Sunday 9th and Monday 10th, Nirox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coal-Themed Sculpture Annoys Lawmakers

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

Day 7 Carbon Sink

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

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

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.