Chris Drury

Dirty Water – new issue of WEAD online magazine

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One of the few publications that focuses on giving voice to artists involved in ecological work, the magazine of the Women Environmental Artists Directory has just published a new issue entitled Dirty Water.  The issue features essays by artists including Betsy Damon, Stacy Levy and Jackie Brookner, as well as Chris Drury. Activist, writer and poet Jourdan Imani Keith provides a personal perspective and Linda Weintraub provides a survey of practices. This is essential reading for anyone interested in artists and water. Previous issues are well worth checking out.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
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Cape Farewell’s Sea Change programme: The Rural Artist Residencies has kicked off! Dorset, Uk

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images1The Rural Artist Residencies has kicked off! Dorset, Uk

Cape Farewell is creating a series of Rural Artist Residencies. Artists will be invited on to the Rural Residencies programme to engage diverse, wide-reaching audiences with the local narratives of Sydling St. Nicholas in Dorset. The idea is to involve the local community, encouraging neighbours and villagers to hold a voluntary stake in the farm’s future.

Artists will interrogate the inspirational resilience and social ties that form when local communities embrace heritage, sustainability, and innovation. So far, Cape Farewell has established relationships with three farmers around Sydling St. Nicholas : Manor Farm, Huish Farm, and Dollens Farm. They have strong community ties, commit to good stewardship of the natural environment, and employ varied practice methods, which they openly invite the public to explore. For the first residency, Chris Drury has been  invited to develop a personal response to the working life sustained by the valley, as a natural, cultural and community habitat.

For more information: click here

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Art installation (removal) leads to controversy at Wyoming University

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British environmental artist Chris Drury´s art installation Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around created back in July 2011 on the Wyoming university campus, was originally intended to inspire a conversation about a prevalent environmental problem in the region. Global warming has, so scientists say, led to less pine beetles dying off by below zero temperature and thus more forest infested by the tree-killing beetles.

The sculpture features a 36-foot-wide circle of logs from beetle-killed trees, arranged in a circular pattern around a pile of coal and thus it points at the link between human induced climate change and dead forests. A big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions however is the burning of coal.

Plausible topic for an art installation, but in a state where the fossil fuel industry is a major economic driver as well as a known financial supporter of the University of Wyoming, some toes were bound to be stepped on.

Still, surprisingly the quiet removal of the installation after less than a year by university presidentTom Buchanan (it was supposed to stay till it decomposed) was confirmed to be the result of pressure by energy officials and their political allies. This stark display of interference by corporate sponsorship in the curatorial decision-making is just a more public and recent one of many and gives a gloomy outlook on the future of censorship in art institutions.

For more information:

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/11/energy-donor-artistic-freedom-censorship/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-anne-hitt/university-of-wyoming-artwork_b_2018743.html

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Big Coal Bullying Prompts University to Destroy Artwork

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Sadly Chris Drury’s sculpture in Wyoming is to be destroyed, as reported by Mary Anne Hitt: Big Coal Bullying Prompts University to Destroy Artwork.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
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US town to turn drainage basin into public art

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image from Jackie Brookner's page on the Women Environmental Artists Directory

Minnesota Public Radio recently reported that Jackie Brookner is advising and supporting the inhabitants of the City of Fargo in North Dakota on a major ecological art project funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.  The focus of the project is making use of a drainage basin, built to deal with heavy summer rains, as year round facilities for the community.

There’s an interview with Brookner on the NEA blog and if you prefer listening to reading, you can hear her on the Social Practices Art Network.

image from Heart of Reeds website

In the UK Chris Drury’s Heart of Reeds in Lewes, West Sussex, is probably a comparable project.  This constructed environment remediates industrial pollution whilst providing recreational space and managing rain water.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Approaches to Arts-based Environmental Education by Jan van Boeckel

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Image from Nature Art Education site

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The Shorelines Symposium which took place at Rozelle Maclaurin included presentations by two keynotes Ian McGilchrist (author of The Master and his Emissary), Chris Drury (artist) as well as a number of others.

The Symposium was organised in conjunction with Alison Bell and Cathy Treadaway‘s exhibition Shorelines currently at in the Maclaurin Galleries.  It was great that a Symposium of this quality took place in Ayr.  We need more of this quality of thinking and discussion.

Jan van Boeckel of the Nature – Art – Education research group at Aalto University, School of Art and Design, Helsinki, gave a short paper entitled Angels talking back and new organs of perception: Art making and intentionality in nature experience.  He has provided the abstract and link to the full paper.

ABSTRACT

This article is about the role of artistic process in connecting to the natural environment. In my research I have explored what participants experienced and learned when they engage in different types of arts-based environmental education (AEE) practices that I have facilitated. The premise of AEE is that efforts to learn about our (natural) environment can effectively take their starting point in an artistic activity, usually conducted in groups.

I found that, on the whole, two major orientations can be distinguished. One starts from the point of aesthetic sensibility: the tuning in with the senses, or with “a new organ of perception” (Goethe), in order to perceive “the more than human” with fresh new eyes. This tradition can be traced back to (but is by no means limited) to the Romantic Movement. Art in this context may help to amplify the receptivity of the senses and strengthen a sense of connectedness to the natural world.

The other major orientation in seeking bridges between nature and art builds on a view of artistic process as leading to unexpected outcomes and “emergent properties.” The fundamentally singular experience of making a work of art may evoke an aesthetic object that becomes a “self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject” (Kadinsky). The art work can be spontaneously generative and multi-layered with meanings, some of which even ambiguous and paradoxical. But perhaps more importantly: it can catch the participant of an AEE activity by surprise; overwhelm him or her as “coming from behind one’s back.” The element of improvisation, of taking in the new and unanticipated and accommodating for it, is the core quality here.

These two orientations, when practiced as part of AEE, have implications to how we relate to nature through art. In the closing of this article I address the question whether it is possible to bridge the dualism between the two orientations.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Sculpture upsets coal industry

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Carbon Sink: What goes around, comes around, Chris Drury

Chris Drury, who will be speaking in Ayr in the Autumn, has successfully stirred up a storm in Wyoming, as reported in the Guardian.  He was commissioned by the University to create a work for the campus as part of its evolving public art exhibition organised by the University of Wyoming Art Museum.

The work entitled Carbon Sink: What Goes Around, Comes Around is made from lodgepole pine and coal, and brings with it the pine beetles.  They are all connected in a cycle that is becoming more vicious.

But what’s particularly interesting is that this work has drawn the anger of the coal mining companies and put the University in an awkward position.  Higher Education funding comes into sharp relief when the corporates and the politicians start saying how sad and shocked they are that the University would commission a work that questions the environmental credentials of the coal industry.

The classic line is from a politician, quoted in the Guardian,

“”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.”

Earth First Newswire reports 21 arrested at a sit-in against coal mining

Beehive Collective’s work on the true cost of Coal

Chris Drury isn’t the only artist drawing attention to these issues, but he seems to have hit a nerve.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland