Red Earth Environmental Art Group

The Red Earth collaborative art group, based in the UK, is an apt representative of the new avant-garde blossoming in the art world. A group of artists who are following ecological tenets and inciting responses from people in a global context are bringing light to important environmental issues such as the dwindling Suffolk coastline. The 2008 art project "Long Shore Drift is a response to the immediate and historical issue of land loss through geological transition and sea flooding, and the potential for the ecological restoration of an endangered habitat." Besides addressing Anglo-Saxon environmental concerns, the group's artistic influences span across the world; the 2001 art project "Breath" took place in the derelict Canterbury castle and was directly inspired by Japanese philosophy and aesthetics. Including performance and installation, "Breath" was intended to encapsulate the essence of life and the vulnerability of nature as a whole; we take our first inhale of breath when we are born and heave a last exhale before we die, synonymous with every living organism that thrives on earth, we are mortal. Installation in the project included:

A series of retreating and superimposed layers:

The floor is raked gravel, a zen map of all matter reduced to its most simple, symbolic form. Two large pools of water break the patterning, reflecting light and video. The contact of water with water resonates through the digital sound system.

At the centre of the castle space a cylinder, its base dark burnt oak. Steam seeps from within the cylinder. Its upper half - a ringed wall of thickly luminous wax.

Blank screens and a bamboo wall cut across the space; the space behind, the last space, is a dark.

Red ladder against the wall leads from water up to the still figure of a performer. Dead. Inert. Waiting to be born ­ waiting for their first breath.

Human/Body/Fluid
Red ladder. Screens of linen and wax. Yellow columns of beeswax lit from within with vitreous honey pools reflecting the structures below. Muted organic light, living fragile skins activated by video projection.

Nature/Vegetation/Animal
An assemblage of tall, bamboo poles, white and spectral; a forest, a cage, a wild place.

Earth/Mineral/Mountain
A mound of chalk: the earth moving, the course of minerals through the veins of the earth: earth as dust in which a performer will be enveloped.

The project "Java," that spanned the years between 1997 through 1999, included the collaboration of Javanese performance artists, an intellectual documentary journey into the culture of ritual and environmental union.