e:collective
Cambridge
Art project of International artists,
writers, curators and designers
focussing on environmental and
social sustainabily.
Mostra collettiva con e:collective “Changing Experiences, Experiencing Changes” Onca Gallery, Brighton UK , 2016
ONCA Gallery | 14 St. George’s Place, Brighton BN1 4GB
Preview | Tuesday 26 July | 6:30 – 9:00pm
International artists from the e:collective launch their debut exhibition of new work exploring our relationship with change on a social, economic, environmental and personal level. The exhibition will challenge, enact, refresh and stimulate our perceptions and thoughts on change and will be viewed alongside current research by scientists at the Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
Experiencing Change / Changing Experience investigates a world where environment and society is in a state of flux with large, and sometimes devastating, changes predicted for the future. Change can seem inevitable or out of our hands, so how much influence do we have on change? Do we just react to the changes we experience or can we intervene?
In my artistic research I am focusing on the relation between human and Nature, art and sustainability, natural phenomena and their aesthetic and anthropological impact.
In my early paintings I have been exploring the concept of “organic”as a natural model of forms and patterns found in living systems, but also as a metaphor for life. Organic shapes, structures and textures, but also the organized chaos of fractal patterns, the natural law of order and the tendency to disorder in entropy. Natural processes like decomposition and germination or metamorphosis and mutation in micro- and macro scales. In my recent personal exhibitions (“Listen To Trees”, Nelimarkka Museum, Finland, 2015 and “MetaForest: Forest’s Metaphors for Life, Nordic Art School, Kokkola, Finland, 2015) I have been working on the Forest as an aesthetic and as a sustainability concept.
Paper is made of wood, so certain dead trees become paper which forwards becomes a support for registered knowledge of all kind: from news and advertising to art and literature. So I have chosen to recycle used paper from my daily ground in material structure for my paintings, some kind of a secondary metamorphosis of the paper (the tree). My choice of recycling paper to paint a forest is a sustainability choice: not to destroy the real and living forest for painting the metaphorical one. It could be seen also like a further “reincarnation” of the forest turning back the cycle in an alternative way; the real tree becomes paper which becomes a newspaper which becomes again a tree – an image of a tree, unfortunately it is not a physical but only a metaphorical rebirth. I have chosen to recycle advertising and newspapers as providers of materialistic and commercial knowledge and transform them into a work of art as an invocation to transform the material into spiritual and the trivial into original.
The Deforestation is one of the greatest environmental problems of our contemporary society and no doubt one of the main causes for the global climate change. Although our consumerist society has always seen the forest as a materials provider of wood or prolific soil for intensive farming, the trees like all the green plants are basically oxygen providers and therefore essential for the Life on the planet. The tree trunk cut in the collective unconscious has always symbolized decapitation and death. The green sprouts of seeds on the contrary stand always for regeneration and aliveness. Once the cellulose of the carton was part of a real living tree and it was alive and organic, but now the packaging carton that I have used in the installation “Deforestation and Paper” is no more alive, it is dead exactly like the tree trunk cut, but the sprouts growing in, are “green” and “living” and they mean hope, a hope for a change to more ecologically sustainable ways of living.
We can’t change our past, we cannot delete the abuses we consumerists have committed to the Nature, but we could recycle, reuse, recover, recuperate and transform all these past mistakes in lessons, lessons on how to live in harmony with the Nature and in this way in harmony with ourselves as we are also a part of the Nature. Because what we are doing to the forests of the world is just a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. The forests of the world suffer by deforestation… And what about our Inner Forest? What about the deforestation of the human soul?
