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ACKROYD & HARVEY

Хизер Экройд и Дэн Харви

Dilston Grove (was transformed into a green chamber of living grass)

source: ackroydandharvey

Biography

Sculpture, photography, architecture, and biology are some of the disciplines that intersect in Ackroyd & Harvey’s work, revealing an intrinsic bias towards process and event and often reflecting urban political ecologies by highlighting the temporal nature of processes of growth and decay in sites of architectural interest as well as contemporary art galleries and museums worldwide.

They are acclaimed for large-scale architectural interventions and for their work making complex photographs utilizing the pigment chlorophyll; in 2003 they grew the entire vertical interior space of a disused church in South London, the following year contributed to European Space 9th Sculpture Quadrennial in Riga, Latvia and in 2007 realised their largest temporary living public artwork FlyTower on the exterior of London’s National Theatre; they have received the NESTA Pioneer award, the Wellcome Sci-Art award and the L’Oreal Grand prize for Colour for their photosynthesis based photography and have exhibited this work worldwide including Void Gallery, Derry; SESC Mostra des Artes, Sao Paulo; Bios 4 Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art, Seville; Big Chill, Herefordshire (UK); Chicago Public Art Program (USA); Agitate SF Camerawork, San Francisco (USA); Traits of Life Exploratorium, San Francisco (USA); Photography and Time V&A Museum, London (UK); Je t’envisage Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne (Switzerland); Paradise Now Exit Art, New York (USA); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (USA); Rice Gallery, Houston (USA).

In 2012 they were awarded the ‘artist-in-residence’ position at University College London’s Environment Institute. This year they have re-created a work for the Points of View exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, USA and shown their 17min Stranded DVD at the Capital Offense group exhibition, Beacon Arts, Los Angeles.

In 2011 they were awarded the prestigious Mapping the Park commission for London 2012, a series of individual sculptures entitled History Trees at ten of the major entrances into the Olympic Park. Three of the sculptures will be present for the Games with the remaining seven to be installed for the opening of the Queen Elizabeth II public park. During last year they also exhibited in Terre Vulnerabili at Hangar Bicocca in Milan, continued a Slow Art residency at the Eden Project, were commissioned to make a short film for the What of Earth series, and showed a series of their crystal artworks at the Royal Society summer exhibition.

In the summer of 2010 they created a new commission for Trasparenze Art for Renewable Energy, at MACRO Testaccio, Rome and M.A.D.R.E in Naples, Italy.

Since 2003, they have made a series of expeditions to the High Arctic with Cape Farewell, looking at the effects of climate change on the ecosystem and have shown the resulting work Stranded, a 6m long whale skeleton encrusted with crystals at London’s Natural History Museum, the Liverpool Biennial 2007, Fundacion Canal in Madrid and Japan’s Miraikan Museum.

In 2007 they embarked on a long term project growing trees germinated from acorns collected from Joseph Beuys’s seminal artwork 7000 Oaks. Currently they have 250 surviving saplings and the trees have been exhibited at Manchester’s Centre for the Urban Built Environment (CUBE) and in 2009/10 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts Earth: Art of a changing world exhibition.

In 2008 they opened Twist, a landmark artwork twenty metres tall on the approach to the city of Bristol. The slate tower has integrated solar and wind-generating capacity produces sufficient energy to light itself. Ackroyd & Harvey have previously been recipients of two Royal Society of Arts Art For Architecture awards.

Ackroyd & Harvey have given many lectures and presentations, notably at the Nobel Laureate Symposium on Creativity, Leadership and Climate Change at London’s Science Museum; Planet Under Pressure, Excel Centre, London; Art & Alchemy, Trinity College, Cambridge; WWEE Forum, Smiths College, Oxford; Royal Academy of Arts, London; London School of Economics, UK; the Royal Society, London; Royal Institute of British Architects, London; Tate Britain, London; Royal National Theatre, London; Manchester International Festival, UK; Oxford University; Courtauld Institute, London; Harvard University, USA; San Francisco Institute of Arts, USA; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, (USA).
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source: cubeme

British artists Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey recently transformed a landmark church in South East London by covering the interior in a layer of living grass. Their artwork makes explicit connections with urban political ecologies by highlighting the temporal nature of processes of growth and decay in sites of architectural and ecological interest as well as contemporary art galleries and museums worldwide. The project is organized by the The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). You can see it for yourself in Dilston Grove’s Clare College Mission Church, South London.

As reported in New Scientist the Grass Wall process involves:

Stripping walls down to bare plasterwork
Smearing the walls with a layer of soft moist clay a few millimetres thick. Moisture content is critical as if it is too wet it will slide off or too dry and it will peel away.
Press in about 10 seeds every square centimetre of clay so that the finished surface resembles a sesame seed cake.

The walls are then watered three or four times a day to make sure that the clay doesn’t dry out.
In about six days the grass will germinate and then only water once per day
Unfortunately the dense growth of the grass starts to get mouldy after about 25 days. This is because the grass grows so densely that air cannot circulate and water becomes trapped. After about a month the grass wall is taken down.
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source: ecoblogit

A Londra la chiesa abbandonata di Dilston Grove ritorna a vivere grazie agli “artisti del verde” Heather Ackroyd e Dan Harvey.

gBlog mostra la Clare College Mission Church, nota come Dilston Grove, trasformata in un’affascinante “cubo” di erba verde e viva. Le pareti interne dell’edificio sono state ricoperte da una sottile rete di argilla in cui sono stati piantati i semi. Acqua e sole hanno fatto il resto.
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source: ecotelhadoblogbr

Um galeria de arte com paredes internas totalmente tomadas pela grama. Esta é a descrição da galeria de arte Dilston Grove, em Londres, que recebeu a obra dos artistas Heather Ackroyd e Dan Harvey.

Para fazer a grama crescer nessa posição, os artistas juntaram sementes ao barro, mistura que foi aplicada em todas as Ecoparedes.
Em seguida foi feito um cuidadoso trabalho de irrigação para garantir o crescimento das plantas.

A ideia é que a grama continue crescendo no local por tempo indeterminado.
A galeria foi construída na década de 1900, e o espaço era originalmente uma igreja. Apenas na década de 60 é que o local passou a ser usado para exposições de arte.
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source: livejournalru

В 2003 году супруги Хизер Экройд (Heather Ackroyd) и Дэн Харви (Dan Harvey) – британские художники, озеленяющие вертикальные поверхности зданий, украсили травой внутреннее убранство церкви Dilston Grove в Лондоне.

Выделенная им площадь составила примерно 760 квадратных метров, и, чтобы покрыть её травой, художникам в составе команды из 22 человек пришлось проделать грязную и очень тяжёлую работу

Они трудились на 10 ярусах строительных лесов (высота здания около 30 метров), размазывая 2,5 тонны почвы по бетону, создавая слой толщиной 4-5 миллиметров, а затем втыкали семена травы в ещё влажную землю: приблизительно два миллиарда семян — 25 мешков по 25 килограммов

«Каждое утро я просыпалась с единственной мыслью — лишь бы не было дождя», — признаётся Экройд, имея в виду тот факт, что гроза могла отправить их дотошную работу прямо в Темзу.