These are images of some of Ceca Georgieva’s “park art experiments.” Georgieva is a textile artist working in the field of nature art. “Working with natural materials not only brings me joy,” she says, “but also much wisdom. In even the smallest piece of grass there is incorporated history, meaning and purpose. I admire and learn from her genius “installation” of design, color, smell and light … It is a great challenge to enter her laboratory and to be able to add my own thing.”

Window on Blood and Water is a temporary installation at Abbaye Jumieges, near Rouen in France created by Chris Drury for the region’s festival of Water. The work takes the shape and dimensions of the arch of the ruined church and fills it with a flow pattern of water and blood from the heart, drawing a link to the nearby river Seine and the Abbey’s violent history over the centuries. The work is 78.75 feet x 26.25 feet and is made from split logs and stones from the ruin. The exhibition of six works opens on May 14, 2013 and runs through the Summer/Autumn season.

 

Environmental aesthetics have come a long way from Birkenstocks and macrame.  The web features a wealth of sites that feature ecological conscious design.  Here are several we like: HAUTE*NATURE is an eco-guide to creative ideas, art and green products that blend high style with sustainability like the  Sit Bag Suitcase chair by maybedesign. http://hautenature.blogspot.com Then there’s treehugger.com the Earth Mother of all eco-sites. The site has regular sections on Design & Architecture, which highlighted Gyöngy Laky’s environmental architecture in 2008. Also a Fashion & Beauty section, which this week covers the (Re)Fashioning Fiber: New Horizons in Environmental Art and Fashion exhibition http://abigaildoan.blogspot.com at Green Spaces Gallery, which includes work by Ceca Georgieva and Abigail Doan.  You’ll also find eco-news, games, green buying guides and lots of How-Tos. Ranked by the Times Online as one of the 100 Best Blogs of 2009, treehugger.com also offers the occasional odd take on the topic, from the photo essay: Clouds that Look Like Boobs (yeah, these do) to the celebrity report: Football Player Leaves NFL, Starts Interning At a Small Organic Farm to eco-pop quizzes like: Is Your Sex Sustainable? Fair warning You can start out looking for a local place to recycle batteries and find yourself an hour later still engaged. Also enjoyable is http://www.ecouterre.com/about which is devoted to the future of sustainable fashion.  It was there that I learned about a “sweat shop” in Paris where you can rent sewing machine time by the hour and sip coffee or tea while you work, got a first glimpse of “vegan style” and learned about the FEED projects great looking Guatemalan ikat totes that provide nutrition for malnourished kids.

 

Then you may want to bookmark the Sustainability and Contemporary Art blog http://artandsustainability.wordpress.com which aims to cover the deepening relationship between contemporary art and notions of environmental sustainability which can include everything from eco-critique to a report on sustainability summer school. If you want to do more than just read about ecology and art. Then the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Art website  http://www.sustainablepractice.org should be your next stop. The Executive Director is Ian Garrett who teaches Sustainability in the Theatre Department at CalArts University.The site covers conferences, grants and exhibitions and offers book suggestions, too.

Lawty has explained her inspiration: “The idea for the World Beach Project arrived in my head fully formed and in an instant. It popped up by way of responding to the response to my work using small stones, which in its turn, is a response to the land – specifically, rock. Whether a line of quartz splitting a rock face or a huge folded mountain range, the structure of rock talks of the structure of our planet. It is like a map of time – the earth drawing itself on a massive scale. And whether stones are satisfyingly smooth… or like long thin fingers… or beautifully, almost purely round; whether they are knobbly, shiny, dull, crinkly, holey, patterned or plain, black or white – they reflect the language of their making i.e. how they look in this de-constructed state is as a direct result of their construction, probably millions of years ago. I find this exciting. World Beach was conceived as a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch. Drawings made on shorelines all over the world, which although erased by the next tide or rains, would be collected within the V&A to become a permanent record of the individual human desire to make pattern. To pick up a rock, is to touch base. Touching stones gives us a primal, spiritual connection with the earth. When we handle a stone, we hold in our hands a small drawing, a tiny piece of the map; we are holding time. That’s why.”

It’s easy to get involved.  More than 800 people have participated from Ross Island, Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa.  Go to the map and pick your favorites. (Some of ours: Rarotonga, Oceania, Mt. Hood, Washington, Klive Beach and Eastbourne.) Watch Sue Lawty explain how to get involved in the project by watching the World Beach Video . Then go to the V&A website for instructions on adding your art http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/textiles/lawty/world_beach/ for instructions on adding your art

Technorati Tags: Art Installation, Sue Lawty

Using different techniques and expressive strategies – from painting to photography, from film to sculpture and installation – the artists in Entre elace et neige have dealt with natural phenomena representing the solid states of water. Work by established artists such as Anish Kapoor, Mario Merz, Salvatore Scarpitta, Hamish Fulton, Lawrence Carroll and Salvo will be present alongside work by younger artists such as  Elisa Sighicelli, Massimo Bartolini, Hans Op de Beeck, Christian Frosi, Lucy+Jorge Orta and Loris Cecchini to investigate the way art reflects on natural energy, in its dual aspect of a dangerous, and currently endangered, universe. In the exhibit, Jana Sterbak’s Dissolution creates impractical ice chairs, while her videoFévrier depicts a Montreal ice-skating rink with clear Brueghel quotations. Anish Kapoor celebrates sun and moon with a white marble mountain. Walter Niedermayr portrays the huge emptiness of mountains, punctuated by tiny figures. Chris Drury captures the life of an iceberg and offers the equivalent of a glacier’s electrocardiogram.