andy berg
sculpture & installation art community engagement artist
RED LINE ON THE EARTH
A question of identity continues to reside within the distinction that many people seem to make between nature and human-culture (one hell of a tough Cartesian hangover). In the face of environmental degradation and loss, and our increasing horror of it, combined with a collective form of denial and paralysis in meeting our horror head on, where now may humans find identity? Can we identify ourselves only with the anxiety of environmental loss and planetary suffering?
RED LINE ON THE EARTH responds as a site for realistically examining this issue in a red line for walking, a handmade relief work using artefacts of our consumer culture's debris objects culled from city streets on art walks and cast into clay and cement in the studio. RED LINE functions as a liminal site for recalibrating inner alignment and fostering a sense of self-awareness by riffing on Berg's artistic practice of walking. It engages with Earth centred perception at multiple levels of functioning, in a healing space that positions the visitor gaze-body in a haptic look-feel-touch via feet walking in, around and upon that which we humans insistently trod and manipulate.
Referencing 20th C art such as Long's "A Line Made By Walking" and Newman's "Zip" paintings, RED LINE ON THE EARTH moves the visitor further down the trail, by positioning them in the act of their own walking, through a walking meditation of experiencing this red line in and on the Earth, our site of rupture, the place where the ground has been ripped open and the Earth is a gaping wound, and yet, which is also the site for reintegration, healing and rapprochement. RED LINE ON THE EARTH is a place for forging a new identity and Earth relationship: "That which scars will also heal." (Hippocrates)
-Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre, 2018 Juried Members Exhibition: "19/9/60"
RED LINE ON THE EARTH, Detail. Spruce 2 x 4 frame, garden mulch, nursery cloth, cast cement stone, oil paints