved out of the far bank where the meeting of two glaciers would have formed a vortex before flowing on down.
My plan was therefore to draw these lines of ancient flow in gentle grassed mounds. In the smaller of the two valleys was a small disused dew pond which I wanted to restore and incorporate. Here are the first drawings and plans:

Work was delayed until late summer as we needed planning permission and a magnetic resonance survey for archeological disturbances. I spent 3 days stringing out the site into a grid of 10 m. squares. Then made the drawing in lime and water lines.

The work was being carried out for me by Clive and Leslie from Country Plan and they had already completed the dew pond, using the traditional means of a thick layer of clay, covered in a layer of straw then stones to prevent cattle from puncturing the clay liner.
On the Monday Mike Dee arrived - the best digger driver in Yorkshire. He came with machine and his dog Alfie, who proceeded to bark at all passers by and generally get in the way - much to the amusement of us all. Also present were Louise and Dominic, the local archeologists, employed to check out anything we dug up. In the end this amounted to a few fragments of medieval pottery and a sheep's bone!

So we started in the middle and worked outwards, Mike digging and me raking by hand. Mike was an artist with the digger and made the most beautiful job. His bucket was 40 cm. deep which was as deep as the trench. What came out went on the mound. He started by removing the turf on the ditch, then scooped out the rest. It took about 4 days in all.

The work has now been seeded with a natural grass mix and fenced. It will be green in a month and in 6 months we can take down the fence and let the cattle in.

The Sucker Done dried up itself

2011-07-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

Stuff still proliferating on the blogoshere about Carbon Sink. The faculty member who made the initial remark to me back in November about no one making the connection between dying forests and coal being shipped out of the state on a daily basis has this to say about it:

"I must also say, as I'm sure many already have, that it was absolutely delightful, energizing, and thrilling to discover that the arts have such subversive political potential that an installation can threaten the socioeconomic hegemony of the energy industry in Wyoming."

Meanwhile we came across this strange thing on Lake Hattie out in Big Hollow.

This is what a local Geologist has to say about it:

"Yup, them thangs is concretions. But they ain't made outa concrete! Nope, most probable they's from calcium carbonate concentrated in the mud on the bottom of the late Cretaceous ocean. But where's that ocean at? Damned if I know, maybe the sucker done dried itself up!

Carbon Stink

2011-07-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

It appears that some legislators, who are strongly influenced by the Energy companies, who fund the university through their taxes paid to the state, are serious about cutting funding to the University of Wyoming. This really does smack of 1984 and Big Brother. Art and education are both poor and powerless and easy to whack on the head. But both art and education are about the power of communicating - knowledge, ideas, understanding. It is how we survive as a species we pass on wisdom down to the next generation who we hope will find better solutions than we have.

We are at a turning point here. There are protests going on throughout the world about building yet more coal fired power stations. The majority of our electric power comes from the burning of coal which is on the way to raising mean temperatures on the planet 2 degrees. This is, in itself unsustainable and puts all life at risk. But at the rate we are going temperatures will rise beyond this and the process of heating will accelerate: Floods, heatwaves, drought, famine, tornadoes, dying forests, loss of biodiversity etc etc. We can see it all happening now.

There are two things that need to happen;
1) More research into clean energy production and more (not less) funding for universities to do this research.
2) An ongoing debate on how we can give the people of the world the basics for a decent life, and
how we can consume less and take the strain off the biosphere. This is a conversation
that needs to happen at all levels of education and it needs to happen now.

No one is suggesting that we stop burning coal. That is not going to happen or the world as we know it, will grind to a halt. But we do need to find alternative clean energy solutions and fast.

Horses, Steers, Bulls, Cowboys 'n things

2011-07-25T19:47:00.000-07:00

Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Whether you are an energy producer, a legislator, or a tree hugging liberal, everyone needs to breathe. While the blogosphere is alive with invective, Wyoming remains not just a place of mineral extraction, but wide open spaces, expansive skies, wildlife, cattle, horses, cowboys and the original first Americans.

University sculpture upsets Wyoming coal industry

2011-07-22T22:17:00.000-07:00

So now the row has gone global. Here is the article by Suzanne Goldenberg for the Saturday Guardian on July 23rd

The sculpture was always going to be hard to ignore – a giant 36-foot whorl of silvery logs and lumps of black coal in front of the main campus building at the University of Wyoming.

But British artist Chris Drury thought his commentary on the connection between the coal industry and dead trees would merely generate some polite on-campus debate in Cheyenne.

Not anymore. Drury's work, Carbon Sink What Goes Around Comes Around, sits in the heart of coal country, Wyoming, which mines more coal than any other state in America.

The work's existence and the links it draws between coal, climate change, and the pine beetle infestation that is devastating the landscape of the Rocky Mountains, has set off a debate about artistic and academic freedom, with the mining industry and Republican state legislators expressing outrage that a university that got money from coal would dare to turn on it.

"I thought it was a fairly innocuous thing to do," said Drury . "But it's kind of upset a lot of people here. Perhaps it was slightly more obvious because it is slightly more crucial in this state. But this is a university so I expected to start a debate, not a row."

He said he got the idea from a conversation with a scientist who complained that nobody was drawing the connection between the daily coal shipments from Wyoming, and the pine beetle infestation that was killing the region's forests.

The beetles are endemic to the Rockies but with climate change the region no longer gets the plunging temperatures that used to kill them off. Milder winters have allowed the beetles to live on and eat their way through the Rockies, stripping the bark off lodgepole pines from Colorado to British Columbia.

Some of the logs used in the installation were still crawling with beetles.

But as Drury charts on his blog, his comment on the connections between that calamity and coal was too close to home. By day three of construction, the mining industry was accusing the university of ingratitude towards one of its main benefactors – in what some have seen as a veiled threat to cut funding.

"They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonising the industry," Marion Loomis, the director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told the Casper Star-Tribune. "I understand academic freedom, and we're very supportive of it, but it's still disappointing."

Then two Republican members of the Wyoming state legislature joined in, calling the work an insult to coal. The subject of university funding also came up.

"While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget – I'm a great supporter of the University of Wyoming – every now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from," Tom Lubnau, one of the state legislators, told the Gillette News-Record.

The university said it was standing by Drury's work, although it was not necessarily endorsing his message.

Believe it or not the Dinosaurs eventually died out

2011-07-21T20:07:00.001-07:00

Dinosaur museum, made from dinosaur bones, Near Medicine Bow, Wyoming

Coal-Themed Sculpture Annoys Lawmakers

2011-07-21T19:10:00.000-07:00

Today Jim Robbins ran this article in the New York Times Green Blog:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/coal-themed-sculpture-annoys-lawmakers/

And tomorrow it may well go global as the Guardian have asked to interview me. If the energy companies hadn't made such a fuss about an overblown headline in the Casper Star Tribune all this would have been small beer. As it is they are now making veiled threats to The University of Wyoming about who they should and should not employ and what art should or should not be on campus. Isn't there something in the constitution here about freedom of speech - particularly applicable in a University, I would have thought. All this has been rightly stressed by the UW president. Art is free to speak its truth, and in the case of Carbon Sink all I am trying to do is to make many and multiple complex connections in as striking and beautiful way as I am able.

Rupert Murdoch, because of his economic and media power, has for years shackled UK politicians with veiled threats of electoral defeat, only to 'come a cropper' himself - custard pied in fact. The only thing that will work here if forests are to be saved and a repeat of what happened to New Orleans be avoided, is a proper and open debate about how we produce and use energy in a semblance of sustainability.

Below is Jim Robbins article.

Some people in Wyoming, one of the country’s top energy-producing states, are not happy with a sculpture that has just been installed at the University of Wyoming that depicts a link between human-caused climate change and dead forests.

The installation, by the British artist Chris Drury, is called “Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around.” It is 36 feet in diameter, and at its center, it features logs from trees killed by beetles, surrounded by lumps of coal. Forests have been dying in large numbers across the West, and scientists say it is because the climate has warmed, reducing the frequency of the well-below-zero temperatures that kill insects that attack pine trees. Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are a big reason things have gotten warmer, they say. Foremost among them is the burning of coal.

The sculpture and its message do not sit well with two state legislators from Campbell County, Wyoming, home to some of the largest coal mines in the country. In a letter to the University of Wyoming, Representatives Tom Lubnau and Gregg Blikre, both Republicans from Gillette, the energy capital of the Cowboy State, protested the installation of the sculpture.

“While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget – I’m a great supporter of the University of Wyoming – every now and then you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” Representative Lubnau told a local newspaper, referring to taxes collected from coal and other energy industries. He did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Museum representatives say they support the expression of their artists. “There are no plans to uninstall it,” said Susan Moldenhauer, director of the University of Wyoming Art Museum. “Chris Drury makes connections within nature. He’s not a political artist in any way.”

Mr. Drury said he understood that the world needs energy but that he also grasped that humans are doing damage to meet that need. His work seeks in part to connect these two ideas. An article that appeared about his sculpture in The Casper Star Tribune made that point, he said. But the headline – “U.W. Sculpture Blasts Fossil Fuels” – was a misrepresentation, Mr. Drury said, and angered some people.

“I’m sympathetic that we all use fossil fuels,” he said. “But whole forests are dying in the Rockies, and it’s happening everywhere.”

“I’m not trying to shove it down everyone’s throat, but I hope people will have a conversation” because of the sculpture, he said.

The work, which cost about $45,000 and was financed by an anonymous donor and with money from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, is intended to return to nature through decay and will probably be gone in 5 to 20 years, Mr. Drury said.

Representatives Lubnau and Blikre have suggested that a sculpture of energy workers be built on campus.

Carbon Sink, University of Wyoming

2011-07-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

Day 7 Carbon Sink

2011-07-19T19:37:00.001-07:00

We are done.

Sadly however the controversy is if anything heating up. I would call it petty politics and I haven't read anymore, but The Gillette News Record ran an article in the same vein, which spread to Montana and legislators are asking questions. The President of UW was interviewed on radio and said something like Art should be free to say what it likes - again I am going on hearsay.
However people in favour of what this work might imply are coming out of the woodwork and Jim Robbins will have an article in the New York Times on Thursday, which I think will be a voice for the forests. Others too want to talk about the art, so watch his space. As for me, I am very happy with the work.

Day 6, Carbon Sink

2011-07-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend a pipe in the sprinkler system broke and the sculpture was flooded, but nothing floated away and work continued today.

More rubbish from newspapers trying to stir it. They ignore everything of interest which you tell them and print only what they think is sensational. Here are a couple of email comments to me from friends:

Looks like a wonderful piece. It's tough to take the spiral form and do something genuinely new with it, but I think you've succeeded. And the brouhaha around it is both unexpected but maybe sadly predictable, no?

Very, very interesting to see this work of yours, and what it's prompting; its own outwhirling vortex of implications, then. Importantly, too, it *looks* astonishing.

I have had quite a bit to do with coal in the past. I once did a project in Nottingham Forest and asked to go down the coal mines which are underneath it - the ancient petrified forests. A mile and a half underground - an hour getting to the coal face - the heat, the dust, the noise, the collapsed passageways, the wheezing lungs of pneumoconiosis, and the ghost story's the miners tell you; thousands of tons of coal mined with peoples lives, all to feed one power station which feeds the national grid at peak times like Christmas and 6.00 pm when everyone is home from work with a cup of tea and Neighbours on the TV.
Thatcher did for the miners, broke the unions by using cheap North Sea oil and gas and fought them in the pitched battle at Orgreave, between mounted policemen and miners with clubs and iron bars.

Then there was the project I did in Rebecca Hossacks gallery in the Crypt of St James church, Piccadilly. I installed Coal Chamber, an igloo of coal in the white pristine basement: something dark as a reminder that religion is not necessarily all sweetness and light, and that humans have a dark side. We opened the show, but the church took exception to it and shoveled it out the following day. The coal was donated by British Coal but sadly it wasn't even British as the politicians had put paid to that, it had come all the way from Columbia.

Tomorrow we will fill in the remaining seams between the logs with the black and beautiful coal of Wyoming.

Big Hollow and the Mountains from the Observatory

2011-07-18T20:07:00.000-07:00

We are standing on granite, the top of a small forested mountain with an Observatory at the top, where there is a barbecue going on. Storms come and go and the wind is strong. Apart from the mountains in the distance, everything was once covered in volcanic ash from Nevada - up to the height of this mountain - time has compressed some of it into a sandstone, the rest has been scoured away by the wind, including what is referred to as Big Hollow. It is probable that Bison started the erosion by scraping hollows, which were gradually enlarged by the relentless winds.

Day 5, Carbon Sink

2011-07-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

Getting There:

Full Moon over Big Hollow by iphone

2011-07-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

In the Evening three of us, Susan Moldenhauer, the director of UW Art Museum, Nicole Ballenger and myself drive out to Centenial for a meal. It is a glorious evening and on the way home we see Pronghorn, Mule Deer, and two elk, as well as herds of horses. As we approach Laramie a huge full moon rises over Big Hollow. This remarkable depression in the plain, 11 miles long was scooped out by the jet stream coming down to earth and scouring the land.

Day 4 Carbon Sink

2011-07-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

I have four excellent helpers, all preparators at the Museum. They are Stoney, Connor, Felicia and David. The work is going really fast, but today, after the big thunderstorm last night, it was very hot with clear blue skies.
It turns out the beetle on Connors T- shirt was a kind which takes over after the bark and the pine beetle are gone, it eats the destructive fungii, brought in by the pine beetle. Never-the-less the powers that be have decreed that the logs must be sprayed for pine beetle.

Day 3 Carbon Sink

2011-07-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday I did a phone interview with a journalist from the Star Tribune. The article was on the front page this morning and it seems the s**t has hit the fan.But let me just clear one thing up first; the beetle crawling on Connors T-shirt was not apparently a pine bark beetle. They need bark and there is none on the logs. Well here is the article, apart from the inflamatory headline it seems quite balanced.

University of Wyoming sculpture blasts fossil fuels

By JEREMY PELZER Star-Tribune capital bureau trib.com | Posted: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 6:00 am | (14) Comments

Courtesy University of Wyoming

Artist Chris Drury constructs his sculpture titled 'Carbon Sink' south of Old Main on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie on Tuesday afternoon.

_CHEYENNE —

For the next three weeks, British artist Chris Drury will be constructing an outdoor sculpture at the University of Wyoming that connects the burning of fossil fuels to the region’s devastating mountain pine beetle epidemic.

It’s a message that doesn’t sit well with Wyoming’s mineral industry, which dominates the state’s economy and has given millions to the university.

The sculpture, titled “Carbon Sink,” will consist of a flat whirlpool of beetle-killed logs spiraling into a vortex of charred, black wood and studded with large lumps of Wyoming coal. Thirty-six feet in diameter, it will be just south of Old Main, near the intersection of 10th Street and Ivinson Avenue.

The work will be the latest entry in the UW Art Museum’s ongoing exhibition of large-scale sculptures around campus and throughout Laramie.

Like the other exhibition entries, “Carbon Sink” is only expected to last for a few years, until the wind and elements weather it down.

UW Art Museum Director Susan Molderhauer said the total cost for Drury’s sculpture and a second sculpture by a different artist was $75,000.

The sculpture is funded in part by a public grant through the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, she said. The remainder of the cost is being paid by a private donor.

Molderhauer said she’s been trying to bring Drury to Laramie since 2008, when the museum first launched its outdoor sculpture exhibition.

The sculpture was reviewed by UW’s art committee and approved by UW President Tom Buchanan, said university spokesman Jim Kearns.

Drury, a “land artist” who for 36 years has built sculptures in America and Europe using local materials and the local landscape, said he got the idea for “Carbon Sink” when he visited Laramie in November.

Talking with UW faculty and students, Drury said he learned about how during the past decade or so, mountain pine beetles have infested and killed more than 100 million acres of forest in Wyoming and other mountain states with no effective large-scale way to stop them.

Most scientists believe the dramatic increase in the number of beetles has been caused by warming temperatures and drought. In turn, most of the scientific community believes those trends are primarily human-caused, in large part because burning coal, oil and gas releases carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

“I just wanted to make that connection between the burning of coal and the dying of trees,” Drury said. “But I also wanted to make a very beautiful object that pulls you in, as it were.”

But Drury’s message could prove controversial in Wyoming, which produces more coal than any other state and is heavily reliant economically on fossil fuel extraction.

Last year, several major UW donors threatened to withhold millions in promised donations after the university invited 1960s radical-turned-academic Bill Ayers to speak on campus. UW banned Ayers from speaking, citing threats of violence, but a federal judge forced the school to allow him to deliver a lecture on education theory.

Marion Loomis, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, said it’s “really disappointing” that UW decided to build the sculpture. He pointed out that the mining industry has “been a stalwart supporter” of the university for years, giving the school millions of dollars in donations for projects such as the new School of Energy Resources.

“They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonizing the industry,” Loomis said. “I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing.”

Loomis said it’s “hard to tell” whether the sculpture would affect the mining industry’s donations to UW in the future.

“I’ll have to see what it looks like, I guess,” he said. “And maybe they’ll put up a sculpture commending the affordable, reliable electricity that comes from coal on the other end of Prexy’s Pasture.”

Kearns said UW officials had no comment on potential controversy over the project.

comment tread on: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/article_82943c8e-c869-5ffd-9874-8730df510368.html#ixzz1S1tgmtnJ

So first of all I am not attacking anyone, least of all the energy companies. I use as much oil, gas and electricity as anyone else in the Western world. My Carbon footprint is probably off the scale as I travel around the globe by plane. I come from the first industrial country, whose industrial revolution was based on the burning of coal, and much of our energy still comes from that source. So far be it for me to preach what we should and should not do.

However the science is abundantly clear on the fact that our actions are altering the climate and whole mountain ranges of dying forests are a visual reminder that things are not good and if nothing else, we need to have a conversation about it. The energy company might give the University of Wyoming millions of dollars, and in return they will get accurate unbiased science, often in their favour. But I presume that the gift of this money doesn't mean they dictate what the University does nor will it be used to stifle a debate that needs to be aired, because it is the future of our children and grandchildren that is at stake here as well as the entire biosphere. I don't have answers, but the questions need to be asked.

But really this was never intended to be a didactic sculpture, it is far more than the sum of its parts - coal and trees. It takes the form of a universal energy found in both the microcosm (e.g.flow of blood in the heart) to the macrocosm (formation of galaxies). It means that we are part of something much bigger than us, and it will be here long after man is just a fossil record.

Day 2, Wyoming

2011-07-13T04:46:00.001-07:00

We put in the first curving line of logs and the centre of the vortex, pinning them in place with re bar. There was talk of creating a bonfire over the top to char the logs, but there is concern from the authorities so, we will revert to plan B which was to use a propane burner, which will work well as the logs are very dry. Beetle are still coming out of them!

The coal has also been delivered and there are some beautiful large lumps. It is mined in open pits and the seam is 200' deep with very little sulphur, as the forest swamp in which it formed was fresh water. Tomorrow we will try and char the centre, weather permitting - There have been quite a number of thunder storms coming through and they are not done yet.

At the back of my mind I am still thinking of a cloud chamber sited near the museum, put underground, but projecting the wide expanse of sky, which in Wyoming is always mind blowing.

Laramie - day 1

2011-07-11T18:19:00.000-07:00

Just looking at the map makes your heart sing:
The Wind River Range
Greybull
Bear Lodge Mountains
Medicine Bow
Shoshone
Bridger Teton
The Platte and The Big Horn rivers
Cheyenne

Laramie is at 7500 ' and the last time I came here for 3 days in November, I flew in to Denver from Sussex at sea level, then on to Laramie by bus where I suffered altitude sickness with hammering headaches and vomiting. Someone here who uses goats as pack animals high in the mountains, says that when the goats go high they chew on Yarrow. So I have been adding tincture of Yarrow to my water bottle and touch wood, it seems to be working.

Today we made a start and the site is perfect for the piece.

PARIS AND WYOMING

2011-07-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

Four works at Galerie Gimpel et Muller:

A print from Antarctica which is in an edition of 50. It schematically represents one day of wind over Antarctica and the flight of an Albatross over 18 months, following the circumpolar current.

Two works using maps and ochre from the mines at Roussillon in the Luberon.

A work called Rhone/Camargue which uses a shed Aesculapian snake skin, found lying in the reeds of the Camargue, superimposed on to paper with flowing mud patterns of Rhone silt.

Albatross 2008
digital print on archival paper of one day of wind over Antarctica, with a hand drawn blue crayon line of the flight path of a tagged Alabatross over 18 months.
97 x 96 cm.

Roussillon I 2011
Rubbed ochre and inserted, dished, woven map
84 x 84 cm

Rousillon III 2011
Rubbed ochre and inserted, dished, woven map
84 x 84 cm

Rhone/Camargue and detail 2011
Rhone mud and snake skin on paper
187 x 50 cm

All works are for sale

Carbon Sink - A work outside for the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

In November last year I made a visit to the University oF Wyoming with a view to making a work there as a part of their Sculpture program. While there I gave a talk and two seminars and met with various people in the faculty. It was during a conversation with the entomogist and nature writer proffesor Feffrey Lockwood that I had an idea for a work. He said that no one really makes the connection between the wealth of the state from the mining and export of oil and coal and the subsequent warming of the planet. This induces warmer winters and allows the pine bark beetle to thrive and as a direct consequence vast tracts of forests in the Rockies are dying. I have seen this at first hand. So I am about to make a large and very black work on the campus, using coal and charred, dead tree trunks in the shape of a whirlpool spiraling down into the earth.

Destroying Angel Nevada

2011-06-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

This is a new work made in my studio from several thousand pieces of desert thorn branches;
Lycium pallidum and Lycium andersonii. This is a plant which grows on The Nevada Nuclear Test Site and was sent to me by Dr Lynn Fenstermaker, an earth and ecosystems scientist working for the Desert Research Institute on the Test Site.
The thorn is stung on Nylon thread within a perspex box, which is placed on a black stand which houses an LED spotlight which shines up through the work (My studio has too low a ceiling to allow a photograph). The shape of the mushroom cloud is taken from Amanita virosa (Destroying Angel), a highly poisonous species.
The work forms a part of on an on going series called Life in the Field of Death, about organisims living in conditions hostile to life.

WAVE-PARTICLE

2011-05-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

WAVE - PARTICLE, A PROPOSAL FOR A NEW WORK.

Drawings of the installation

One section through

The wave is an image I keep coming back to. Energy moves in the form of a wave, be it in weather systems, rivers, ocean currents, sound, and in our bodies. This wave energy is present in all matter, visible in the grain of wood, a nuclear explosion and the creation of the universe itself - within both microcosm and macrocosm.

Exploring these connections in 2009 I made a film, Breath, with Andy Mackinnon in North Uist, Scotland, which can be seen on the following link: http://vimeo.com/channels/taigh#14956047.

One idea had been to project the film onto Battersea Power Station or Tate Modern (itself a former power plant) during the Copenhagen climate summit .

With the proposed work Wave-Particle I would like to take this idea further. In quantum mechanics the theory of wave-particle duality states that all matter exhibits both wave and particle properties, but not at the same time. If you look at a particle you can’t determine its velocity and if you look at its velocity (i.e. the wave) you can’t see the particle, but they are in fact one and the same thing. This duality is central to the nature of matter; It is part of the nature of our lives.

The connection between the wave and nuclear power has been further illuminated by the events of this year – the tsunami in Japan and the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant. Waves are also of course at the heart of the physics of subatomic reactions and are currently being explored in the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN in Geneva.

The wave is therefore a very apposite image both of the ‘nature’ of matter itself and of what is happening in the world now. It is at once symbolic of man’s attempts to make sense of the complexities of the universe, of man’s exploitation of nature, and the potentially destructive power of nature itself. As well as the tsunami, the idea of the wave also alludes to global concerns about coastal erosion; it also contains prompts of nuclear tests in the Pacific, which have resulted in contamination of land and sea and the loss of livelihoods.

The wave then is both life and death.

Since 2008 I have been using particles (small units of substance) to create larger forms, most notably mushroom clouds, which have been linked into cycles of life, death and regeneration. The mushroom is the great symbol of this cycle as it breaks down dead matter into soil on which plants grow. Two recent works, Mushroom Cloud and Destroying Angel, are made respectively from dried mushroom slices and small bundles of sagebrush from the Nevada desert, strung floor-to-ceiling on nylon thread. There are obvious links in these pieces to nuclear testing, weapons, and the natural cycles of life and death. These works are constructed using a
schematic formula, illustrated below:

Destroying Angel - Nevada, 2008

Mushroom Cloud - Arte Sella, Italy 2010

Drawings and plans for Mushroom Cloud

With all this in mind I would like to make a work that embodies both the life-death duality and wave-particle duality – a three-dimensional installation of a huge wave made from suspended fragments of detritus, both man-made and natural, washed up on beaches throughout the world. The work’s form would move from the relatively ordered vortex to chaos, giving the appearance of movement while remaining static, enabling the viewer to experience the duality the wave embodies.

The sculpture would be strung floor-to-ceiling on nylon thread, attached to hooks screwed into the ceiling or metal plates and would ideally be made to a height of at least 8 metres, though the dimensions would vary depending on the size of the space.

The material would be gathered principally from shores around the UK, so that it can be collected without resorting to air travel. I would do this myself but I would also like to involve people who live in coastal regions worldwide by asking communities, schools and other individuals to send me detritus by post. I would advertise the project by posting messages on my blog, on Twitter and Facebook, and contacting relevant organisations (such as the Coastal Communities Alliance in the UK and international conservation/environmental groups)
and newspapers such as The Guardian. My experience is that one of the most valuable things about making a new work is the process itself; simply making a work can change you and the people you work with. It creates a sense of community and generates discussion of ideas that often have a reach far wider than you’d originally imagined. That sense of engagement with the world is more important in some ways than the object itself.

An 8 metre-high work would probably take about three weeks to construct, and would require a small team of volunteer helpers.

This idea for a work has been entered for the Coal Prize 2012

Where humankind and nature converge

2011-02-25T02:15:00.000-08:00

FROM THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2011 | 15

SPECIAL REPORT CONTEMPORARY ART

Where humankind and nature converge

LEWES, ENGLAND

A British land artist
explores the permanent
and the ephemeral

BY RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS

Visitors to the white chalk cliffs above this picture-postcard country town in southeast England will see a mysterious arabesque of ponds and reeds on the flood plain beyond the meandering River Ouse.

It was from this vantage point that, in the late 1990s, the artist Chris Drury first conceived of ‘‘Heart of Reeds,’’ a landscape sculpture covering four acres, or 1.6 hectares, whose graceful, looping, double-vortex forms are based on the blood-flow patterns of the human heart.

Chris Drury is now one of Britain's leading exponents of Land Art, a movement whose origins date from the 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, dedicated to creating works in natural, found materials, often in remote places.

As an expression of the themes that for nearly three decades have inspired Mr. Drury—nature and culture, the inner and the outer, microcosm and macrocosm—‘‘Heart of Reeds’’ is a characteristic piece. What makes it unusual is that it is so close to home. (Mr. Drury settled in Lewes with his family in 1982.) Most of the rest of the artist’s site-specific work has been carried out in places scattered around the globe, from Scandinavia, Greece, Spain and the Italian Alps to the Himalayas, Sri Lanka, Japan,Antarctica and the Nevada desert.

Works by ChriS Drury: ‘‘Heart of Reeds’’ (2005) in Lewes, England;

‘‘Wind Vortices’’ (2007) in Antarctica

‘‘Mushroom Cloud’’ (2010), made of dried mushrooms

Mr. Drury’s ‘‘Sky Mountain Chamber.’’

‘‘The land in this case was not wild nature but had just been reclaimed from old railway sidings and the town was trying to decide what to do with it,’’ Mr. Drury said on a recent crisp and sunny winter morning during a stroll along the paths that pleasantly wend their way through the reeds. ‘‘When I went to the local authorities with my idea, they were very dubious. But I did drawings of it and held a show of them, and the town approved.’’

It took five years to raise the £150,000 —which at the current exchange rate is $243,000—needed to carry out the project, which was completed in 2005. It is now a constantly changing spectacle, according to the seasons, a haven for warblers and kingfishers, loud with the croaking of frogs in summer.

Chris Drury was born the son of a tea broker in Colombo in 1948 and came to Britain when he was 6 years old. He studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts in London, where he also received a rigorous training in drawing from the British painter Euan Uglow. ‘‘He was an incredibly demanding teacher,’’ Mr. Drury said. ‘‘He set very frustrating drawing challenges, but in the end you could see the point of them.’’

After graduating, the artist received a steady series of commissions for portrait busts. ‘‘I had learned all the skills I needed at Camberwell,’’ he said. ‘‘When I began to shift my interest to creating land art, they were in some ways a burden. But the drawing skills are still very important in planning projects. In many ways my projects are drawings put into action. I don’t draw for its own sake, but to form, refine and execute works.’’

Mr. Drury’s transition from figurative artist to land artist began with a 12-day trek in the snowbound Canadian Rockies in 1974 with the land artist Hamish Fulton, who, along with Richard Long, was a pioneering British practitioner in the form.

Mr. Fulton records his journeys in various media but leaves no trace of his passing through the landscape. Mr. Drury, in contrast, began after that trip to work on ideas for creating sculptures at various selected sites along the paths of his journeys.

Mr. Drury has engaged only intermittently with conventional private galleries through which he has sometimes sold his sculptures, paintings and photographs of his work in situ. Yet, he said, freedom from pressure to produce commercially saleable products in an easily recognizable style has left him free to engage with a vast range of collaborators, including craftsmen, astronomers, earth scientists, cardiologists, radiographers, town planners, architects and hi-tech experts.

He has also interacted with university communities, isolated farming villages and a Native American reservation — worlds that he finds much more ‘‘real,’’ he said, than what he sees as the overheated, ultimately claustrophobic contemporary art scene.

Mr. Drury has often spontaneously made works in wild areas of mountain, forest and desert. Others have beencommissioned by institutions and local authorities. These projects include designs for hospital grounds and parks. And more than a dozen public collections on both sides of the Atlantic now have works by him, including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as galleries in Nashville, Tennessee; Raleigh, North Carolina; Reno, Nevada; and Seattle, Washington.

Unlike some of his fellow land artists, he has never been afraid to harness the latest technology. In 2006-7, the artist spent two months with British Antarctic Survey researchers on the ice cap. The experience gave rise to a typically varied group of works.

For ‘‘Wind Vortices,’’ he first made a drawing of the spiraling wind patterns passing over the ice, which he transferred to a map and replotted on a computer. He took advantage of a fresh fall of snow to trace out the wind pattern on the ice on a huge scale with a Ski-Doo snow vehicle, guided by a GPS device attached to the handlebars. He then climbed the neighboring mountainside to take a series of photographs of this
outsize drawing, which disappeared a few hours after he had taken them.

More permanent pieces were created from the patterns of echograms of the ice cap. Using a device that measures the layers of ice, each line on the echogram represents about 500 years of ice buildup. These reminded him of mountainous scenes in classical Chinese scroll painting, an effect he enhanced by highlighting them in pencil and ink. Other echograms were combined with strangely similar echocardiograms of the pilot who flew the Twin Otter plane low over the ice to take the soundings.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Drury went to investigate an extreme environment at the other end of the climate scale — the searingly hot region of the U.S. government’s Nevada Test Site, which covers 1,400 square miles, or 3,600 square kilometers, and was the scene of more than 900 atmospheric and underground explosions. The artist has long been fascinated by mushrooms, remarking that ‘‘a mushroom can feed you, kill you or cure you.’’ Imaginative works derived from them provided the leitmotif of an exhibition, ‘‘Mushroom/Clouds,’’ held at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2008.

At the same time, working with members of the local Native American Paiute people, who have been steadily deprived of their ancestral lands, he created installations in the desert, including ‘‘Winnemucca Whirlwind,’’ a design of concentric circles with diameters measuring 300 feet, or 90 meters, echoing the patterns (themselves taken from nature) used by indigenous basket weavers.

The building of symbolic shelters out of found materials — from stone, wood and mud to reeds, turf and ice blocks — were among Mr. Drury’s first land art constructions. They have since evolved into his ‘‘Cloud Chambers’’ series, or ‘‘camera obscura’’ works that reflect images of the surrounding landscape into the interior of the structure. These are now dotted around the world.

One, called ‘‘Star Chamber,’’ on a wooded hilltop at the Dyer Observatory near Nashville, demonstrates the phenomenon of the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun. Another, on the shore of a reservoir in Northumberland in northern England, catches the movement of waves on the surface of the water through an angled periscope. Others still, in Japan, Belgium, Scotland and northern Italy, cast constantly changing pictures into their interiors of surrounding mountains, wind-rocked trees, sky and scudding clouds.

The ‘‘Cloud Chambers’’ are unusual in that, unlike many of the artist’s outdoor installations soon erased by the elements, these structures may last for many years. But they share with his more ephemeral pieces a common purpose. They are thoughtfully and skillfully composed, provide immediate aesthetic pleasure, evoke memories and almost dreamlike states and draw the viewer into the artist’s ceaseless search for elusive connections between mankind and nature. It is a quest that arises, in his words, ‘‘from a feeling of loss that is experienced by all modern technological societies.’’

THREE INSTALLED WORKS, Pori Art Museum, Finland

2011-02-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

2011-02-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

ECO-ART - Pori Museum of Art, Finland

25th January - 4th February: Installation of 3 pieces at the Pori Museum of Art, Finland for the show ECO-ART, curated by John Grande, Peter Selz and Pia Hovi Assad.

The works are:

WIND VORTICES, Sky Blu, Antarctica 2007.
Printed by Elephant graphics in Sussex to a scale of 740 x 270 m.

DUST TO DUST, ASHES TO ASHES -
A mushroom spore print painted directly onto the wall using dust from the ventilation ducts and ashes from birch logs used for heating a sauna. Dimensions - 3 m. diam.

CARBON SINK
Made from birch logs, branches, twigs and charcoal sticks, the work is a vortex of logs laid on the floor 8 m. in diam.

On the first day the temperature outside was - 22 degrees and Errki and I headed out to a forest school 25 K. away to select the logs for Carbon Sink which were delivered later that day. Two of us, Veijo and myself laid the piece in 6 days. The print, in 10 sections, was hung by professionals and two artists painstakingly painted the spore print, which was projected on an overhead projector. It took them 4 days.

Artists in the show are:
Jan-Erik Andersson, Brandon Ballengee, Ciel Bergman, Christo and Jean-Claude, Joyce Cutler- Shaw, Agnes Denes, Chris Drury, Michael Flomen, Andy Goldsworthy, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ichi Ikeda, Richard Misrach, Nils-Udo, Dennis Oppenheim, Alan Sonfist.

It runs from 4th February to 29th May.

RHINE MOSEL SLATE WHIRLPOOL

2010-09-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

This is a new work for Koblenz Garden Festival 2011.
Made from 20 Tons of slate on a site above where the Mosel flows into the Rhine, close to the Castle. The slate under the ground here is said to give the wine of the region its distinctive taste. The work was commisioned through the Heike Strellow gallery in Frankfurt and it is hoped it will remain as a permanent piece.

LAND, WATER AND LANGUAGE

2010-09-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

4th September - 30th October 2010
Taigh Chearsabghagh Museum and Arts Centre, North Uist, Western Isles, Scotland HS6 5AA

I first visited these islands in the early 80s when I walked from The North of Lewis to Barra in the South. One of the abiding images I have from this walk was the sight of Eaval rearing up above the flat, flow country of North Uist, dominating the maze of Lochs and waterways. In 1997 I was invited to make a work around Lochmaddy and made the now much visited 'Hut of the Shadows'.

It was not until Andy Mackinnon mentioned the idea of a canoe journey through this land, that I was able to re visit this land and to finally climb Eaval and see it all spread out before me.

This exhibition is the first in a series about land and water which will be curated and devised by Chris Drury and Andy
Mackinnon at Taigh Chearsabhagh over the next 2 years. It is hoped that the ongoing project will involve, artists, writers,
film makers and musicians.
The project began in September 2009 when Drury and Andy Mackinnon (TC’s curator and filmmaker) made a two day
journey by Canadian canoe across the island, from the west coast back to Lochmaddy on the east coast, threading their
way through the maze of lochs and waterways. The result is this extensive show which includes the installation of a suspended
woven canoe, made from heather, willow and salmon skins, works on the wall using digital technology and place
names, with maps and satellite imagery; works with peat and water; a photogravure of the land traversed by canoe; and a
video of a breaking wave.

‘The Uists and Benbecula are part of a flow country whose interweaving of sea, lochs and land takes on a wave pattern, as
when the tide retreats from a beach. The chain of islands and sea are dominated by Eaval (Island Mountain) in the North
and Hekla in the South, both Norse names transfixing a fluid landscape with history and language. For the experience of
this land is multi layered: from the actuality of the place; the wind, the rain, the light, the sound of the curlew, the roar
of the surf, the brown squelch of the peat bogs and the scent of the burning peat from the cottage chimneys, intermingles
with the history interred in the place names on the map, given both in Gaelic and Norse: Encounter Loch, Secure Sheep
Island, Hillock of Many Priests, Loch of the Old Woman and something of the pain from the clearances: Isle of Lament,
Coffin Loch. So language and meaning and history are embedded in this now sparsely populated place. And using satellite
imagery we can look at this pattern of land and water observe the ever changing patterns of weather fronts which
mirror the land beneath. At the same time we can look at the microcosm in the small bacteria embedded in the peat bogs
and know through the science that these microorganisms are affecting the climate and the weather in which the whole is
embedded.’

Three Views of Eaval - peat on paper

23rd September 2009

Looking South From Eaval - Land and Language 1

Land and Water - photogravure

Land and Language 11

Detail

The Methane Eater - Life in the Field of Death - Methylocapsa acidiphila

Land Water Vessel - willow, hazel, heather and salmon skins

MUSHROOM CLOUD - ARTE SELLA MALGA COSTA

2010-06-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

Mushroom Cloud – 9th -22nd of June

The Sky Mountain chamber team are finishing clearing the outside of the building and plastering the inside for the screen which will take the image. They will also make the door. Meanwhile we start to think about the installation for the barn, which will be a mushroom cloud made from strung mushrooms with the video Way of the White Clouds projected up in a second floor area above the entrance.

I have drawn detailed plans of the pattern of the top and bottom, between which the nylon threads will be stretched. I realized when I was here last year that because this was an old milking parlor/cow barn it has a trench which runs down the entire length of the centre of the building which is now floored in wood. The floor can be removed, so you could in theory cut a hole in the middle, glaze it with acrylic and shine a light up through it, so lighting the work from one place underneath.

So working with Gabriele, the fixit employee of Arte Sella, and Emanuele’s brother in law, we start to set this up, and then after I have drawn out the bottom plan, Gabriele makes an identical pattern in welded steel for the top. Gabriele is a climber, so by means of ladders, scaffolding and a bit of ingenious rope work, Gabriele gets the top hanging in position. So we are now ready to start threading the 3000 pieces of mushroom – a variety of Cep bought commercially.

The plan is that the two women, Ivana and Annalisa, who come daily to clean and cook and who are also on a social scheme will help me with this. Ivana particularly is really looking forward to it. The stone guys would not be seen dead doing it. So we start in threading mushrooms. It soon becomes apparent however that this isn’t going to work. The air is very humid up here and the mushrooms soon become limp and slide down the threads. It is as I thought and I had warned Emanuele that we might have to dip them all in an acrylic sealer – he naturally was very against this, favoring ‘naturale’. So dip them all in sealer we did, but then of course the weather changed and it rained constantly so there was no sun to dry them. The solution was to light the woodburner in the farm house and dry them all overnight on racks. So it has been 12 days of stringing mushrooms and the work is almost complete; another day and we can take down the scaffolding. When we black out the interior and turn on the light the piece looks like a shower of gold – surprising even me.

Now, a day later it is finally complete

Arte Sella June 2010

2010-06-11T23:32:00.001-07:00

Arte Sella 2010

I first came to Arte Sella to make a work in 1994, an image of that work will be in the Tate’s 2011 calendar. Arte Sella is a site specific Art and Nature organisation in the beautiful high Sella valley just south of the Dolomites, close to the town of Borgo Valsugana in the Italian Alpes. It was the brain child of an art teacher, an architect and a young artist who were on a trip to Samarkand in Uzbekistan. While standing in front of the tomb of Tamerlane they had the idea to create the conditions for a site specific art aligned to their own particular region of the world.

The organisation has gone through several incarnations and has now grown into an incredibly successful site specific contemporary art and music venue dedicated to Art and Nature and attracting up to 100,000 visitors a year. The extraordinarily beautiful forested valley with its flower meadows surrounded by limestone mountains is what really strikes you first about the place, and when walking the trail it is nature that is the dominant feature and the art is almost incidental, for the ethos here is that the art should be a part of this nature. It does however attract a huge number of people and it has to be said that its current incarnation is entirely down to the vision and drive of that one young artist – Emanuele Montibeller, who while running this amazing institution, only gave up his day job of selling fabric in the local markets, as recently as 2007. Arte Sella, has not only transformed the valley but it has benefited the local economy to a considerable extent. To read more about the place visit: http://www.artesella.it/eng.

Back in 1994 about 8 international artists were invited to come to Arte Sella and make something in return for hospitality, good food and wine, a catalogue and a traveling show of images of the work made, throughout Italy the following year + our expenses and what amounted to pocket money. We all stayed in the same house, had fun and got to know each other. The works we made were all temporary and have long gone. From this small gathering and through the other artists, I was later invited to make projects in Japan, America and Germany and was also instrumental in inviting some those artists to Britain. Now in 2010, the story is very different and I am here on my own staying in the Malga Costa, and being paid a fair fee for a large and permanent work.

The work I made in 1994 paid tribute to the mountain which dominates the valley and which is often invisible because of the thick forest. In this work called Tree Mountain Shelter, you entered a mountain shaped structure from which there was a view out through a narrow slit window, through the trees to the mountain wall. At the end of the project Patrick Dougherty and I climbed that mountain. On the invitation of Emanuele, I returned in 2008 to think about a new work, but strangely my first instinct to pay tribute to the mountain was still strong even though the site was different. I searched the area around the Malga for a site within trees, but with a view of the mountain. The only site where all the criterion were met was a amongst some dark pine trees adjacent to Guilliano Mauri’s Tree Cathedral.

I knew for a fact the when Mauri first made this, his last great work that he didn’t want any other work within a mile of it. The thing about Arte Sella however is that large egos have no place, works have to play second fiddle to nature and must rub along with each other. The Tree Cathedral is amazing and I have seen whole coach loads of Italian Catholics stand close to it and sing. The Pope has even expressed a wish to visit. In time however its only human connection will be the four straight rows of planted Beech trees; all the outer wood construction, enclosing the young trees will fall away and be forgotten. By placing a stone structure close by I will reconnect this Cathedral of beech trees back to the human impulse to create. My stone beehive structure will be a kind of ante Chapel or Rondello to the trees. The group of trees surrounding the work are in themselves, dark and enclosing, shielding the stone structure from the cathedral. A group of four of these trees is remarkable as one of the Fir trees is old, huge and gnarled and the three conifers entwine themselves around a single oak which spreads its lighter green leaves in amongst the darker pine needles.

So the idea which slowly evolved over 2008 – 9 was to make a cloud chamber which by means of an aperture angled at the mountain would project an image inside, of the mountain and sky, upside down. In time of course the tops of the trees of the Cathedral will become part of the image. The work would be made from the same limestone as the mountain itself. I was in two minds about the shape of the building – one part of me felt that a chapel like oratory would fit, but another part of me wanted the more archaic and mysterious beehive which would seem to fit the dark space within the fir trees. When I arrived in mid May I still hadn’t made up my mind, but the weather at the time was crystal clear and for the first time, just 30 m. from the site, looking North west was a clear view of the Brenta Dolomites. Their jagged snow covered spires echoed the conical shape of the structure I had in mind – so beehive it was.

I had estimated 150 tons of stone and asked for a team of skilled dry-stone wallers who could build such a corbelled structure. In the event no such expertise existed in the area. The valleys grow fruit and vegetables and there is no need for field enclosures in the high pastures – so there are no stone walls. Building with modern materials has done for any of the old building skills. Arte Sella however is a strongly socialist organization, taking into account the needs of the people of the area. No one gets paid huge sums including the artists and it works because it makes good use of what is available in the area. Within the local commune their exists a system of giving people who are out of work and approaching retirement a job in return for a living wage. It is a social system, and four of these men have the job of renovating the sculptures, making fences and generally taking care of the area around the Malga. One of these men was astonishingly the only guy in the whole region who knows how to build with dry-stone. My own ethos is also always to use what is locally available in both materials, labor and expertise.

I had expected, aged 62 to have the roll of director of works, but in the event I was the only one who knew how to make a corbelled building, and what we had in this instance was a ground plan where a rectangular interior is surrounded a circular exterior, so as we built up, the square walls would need to become a circular ceiling and that is not easy. On top of this I was told that the health and safety regulations for people on the social scheme stated that they could not work above 2 meters – and the building was going to be nearly 5 meters tall. Reno, the expert in dry-stone walling and the self appointed foreman, got round this by building an ingenious system of wooden scaffolding that satisfied his need for safety – up to 4 meters anyway. Plus it was a long way for any health and safety officials to come and inspect! In order to understand the exact shape of the structure we were building, he insisted on building a wooden structure which gave us a clear indication of the angle of the walls as we went up. It also meant I had to make up my mind and give precise measurements from the word go. Usually I work by eye and feel, but I realized that with his system I would get what I intended. This was particularly important as no one spoke English and I have virtually no Italian, so all communication was in sign language and by example.

So five old guys made this considerably large building in 3 weeks, with a week spent on the interior. One of the other guys turned out to have an eye and an enthusiasm for stone, so three of us were building and the two who stayed on the ground passed up materials, mixed up limestone mortar where it was needed etc. When we reached their limit in height I continued working and standing on the building. Stone was lifted to us by a series of machines which Emanuele had wangled off the commune for free. At one point we had a huge JCB with driver supplied by the Civil Defense. Since there had been no earthquakes or natural disasters the driver had time on his hands. He even mucked in and helped build. Limestone mortar, mostly for the stucco walls inside was supplied by a local firm for free. The Romans invented it and this particular company were experts and supplied the building industry for most of the country.

Unless a tree falls on it, this work is going to be around for a very long time and thousands of people will see it, go inside and see the mysterious image of the inverted mountain. I have a suspicion that Emanuele has an eye on it as his tomb!

INTERVIEW WITH PU HONG - CHINESE SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

2010-05-11T02:41:00.000-07:00

An Interview with British Land Art Artist Chris Drury

Pu Hong

Pu: could you say something about how Land Art has evolved and changed in the last 40 years? In the era of globalization, is

there a new face to Land Art which is different from the 1960s’?

Chris: I think land Art has evolved and changed a great deal and most artists I know who have been given this label, do not like

it because it does not adequately describe what they do. Narrowly defined as an art made in the landscape, with the landscape

as part of the work and the work as part of the landscape, then such an art, no longer exists because it has broken out of those

parameters. What it isn’t, is works made elsewhere in a studio and placed in a landscape setting, as in a lot of sculpture parks.

You could say that it has become: Art in Nature, Art and Nature, Art and the Natural Environment, Body and landscape, Private

rituals in the landscape, cosmic cycles, Eco Art and there is an element of Land Art in Art and Science. Some artists, particularly

in America are focusing on ruined landscapes – industrial wastelands and the spread of the suburbs. Some have become community based and activist, where vegetable gardens are being created on the sterile front yards of suburban wastelands

transforming communities as well as landscape. In Europe Joseph Beuys politicized an art connected to nature ( he co founded

the Green Party – an anti political party) and this has now been taken forward by artists making work about Climate Change,

which is activist as well as aesthetic.

In Britain there is an organization called Cape Farewell which takes art, science and education practitioners to the Arctic and to

melting glaciers around the world, to give them first hand experience of the phenomenon. This has resulted in artists such as

Rachel Whiteread filling the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with thousands of white plastic boxes, or Alex Hartley, making

political claim to a small island emerging from the ice in the Arctic, a comment perhaps on the Russians laying claim to the sea

bed beneath the North Pole.

So Land Art now has a very wide sphere of reference. I myself went to Antarctica with The British Antarctic Survey as one of two

artists working alongside a scientific organization which is focusing on the effects of Climate Change. I experienced wonder, but

tinged with incomprehension, confusion, regret and anger. In the face of this to simply make a sculpture or painting in that place

would be wholly to ignore the reality and this attitude must exemplify how things have changed.

Pu: Through creativity and hard work, Land Artists of Britain have earned their worldwide reputation. Do you think there is any

national and cultural identity which separates British’s Land Art from that of other countries, such as the Americans Robert

Smithson and Walter De Maria? Is there something uniquely British about it? Insert images from Long, Fulton, Nash,

Goldsworthy

Chris: Richard Long, whatever he might say, was very influenced by the Americans in the 60’s when he was at college – mostly

because they pioneered the idea of using the wild outside spaces of the world as a form of canvas for their work. Linked with

the conceptual movement, he and Hamish Fulton developed a language about walking. Fulton was actually very interested in

the conceptual language of the musician John Cage and their heroes were the British and European Climbers and Explorers of

the early 20th Century. The Himalayan climber/explorer Eric Shipton once said that if you couldn’t organize an expedition on the

back of an envelope, then it was too complicated. Fulton’s statement: ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints’ is a similar

statement of intent. Last year at the age of 63 Fulton climbed Mount Everest. In 1975 I went with him to the Canadian Rockies

to walk for two weeks in the first snows of October and this one experience changed the direction of my Art. I understand

his attitude of not touching, but I would argue however that because we are nature, we are always going to touch and alter it,

it is a question of how much and why. Both Long and Fulton are very critical of the heavy hand of American Land Art, and hold

a strong, almost Buddhist idea of not altering the landscape in any major way. Move some stones, scrape a line with your foot,

take a photo, make an entry in the notebook and walk on.

Although David Nash’s art is based around the philosophies of the German philosopher Rudolf Steiner his work is very English,

as it focuses on the tree and plant growth, and although most of his work is carved outside using a chain saw directly into fallen

trees, it is mostly then shown inside, but that is no different to Long and Fulton who exhibit documentation of actions and walks

made outside, inside the gallery.

The attitude of a light touch was taken further in the 80’s by Andy Goldsworthy, who some criticize as being purely decorative.

Such is the hegemony of Conceptual Art in Britain that to my knowledge the Tate Gallery do not own a work by Goldsworthy.

British Land Art may have a lightness of touch and a Zen simplicity and from the outside may look like a national attitude, but

in reality is full of divisions and disagreements, which is how it should be. Today things are moving on and what is happening is

more in line with global movements advocating environmental change.

Pu: Your work seems different to other Land artists, because of your enthusiastic link to Science. This is especially evident in

your project in Antarctica, I can see science elements everywhere. And once you said the “theory of everything” has a bearing

on your works. Some critics even said you are more of a scientist than an artist. How does science influence your conception of

Land Art?

Explorers at the Edge of the Void - Antarctica 2008

Chris: In many ways I am an outsider, I have few works in museums and galleries around the world and I am not represented by

cutting-edge galleries. This has been a source of extreme frustration, because it makes surviving financially very difficult, but

strangely it has put me in a position of great strength, because I can operate at the borders of many disciplines, and so can make

unique connections in the world.

The Art world and the Art market is very narrow in its terms of reference, it is rife with positioning and infighting and tends to be

self referential. It rarely bursts out of its own bubble. It reminds me of the heating system of a car in cold weather, switched to

internal recycled air. The car gets nice and warm but all the windows mist up so you can’t see out. That’s the Art world. I prefer

to let the air come in from outside, so I can see the world clearly as it is, or better still, get out of the car altogether.

This attitude, together with the circumstances of my life, means that I must go with whatever is coming towards me. It is in effect

a Taoist attitude and it means that I am interested in all ways of looking at our connections to nature and poses the question:

How can we live sustainably in the 21st Century? It means that I have collaborated with people from many areas of expertise.

Science is one of them and an important one, but I have also worked with small, often marginalised rural communities, farmers, doctors, clinicians, architects, town planners and local authorities, also technicians of many varieties including dry stone wallers, wood craftsmen, basket makers, radiographers, film editors and digital wizards. All of these people see the world in different ways and add to the complexity of how we see nature and how we live on the Earth.

The world of science is much like the world of art – often narrow and compartmentalised. Of course there are people from both

fields who make breakthroughs and see the bigger picture. Science is so complex that most scientists only have time to read

about their own field and often fail to see the whole. As someone who acts on the edge, I am in the unique position to make

connections, which is what my so called Land Art has evolved into doing.

Pu: how do you understand Nature?

Chris: Nature simply is. Nature is also a word, which is language and language is culture. Culture is our conditioning as an individual, through to a society. In the 21st century culture is global. Culture is the veil through which we see nature, so we rarely

see it as it is – we see it through the veil of our conditioning. From the first early farmers we have tried to control nature and right now that is causing immense problems because we are changing the climate of the earth and heading towards the 6th mass extinction of most of the biosphere. Sixty five Million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, 95% of the biosphere became extinct. We have evolved from the 5% which survived and are in danger of becoming a part of that 95% which will disappear again. Understanding our disconnection to nature, may yet save us.

Pu: in your philosophy on Art, you talk most about the idea of “macrocosm and microcosm”, can you expand on this more for

us?

Chris: Like I said, we set up divisions. Nature is not something ‘out there’. We are nature. We are made from the dust of stars,

millions of years old. The energy and laws which underlies the creation of the universe, also created us. The underlying energy

driving the universe, creates the same patterns of flow in our bodies as it does in weather systems, so everything is linked by

this creative force.

Pu: To continue, it seems that in your art you often draw attention to the similarities between two different things. For example,

mushrooms and atomic explosions, the radial form of Destroying Angel Trinity to the shape of a Mandala; this is like a

mysterious metaphor between different worlds. Is the similarity just the bridge connecting macrocosm and microcosm?

Destroying Angel Trinity and Destroying Angel - 2008

Chris: Similarities and comparisons certainly form a bridge, but perhaps to more than just microcosm and macrocosm. The

bridge opens up further possibilities. For instance in Nevada I asked a plant ecologist, working on the desert of the Nevada

Test Site (NTS), what was growing in the soils of the area where from 1951 to 1963, 14 atmospheric tests were carried out. Her

answer was to produce two images: one a magnified image of a soil sino-bacteria, and the other an image of that area of the Test Site,(Frenchman’s Flat) taken from space. The dried out river wash of Frenchman’s Flat was remarkably similar in pattern to the

string of fibres in the sino-bacteria. These two images became the first work – Life in the Presence of Death 1. I then took this

idea for a walk, looked up the gene sequence for the plant – at that time only partially decoded at 559, and stencilled this

sequence in groups of 100, onto a 18 m. long wall like rows of grave stones, in soil collected from the NTS.

We then collected 559 stones from the desert and constructed a very primitive and fragile stone fallout shelter, with a floor plan

like a splattered explosion. So here there are multiple layers that bring in all sorts of associations. In the final show at the

museum, each work was bridged to the next in a train of thought.

Life in the Field of Death 1 & 11

559 Shelter Stones - 2008

Before I can make a work, I need to make a connection and this is intuitive. I am drawn to something for no particular reason

other than that I feel an excitement in the pit of my stomach. This may be a reaction to a particular place, landscape or

experience, or it may arise from a conversation or something I have read. In this case language is a guide to memory of the

actual physical world.

I feel my way towards finding the best way to explore it and look for a visual form. Usually each new work has to start from

zero and it may mean that I end up using a process, medium or material for which I have no prior experience, so I look for

experts to help me. My work therefore has no particular style or medium. Its cohesion rests in the connections it makes.

To finally make a work, everything has to be in balance – idea, process, material and form. Because of this, in any one work

there are many layers and I may not be consciously aware of them all. Microcosm/macrocosm may well be in there. For the

viewer, however there is work for the eye and mind to do to extend those connections and find meaning within the context of

their own lives and experience.

In a work outside, this process is condensed into the one piece and because it is a tangible thing – often architectural, like one

of the Cloud Chambers, which have an inside as well as an outside, there is an outer form and an inside experience which has

an almost bodily way of communicating – beyond language.

Willow Domes on The Este - Hamburg 2003

Star Chamber 2006 - inside and out

Pu: Besides exploring a philosophy, your works are also involved in many social problems, such as in the project Mushroom/

Clouds, where there is reference to nuclear issues, but you know, “reflecting the world” and “changing the world” through art

are not the same thing. May be we cannot change anything through art. So, besides their great visual strength, what more can

we discover from your Art?

Chris: Yes, I agree that Art is not really going to change anything and it does reflect society as it is at that particular moment in

time. Mostly change happens very slowly, so slowly we don’t notice it, but the world is a very different place now to what it was

when I was a teenager. Sometimes an idea reaches a critical mass and then change happens fast as in a political revolution. The

idea of Climate Change, which has been around since the second world war, has now reached a critical mass and politicians are

having to take action.

As humans though, we don’t seem to have changed at all. We are still as much driven by greed, anger and violence, as we were

thousands of years ago. Greed will in the end destroy us. An art connected to nature can be a superficial thing – a love of

mountains, fresh air, fitness etc is a romantic notion – Hitler’s Youth movement extolled all this and look where that led. If we

want to move from what you call Land Art, the connections will have to go deeper than mere scratches on the surface. Of course Land Art can become political and subversive, as it has, but art is a visual, non-verbal language, and any work which is in tune and in balance communicates a kind of harmony without trying to ‘say’ something.

Pu: Concerning Nature and Humanity, you have said, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is not an egocentric imposition on a landscape. But in fact, is a masterpiece of human civilization. It has had a great impact on the surrounding environment; Its iconic

nature is a reflection of the focus of human attention over the years. In such a context, is there any difference between Spiral Jetty and your works which use similar spiral patterns, such as Ice Print?

Heart of Reeds - 2005

Chris: There is a great deal of hype about Smithson breaking away from the city/gallery based art markets and using the landscapes of the South West as the place of his art – negating the market. This is not really true; Spiral Jetty with its purchase of

land, construction and documentation was all financed by the art market and was sold and broadcast by that market. Much of

his other work – the site and non-site work was also gallery based. Spiral Jetty, however is iconic because it has a life beyond

the market. It exists as a reality in the land. It changes and reacts with the landscape in which it sits very beautifully. Its shape is

archaic. It changes colour in reaction to the salts of the lake and it appears and disappears as the water levels change. For this it

is truly extraordinary.

Despite the archaic native form of the spiral, in the final sequence of the film of its making, there are elements of transcendence

and redemptive Catholicism in the blinding rays of the sun and kaleidoscopic colours surrounding the lone figure of the artist within the work itself. Catholicism was the religion he was brought up in and something that interested him a great deal in earlier works. This in itself would set him apart from my own and other British Land Artists, although in the project Mushrooms|Clouds I am talking about the cycle of life, death and transformation and there may well be cross-over’s there. Smithson did however genuinely try to place his art in other contexts. He tried to interest strip-mining companies in working with him, but he was way ahead of his time and they all turned him down. In he end he was killed in a helicopter accident while researching a work for a site in Texas. It took artists like Herman Prigann in Germany in the 1990’s to finally get strip coal mining companies to see the worth of working with Land artists to find creative solutions to clean up these devastated landscapes. For myself, having been ostracised by the Art Market I found that other organisations: scientists, architects, clinicians, environmentalists etc came towards me with proposals.

Like most of my British contemporaries however, my work is small scale, hand made and often ephemeral. When I was in

Antarctica I wanted to observe and experience, rather than make. The few works I did make on the ground used ice and snow

and disappeared in a few hours. Iceprint was a human fingerprint brushed onto a fresh fall of snow on blue ice with a dustpan

and brush – the documentation of it highlighting our inappropriate presence in such a place – do not touch!

The only work of mine which approaches the scale and shape of Spiral Jetty and was also constructed using heavy machinery

is Heart Of Reeds in my home town of Lewes. This work however, lives, grows and changes, providing habitat for other species.

The shape uses a complex chaos pattern from blood flow in the heart to create the conditions to maximise the biodiversity of

a small local nature reserve on a piece of land once used as an industrial railway siding on the edge of town. A work made for

small creatures as well as people. You can get up close and see the microcosm, or climb a nearby hill and see it from above and

at a distance.

In creating the conditions for plant and animal life, these living systems become a part of the work. Unlike Spiral Jetty which is in

a sterile saline environment, Heart of Reeds is a living system, in which people have to play a part. The work therefore is managed, not as an artwork, but so that it continues to provide maximum habitat for biodiversity. I explained this work to one of the Paiute tribe I worked with in Nevada, and he was intrigued, because of course a concern for all of life is at the centre of their belief system. This is something which was never a part of the thinking of Heizer or de Maria, but if Smithson had lived I have a hunch that is where he would be at now, Nancy Holt has gone on to make ecological works.

Pu: I really appreciate your art project “the heartbeat of the Earth” in Antarctica. There is a nervous tension when you use radar,

a human technology, to represent the natural world. How does this fit within the wider context of your art-making experience?

Chris: the work I made with scientists in Antarctica was in fact an extension of the work I have made in connection to blood

flow patterns in the heart, which came about through collaborations with clinicians in hospitals. Antarctica was in many ways

a difficult social experience – two artists amongst many scientists and technicians, many of whom thought that we were taking

up valuable science resources. We were advised therefore, to connect with people by giving talks about what we do. I gave two

slide presentations and as a result of this was approached by a scientist who was anxious to show me the parallels in what he

was doing and introduced me to the images of the echograms they were working on.

Later I spent time with him deep in the interior, living in tents on the ice. In a conversation we had he made the statement “Our

echograms are like the heartbeat of the Earth”. A great statement and he was right – an echogram is very similar to an

echocardiogram of the heart. One is produced by radar fixed to the wings of airplanes, and the other by ultrasound through the

body; both show flow patterns. A surgeon can read the medical life history of the patient in an echocardiogram, just as a

scientist can read the history of the Biosphere in the echograms of the ice.

One of the works in this series was called Double Echo. I superimposed the echocardiogram taken from the heartbeat of the

pilot who flew these echogram flights, onto a fragment of one of his echograms. So the whole project was a continuation and

deepening of my research into universal patterns of flow, the underlying energy of the universe made visible.

Pu: The last hypothetical question: supposing I have a ticket for you to attend Shanghai Expo in 2010. You will create an artwork

for this city, which is different from the desert in Nevada and the glaciers of Antarctica. In Shanghai, there is a multi-perspective

on culture. What should you do to have a dialogue with this charming city and not lose your sense of the natural environment?

Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes - 2008

Chris: This is your hardest question yet, because in order to make something I need a context and I have never been to Shanghai.

If the brief is to come for a short time, make a temporary work and leave, and if the space is a white wall in a building, then

I would use a universal symbol and make it particular to place by the use of a local material or pigment. Or if there was a space

outside, I might use a vortex pattern, which spirals downs into the earth, maybe using bamboo or recycled timber from industrial pallets, laid on edge and charred black as they move into the centre.

The thing about cities, however is that they are complex places. Most modern cities look superficially the same – high-rise

buildings, transport flow systems etc. However all will have layers of history within them. That history will have been built from

culture and language, but still be deeply connected to its particular place in the land. Its customs, language and food will have

been shaped by this land.

What would really interest me would be a longer term project which peeled back some of these layers. Perhaps it could be a

collaboration between myself, a neurosurgeon, a botanist and an engineer, which could be open ended in terms of an eventual

work, but which might be a garden or small park which reflected our findings. Send me that ticket any time.

Carbon Sink drawing.

Breath

2009-11-03T08:17:00.000-08:00

2009 has been a year of recuperation and regeneration. Due to the recession a number of projects disappeared and a number of ideas did not get funding. One of the ideas was BREATH a simple looped film of a breaking wave, made in collaboration with Andy Mackinnon at Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist. We wanted to project this film very large onto either Battersea power station, or Tate Modern during one night in December at the start of The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Firstly Tate said "no you can't, not on our building". To project onto Battersea for one night would have been very expensive and even with a small team working on it, we failed to get any funding. The Scottish Parliament were interested, but again; no funding, We even looked at powering the film by bicycles, and moving around the city as a kind of guerilla event, but sadly it wont happen.

However the film is made and Andy and I are looking to make it into an indoor work, powered by a rowing machine. It must be possible to do, so if there is anyone who can help us, please get in touch.

MUSHROOMS | CLOUDS - NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART

2008-08-25T00:29:00.000-07:00

INSTALLING MUSHROOMS | CLOUDS

2008-08-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Stone Mother, Pyramid Lake

The Pyramid

Kay and Ben Alek at Pyramid lake.

MUSHROOMS | CLOUDS - NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART

2008-07-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

Nevada Museum of Art, Reno August 9th – October 5th 2008
http://www.nevadaart.org/

In the exhibition literature the Ann Wolfe writes:

‘Chris Drury investigates themes related to the environment, emphasizing cycles of destruction and regeneration in nature, and the ways that humans affect these processes. In Mushrooms | Clouds, Drury brings an international perspective to topics ranging from land and water appropriation to nuclear testing in the American West.

In many of his artworks – located inside and outside the Nevada Museum of Art galleries – Drury utilizes materials collected from such places as Pyramid Lake, Donner State Park, and the Nevada Test site to engage museum guests in the ongoing debates related to scientific, cultural, environmental, and political issues.

Why Mushrooms and Clouds?
As the primary regenerators of soil in nature, but also poisonous agents of death, mushrooms are a metaphor for the cycle of destruction and regeneration in the environment. From mushroom spore prints to a sculpture that takes the form of a nuclear mushroom cloud; a multiple video works that explore cloud-like properties of smoke and water, Drury makes visible the subtle connections between art and environment.’

Five works from my Studio:

Destroying Angel – Trinity (see under Shows and Installations)
3 x 187 cm square canvasses, white printed spore prints and radiating lines of text in white ink and pencil on black prepared canvas. Text reads: 'Amanita virosa- Destroying angel'

I have a continuing fascination with mushrooms and their spore prints. Up until this summer (2003) when I saw two Destroying Angels (Amanita virosa) growing in the forests of Ontario, I had never seen one. Because of this I had to use its colourful relative, Amanita muscaria for the central spore print. If you cut off the stem of a mushroom and place it on a piece of paper overnight, covered with a bowl, it will drop its spores onto the paper in the pattern of the gills. The spore print here is digitally scanned and printed in three versions and altered by changing the contrast in Photoshop. The prints are glued and ironed onto the canvas which is built up in layers of gesso to form a surface for writing.
This radiating pattern of spore lines draws you in as a mandala would, but if you take a magnifying glass and follow one line from the centre out to the periphery then you will notice that each line branches and branches again like the limb of a tree. In making these densely written works this is in fact what I do: I follow the principle of the line that branches, only in densely hand-written words, in inks of different tones, with reed pens of different thickness, gathered from the banks of the river (everything flows here) and which have to be constantly sharpened and dried. The written words are repeated and hypnotic, like a mantra. The words cease to have meaning, the concentration is on the sound. A word that has a good sound is easy to write. It flows on to the canvas. The concentration is on the sound, the shape, the size, the colour, the tone, the branches. The words are the mantra that shape the mandala.
The mushroom Amanita virosa - Destroying Angel - is pure white and utterly deadly if you are foolish enough to eat it. Symptoms of poisoning may take 24 hours to appear by which time it is too late to do anything. Severe vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pains may last a day or more and are then followed by a period of recovery. The patient may think his ordeal is over and may be released from hospital only to die in agony within a few days from liver and kidney failure.
The name Destroying Angel has a strange pull and I have long wanted to make a work with this mushroom. With the events of September 11th and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seemed like now was the right time. The mushroom is symbolically paradoxical: mushrooms are agents of decay, but by breaking down organic matter into soil they create the foundation of life on our planet. I like this duality; the image of a destroying angel brings to mind the fearsome sword-wielding Shinto deity, Fudo Myoo, who by cutting through the ego, liberates rather than destroys.

Spore Grid
35 R type prints on 2mm aluminium from 2cm spore prints on glass slides.  Each 39 x 39 cm. Overall 194 x 273 cm

Boletus Circle
Screen print of a boletus spore print in mud on paper: 120 cm x 100 cm

Spore Waves
A three minute looped video of a spore print projected onto a creek at night with its image mirrored on the adjoining rock wall. Waves and ripples from the water course through the image.

VIDEO WORKS MADE FOR THE EXHIBITION

2008-07-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Way of White Clouds
A three minute looped video of a white cloudy stream of water entering still black water.

Shattered Peace, Broken promises – real time
Shattered Peace, Broken promises – slow time
Two looped videos, in real and slow time, of the effect of the sound of three explosions on a thin column of smoke from a sage brush bundle.

Maidu Clouds
The reflections of the sky during intervals throughout one day, in the acorn tea filled depressions, of both a Maidu grinding rock and the stone pool in the Cloud Chamber.
These are projected into the corner of a room, and re reflected back into a square pool of water placed beneath them.

PHOTOWORKS

2008-07-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

Cloud Pool Chamber
12’ x 10’ digital print of the chamber at For-Site, Nevada City.

Winnemucca Whirlwind
10’ x 15’ digital print of The Winnemucca Lake desert drawing.

Life in the presence of Death 1
24” x 18” digital print of Frenchmans Flat from the air and a magnified image Microcoleus vaginatus, an organism found in the soil of the same place.

INSTALLED WORKS

2008-07-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

Life in the presence of Death 11
A Partial gene sequence (559 letters) stenciled along the length of a 60’ wall, like 7 tomb stones, in Test Site earth and PVA.

559 Shelter Stones
559 stones from near Pyramid Lake, built into a random scattered arrangement of stones which group in the middle into a small fragile shelter.

Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes
A 12’ diam. wall work in dust from the museum and ashes from the burned off-cuts of The cloud Pool Chamber, in the pattern of a mushroom spore print.

Destroying Angel
6’ diam. by 12’ high
513 strands of nylon fishing twine stung between hooks from floor to ceiling and arranged in the plan pattern of a spore print, holding fragments of sage brush which go to create the 3D. clouded image of the mushroom, Amanita virosa, which of course resembles a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Cloud Pool Chamber
The reconstructed log Chamber from For-Site on the roof space of the museum, where passing white clouds from off the Sierras will be mirrored in the interior stone pool.

Touching the Eye of the Storm
A 10’ diam. drawing which mirrors the Winnemucca Whirlwind drawing in the desert, made by the accumulated earth fingerprints from visitors to the museum.

RESEARCH AND BACKGROUND TO THE EXHIBITION

2008-07-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

The exhibition is made in collaboration with For-Site in California and the Nevada Museum of Art and will be a show about place, referencing climate, ecology, history, land use and appropriation. The title itself references The Nevada Test Site, but gives me the excuse to explore in more depth these two natural phenomena (mushrooms and Clouds) which have preoccupied me for over 25 years and to use them as a focus to find connections which link them to this high desert and its history and to the wider cycle of life and death.

In February this year I visited both ForSite in the gold mining Sierra Nevada foothills near Nevada City and the Museum in Reno, where I was able to see the space and talk to scientists at the Desert Research Institute who have offices in the city and also in Las Vegas, where I also able to visit the Atomic Testing Museum which is linked to it.
The result is that I have been corresponding and talking to Lynne Fernstermaker, a microbiologist working for the DRI and together we have explored ways to make visible a micro-organism growing in the soil on Frenchmans Flat, the area where atmospheric nuclear tests were made. Lynne has produced a microscopic image of Microcoleus vaginatus which looks very similar in form to the dried wash of Frenchmans Flat seen from space. These images will make one work, and we will write the partial gene sequence (559) for the organism in large stencilled letters along one 60’ wall in soil from the Test Site. In seven blocks of 80 each they will resemble tomb stones. Together with the photographic images, this will make the works ‘Life in the Field of Death I & II.’

We will then take this number – 559 and reproduce it as 559 random stones built into a low primitive shelter on the floor of the gallery. The stones will be collected from the land close to Pyramid lake on the Paiute reservation.

The Work at For-Site in the Sierra Nevada foothills

2008-07-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

In May I began work at ForSite, Nevada City, where we made 4 works:
Cloud Pool Chamber (2)
Maidu Clouds
Shattered Peace, Broken Promises (real time)
Shattered Peace, Broken Promises (slow time)

The Cloud Pool Chamber is an octagon log Structure, built over a granite boulder which holds a pool of water in the carved dished upper face, acting as a mirror for the interior structure and the sky and trees seen through the top opening of the log structure. Each log has been notched and numbered and the work sat between two large granite outcroppings.

The work was photographed on site (work 1) and then the whole structure has been dismantled and re erected on the flat roof space of the museum, where the mirror pool will reflect the white puffed clouds coming off the Sierra Nevada (work 2)

The land around ForSite was once inhabited by Maidu people who tended the land for optimum production of oak trees. They ground the acorns into a flour in what are now called grinding rocks. These are granite boulders pitted with deep indentations which acted as querns. There are native peoples still alive today who could remember their grandparents doing this. The land however was grabbed in the gold rush and decimated. Today the rivers are still polluted and gold mining is ongoing. The land has been logged and most of the oaks gone, and scrub has invaded what was once productive pasture with much biodiversity. It is still however very beautiful.

Having filled both the dish in the log chamber and one of the grinding rocks with a brown liquid from boiled acorns, I have filmed passing clouds in these mirrored pools over the course of a day. These will make up a video projection within the museum (work 3).

‘Shattered Peace, Broken promises’ (work 4) is another 6 minute looped video of a thin line of smoke from a sage brush bundle (used by native Americans as a cleansing smoke), which is subjected to the sound of 3 explosions (inaudible in the projection). The work is projected and played in real time and also in a slow time, where you can see just how the line of smoke particles are broken down by the waves of sound. This piece connects to another which we will install in the gallery which will be hundreds of small fragments of sagebrush suspended on nylon threads, floor to ceiling, in the shape of the mushroom Amanita virosa (Destroying Angel) and resembling a nuclear mushroom cloud.

WINNEMUCCA WHIRLWIND AND THE TEST SITE

2008-07-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

From ForSite we moved to the desert around Pyramid lake on the Paiute reservation where we made ‘Winnemucca Whirlwind’ in collaboration with the Pauite Indians. The Paiutes used to consider that land their hunting and fishing territory back in the 1800’s when it was in fact a lake. The US government redrew their boundaries, gave them the larger Pyramid Lake and took Winnemucca. Having done this, they diverted some of the Truckee river into the desert to grow crops. The result was that Pyramid Lake dropped 80’, they lost the Salmon runs and Winnemucca dried out and became the white salt pan it is today. The Paiutes took the government to court recently and won compensation, but nothing that will really compensate for the loss of an ecosystem.

Winnemucca in the 1800's. The boat must be more or less over where we made the drawing

The drawing is from a coil basket design, and is made just over the fence on Government land, but can really only be seen from a nearby high vantage point on Paiute land. So in a sense it is a symbolic reclaiming of the lake. It was made by raking the salt surface ( a tough job as the surface is rock hard and has to be broken each foot of the way). The weather was so hot during the day and the sun so blinding on the white surface, that we came back at sunset and worked on late into the night by the light of a full moon. We camped on the lake and were up again at 5.00 am. Finishing the raking by sunrise. That evening we returned to take photographs which we did in the light of an approaching storm. By the following day the rain had brought the salts back to the surface and the drawing had disappeared.

Sketchbook drawing for Whirlwind

Raking the drawing just before sunset

It had been our intention to encourage visitors to the museum to drive out to Winnemucca, pay the stopping fee to the Paiute and leave a finger print in the visitor book, held in a tin on the viewing butte above the drawing. They would also add their fingerprints to the growing earth whirlwind drawing in a wall in the museum. It turns out however that this drawing is a rainmaker, as the staff at the museum went out in June/July and re-raked it, only to have the same thing happen again – washed out in a flash flood. All that remains is the 12’ x 15’ digital image on the walls of the museum.

From Pyramid we went south to Vegas and took the free tour of the Test Site, which since the Test Treaty, only conducts very small tests underground. Having read up a lot of the material behind and around nuclear testing in Nevada, I knew a bit about, the damage it had caused, including radiation deaths to witnessing troops and farmers downwind in Utah, to say nothing of the summary appropriation of Shoshone hunting grounds. During the tour and in the museum, people are fed what I can only mildly describe as a diet of propaganda and disinformation. The tour was in fact a window onto the whole sorry saga of the misuse and degradation of a vast area of desert.

In August I will return to install the show over a two week period where the public will be able to see some of the works being made in situ. There will be 15 works comprising sculpture installations, wall works, photoworks, drawings, prints and videos.

2ND APRIL, SHOW OPENS AT BEAUX ARTS, LONDON

2008-03-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

EVERYTHING NOTHING

2008-01-29T09:11:00.001-08:00

Everything nothing

Hand written text in ink on an inkjet print on artists' paper.

88 x 78 cm.

The ice sheets of Antarctica are an endless expanse of nothingness. Its the kind of intense nothingness that both fills and empties the mind. Enfolded within the ice and revealed by the echograms and ice cores are 900,000 years of the history of the Earth. These waves of land and ice are like a heartbeat of the Earth.

EXPLORERS AT THE EDGE OF THE VOID

2008-01-29T08:23:00.001-08:00

Explorers at the Edge of the Void + detail

Hand written text in ink on an inkjet print on artists paper. 106 x 235 cm.

Not long after I returned from Antarctica, my wife and i were invited to CERN to see the new Hadron Collider under construction. The experiment which is due to take place this year, will attempt to prove the Theory of everything, which will mimic the Big Bang and give us an insight into the origins of the Universe. It will also bring to a conclusion nearly a century of research into the nature and origins of matter; the strange Zen-like world of particle physics, which places man and his thinking as part of the equation rather than outside of it.

This is something which has always intrigued me and it struck me that this century of research into the smallest and largest universes, went hand in hand with the exploration of the last uncharted place on Earth; Antarctica.

Einstein, plank, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen were all contemporary explorers. They were looking at absolute matter and absolute mind. Nature was in all senses, a blank white canvas of exploration. It is ironic that instead of seeing the truth of what it means to be a part of nature, society has continued to dominate it, often using science, and the result is the devastating climate change we see today and which is so evident in the melting glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsular.

This work reads from the bottom up, starting with a mix of Antarctic explorers and Nobel Laureate physicists, splitting into two distinct groups divided by 'the theory of everything' and 'everything nothing'. It culminates in the equations which go to make up the four forces of Nature that constitute the Theory of Everything: Quantum Chromodynamics, Lagrangian, Electromagnetic and Quantum Mechanics. If the experiment works we will see the particle tracks of the Higgs Bosun theory; what Leon Lederman called 'The God Particle'.

UNDER THE ICE

2008-01-29T08:17:00.000-08:00

Under The Ice, Over the Unknown, detail Flight G23

pencil and Ink on an inkjet print on artists' paper. 206 x 87 cm.

Albatross

2008-01-29T07:59:00.000-08:00

Albatross I - Blue Crayon and pencil on artists' paper. 75 x 75 cm.

Albatross II - Inkjet print and pencil on artists' paper. 103 x 103 cm

Over the two months I was in Antarctica, the Met Officer at Rothera gave me daily, a satellite image, a pressure image and an image of winds. Here I have combined the wind diagrams over one day with the flight of an Albatross around Antarctica over 18 months. the bird is tracing the 55d latitude, which is where the warm currents are meeting the cold circumpolar current and so giving rise to a vast array of marine life. The albatross is a bird of the wind, skimming the waves in search of food.

LANDSCAPES OF THE MINDS EYE

2008-01-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

Double echo - Inkjet print - 134 x 114 cm

This echogram from East Antarctica, has been superimposed with an echocardiogram of the pilots heart beat. Both use a similar imaging technique.

Lake Concordia + (detail) - Biro on an inkjet print on vinyl. 130 x 114 cm.

The ice here is over 4 km. deep and the underlying Earth is hot, so a lake has formed. each line of biro represents over a hundred years in time and accumulation. Antarctica has been covered with ice for around 900,ooo years, which is about the time man has been on the Earth.