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REPRESENTATIONAL ARTWORK
This tangible and real-world exhibit invokes a completely different emotion than other environmentally focused pieces as it truly allows the people to see what they are losing as the consequences of climate change continue to occur.
1. Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch
Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic artist, has created many pieces that highlight the effects of climate change on the environment. For this piece specifically, he brought 12 giant pieces of an iceberg from the fjord that stretches off the coast of Greenland to Denmark. He placed these pieces in front of Copenhagan's city hall for all to view. This piece highlights climate change in action and allows people to directly perceive these changes right in front of them. The viewers were able to touch these icebergs and even climb on them as they melted, making this an entirely interactive experience.
The melting of this fjord where these pieces of the iceberg were taken from has already raised the height of the ocean by 1/10 of an inch. This may not seem like a major increase, but this small impact can have catastrophic effects, such as flooding, erosion, and the loss of marshes and wetlands for coastal ecosystems.​
2. Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation
summer, 1982
With many months of planning and research, Agnes Denes and her team created a 2-acre wheat field in May of 1982. This field was created by digging 285 furrows in the dirt by hand and then cleaning up all of the garbage and debris within the soil. The wheat seeds would then be placed by hand and covered. Every furrow took multiple hours to complete. For months, the seedlings were taken care of with an installed irrigation system, weeding, as well as fertilization. On the 16th of August, the healthy wheat was collected resulting in almost 1000 pounds of the fresh grain.
The wheatfield was placed on a landfield in lower Manhattan facing the Statue of Liberty. Two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, the $4.5 billion location provided an even deeper meaning to the piece. The absurdity of using such an expensive piece of land to simply harvest wheat attracted a lot of public attention.
Wheatfield represented the corruption of waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns. The contrast between the large city buildings and the golden field called attention to misplaced priorities of human civilization. The harvested wheat was transported to exhibits around the globe where the seeds would be collected and planted in impoverished communites.