In the last year creative initiatives to raise awareness about the state of our planet and climate change have multiplied. Global network Parley for the Oceans has worked, for example, to bring together creators, thinkers, brands, governments and environmental groups to develop projects about the fragility of our oceans.
Parley's site includes posts about the latest projects, such as supporting volunteers cleaning up a 1400 mile stretch of Brazil's northeast coastline from blobs of oil, and informative sections about the state of the oceans.
It is estimated indeed that 8 million metrics tons of plastic trash ends up in our oceans every year, forming moving whirlpools of plastic that remains in the ocean, washes onto our coastlines or ends up on the seafloor, eventually entering marine food webs.
So far the Parley initiative has worked with a wide range of partners and collaborators including fashion brands and artists, hoping to change our collective habits by funding projects or launching limited edition products.
Their latest collaborator is Katharina Grosse: the German artist is known for her immersive environments that she transforms using an air compressor and a spray gun, a technique that allows her to control the trajectory of the aerosol in paint in a planned way.
Grosse's colours are usually extremely vivid and bright and call to mind digitally enhanced nuances (you wonder why she hasn't collaborated yet with a major fashion house on prints derived from her visually striking works...).
As the surf community is vital to the Parley's mission, the artist created for this project 20 individually painted surfboards, constructed from sustainably sourced wood, reducing in this way foam, resin and fiberglass use. The painted surface, a mix of bold and bright clashing colours in pure Grosse style represents the dynamic character of the seas.
Grosse herself once compared the perception of her abstract color-environments with her body surfing experience: "It's an amazing feeling to swim through swirling underwater sandstorms while the water shapes the land."
The boards are on sale at the Gagosian Shop, 976 Madison Ave, New York, and the profits of the sales will benefit Parley's Global Clean Up Network, a global alliance to end marine plastic pollution active across 28 countries, intercepting plastic waste from beaches, islands, and in remote coastal communities.
The collaboration proves that contemporary artists can help raising awareness about key problems such as environmental issues with their vision and with cultural interventions that can easily reach out to people and urge them to act to save our planet.
Image credits for this post
Artwork © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019. Photo: Jens Ziehe
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