Philip Colbert. Air-Ink on recycled A2 Paper

Eco-art organisation Platform Earth is creating an exhibition of works by leading artists made from air pollution, at Frieze London. The aim of CARBON is to raise funds for a highly worthy environmental charity while raising awareness of our carbon footprint, as Ella Johnson reports.

Frieze London will see an innovative new stand by Platform Earth, showing CARBON, an eco-exhibition devoted to sustainability and featuring works by prominent UK based-artists, being sold in aid of marine carbon capture initiatives supported by eco-fundraising organisation Platform Earth.

Platform Earth is the brainchild of Petroc Sesti, with assistance in curation by Mark Sanders, Jessica Carlisle and Richard Wadhams. The show exhibits works by Tracey Emin, Brian Eno, Shezad Dawood, Ben Okri, among others. All works have been created using the medium of Air-Ink, a pioneering, carbon-negative ink made from air pollution.

Proceeds from the sales will go to Platform Earth’s Great British Sea Forest initiative and the  Sussex Kelp Restoration Project, a project working to restore depleted kelp forests on the Sussex coast. In Platform Earth’s first year, it has successfully supported the Sussex Wildlife Trust in passing a bylaw banning trawling on 300 KM2 of the south coast, now the largest marine restoration project in the UK. Sesti points out that the marine-based plant is a potential game-changer when it comes to reducing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. “Capable of growing three metres in just four months, kelp can draw down carbon more than twenty times faster than land-based alternatives. Once restored to its original size, the Sussex kelp forest could remove the equivalent of London’s entire art industry’s emissions year on year,” he says.

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Sesti himself has a name where art and conservation meet. In addition to having founded Platform Earth last year – which strives to bring artists and scientists together to bring about carbon neutrality in the art world – he has collaborated with David Attenborough, and NASA astronaut and artist Nicole Stott on conservation initiatives dealing with deforestation and carbon capture. His work, which often takes a broadly cosmological focus, is also displayed at the Yacht Club de Monaco, whose patron, Prince Albert II, is a keen supporter of marine conservation causes.

Sesti was given the space at Frieze by Victoria Siddall, Global Director of Frieze Fairs, with the support of the Gallery Climate Coalition, amid rising concern in the art world about the carbon footprint of the sector.

The line-up of artists participating in CARBON is striking. Emin has created a line drawing of a woman reclining from the Air-Ink medium; Eno has contributed a work showing an ink footprint on (recycled) paper simply entitled Carbon Footprint.

Shezad Dawood, Terrarium Study, Air-Ink on recycled A2 Paper

Shezad Dawood’s work depicts an underwater seascape replete with a crab and seaweed (or polythene tendrils, depending on how you view it). The multi-media artist comments: “Keeping the process carbon neutral, from the paper to the Air-Ink, is a nice touch, but the Air-Ink is actually wonderful to draw with, so there were no compromises there.” For Dawood, the CARBON project builds on a pre-existing passion. “For my works The Terrarium and Leviathan, I have spent years working with scientists, oceanographers and environmentalists imagining the future. What will different marine and coastal regions look like in 30, or 300, years from now?”

Read more: Philanthropist Helga Piaget on educating the next generation

For contributing artist, Sue Webster, CARBON offers an opportunity for retrospection. “Tim [Noble] and I have always inadvertently made environmentally friendly art, dating back to being penniless art students in Nottingham in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We simply couldn’t afford to waste our precious student grants on buying sheets of metal or lumps of granite with which to carve our future in art, so we turned to emptying out the skip in the sculpture park in order to pave our way through the art of assemblage from trash. It was never meant to be a political statement: it was simply a means to an end, to survival. It’s funny how things have turned out. It’s about time artists unify and invest in solutions to the art industry’s carbon emissions.”

Conrad Shawcross. Air-Ink on recycled A2 Paper

Conrad Shawcross has created an abstract, particle-like work. He tells LUX, “As we do not have all the answers, I celebrate all endeavours to think outside the box, raise awareness, and promote change. Platform Earth represents a fresh and bold solution to accelerating environmental understanding, protecting ocean habitats and a novel way for the art world to try to reduce its negative environmental impact, while also crucially supporting and sustaining artistic expression.

Read more: Sophie Neuendorf on the legacy of Valmont’s Didier Guillon

“For well over a decade now, my joy in making has been increasingly tarnished by an anxiety at the environmental consequences of my expression and process. For years I have been trying to unbind the direct link between my artistic production from my carbon footprint. Decarbonising my supply chain has not been easy. While there are exciting solutions on the horizon, such as green hydrogen steel mills, we are not there yet.”

Charlotte Colbert. Air-Ink on recycled A3 Paper

Charlotte Colbert’s surreal creation blurs the lines between man and marine creature. “All our senses can witness our hurtling towards climate catastrophe,” she says. “It feels overwhelming, so when organisations come with clear aims and goals on how to delay or even avert it one can only leap behind it with full faith and commitment.” Philip Colbert, who has recreated his signature lobster seemingly drowning in a rising ocean, adds, “It seems about time that an art movement focused head on the environmental challenge of our time. Great art has always attempted to tackle the existential challenges for humanity and Platform Earth perfectly addresses our biggest challenge today. If artists can’t inspire then they can no longer dream.”

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, taking place in a few weeks, the show could not be better timed. As Sesti says, “To have Frieze place us essentially in their blue-chip section is a real barometer of how the art world is changing – or potentially hasn’t changed yet. It does not have many solutions at the moment, in terms of contributing to the environment and carbon capture.” A zero carbon art world may be a long way off, but CARBON is at least playing a small part in raising awareness – and addressing the issue.

Find out more: platformearth.org

Follow Platform Earth on Instagram: @platformearthuk

Conrad Shawcross’s sculpture Bicameral at the pedestrian entrance to Chelsea Barracks.

Chelsea Barracks has already established itself as one of the most desirable places to live in London. Its gardens, with their planting schemes, public artworks and open access, are adding to the city’s continuing and defining history of garden squares, as Anna Tyzack reports

There are many measures by which London could be said to be the greatest city in the world. It is a (possibly the) financial and business hub; a crossroads between the Americas, Europe and Asia; a cultural centre that combines 2,000 years of history with being on the world’s leading edge in creativity in the 21st century.

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It is also the world’s most liveable great city. Yes, there are surveys published in trendy publications each year that tout the virtues of earthy locations in crispy-clean countries. But successful, ambitious humans want to live and work in a place where they can be surrounded by their peers: to be right in the heart of a city teeming with global leaders in finance, the arts, creativity, science, philanthropy and international trade. And yet they also crave a standard of living. Their villa on Cap Ferrat for summer and lodge in Aspen for winter have infinite light, space, nature; and London is the only city of its level in the world that can offer these semblances of space and green alongside its myriad other draws. London is the greenest city in Europe: almost 50 per cent of its surface area is parks, gardens, natural habitats or water.

In the most authoritative measure of its kind, London and New York regularly swap places at number 1 and number 2 slots in the Knight Frank Wealth Report Global Cities Index: but for the ‘lifestyle’ subsection, London is, in 2020, at the top.

Bourne Walk at Chelsea Barracks

One unique aspect of London lifestyle is its garden squares. They developed naturally as spaces for inhabitants to relax and play as the city grew; became protected in law; and now many of them are the most desirable addresses in the city. Garden squares in London can be public (run by the local councils) or private (owned and used by the local landowners); the best are hives of culture, leisure and joy.

And now there is a new crop of squares coming to life. Uniquely, they are in central London, an area not known for its propensity to be developed. They are the creation of Chelsea Barracks, a new super-luxe five-hectare residential area built between super-prime neighbourhoods Chelsea and Belgravia on the site of what was for 150 years an army barracks.

Read more: In conversation with ballet dancer Sergei Polunin 

It is also unique in its concept and ambition. Rather than build yet another cookie-cutter set of branded residences inside an enclosed compound, sell them off and take the money, owner Qatari Diar is in for the long term: the aim is to create a new neighbourhood, not just for those fortunate enough to afford the residences lining the new streets, but to welcome anyone who is drawn in by the beautiful and distinctive urban planning.

And the squares. There are two hectares of garden squares and public spaces, open to all, in the development: in all, seven new squares are being created. The idea is that residents can enjoy them permanently, and through an artfully curated cultural programme, visitors can pass through, linger and enjoy the first, and last, new area on this scale likely to be developed in central London for, well, probably ever.

Whistler Square is named after the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler who once lived in Belgravia

They are also very much not a recreation or pastiche of existing garden squares. “Our gardens are very different from the traditional idea of railings around a set of trees and a lawn – we didn’t want rules or hostile architecture giving any sense that people were being segregated,” says Richard Oakes, Qatari Diar’s Chief Sales & Marketing Officer Europe & Americas. “Given we were working on what is going to be the most exclusive addresses in London, we had to find a new way of considering what is a garden square.”

This takes a delicate balancing act. The open spaces at Chelsea Barracks (which amount to a lot more than just garden squares) are aimed at attracting visitors and establishing the area as a cultural hub; while residents still feel a sense of exclusivity.

Read more: Van Cleef & Arpels CEO Nicolas Bos on the poetry of jewellery

The landscaping is contemporary in style, while referencing the traditional garden square, with water features to bring a sense of calm and tranquillity and bulbs and flowering trees such as magnolia to add colour and structure throughout the seasons. The red Chelsea Barracks rose, inspired by the intricate petal-shaped window in the restored Garrison Chapel, and cultivated for Chelsea Barracks by grower Philip Harkness, features prominently in the planting. “The gardens provide a spectacular new front door for Chelsea Flower Show, which takes place next door, at the Royal Hospital,” Oakes says.

Here and above: Mulberry Square’s garden planted with lavender, rosemary and strawberries

In Mulberry Square, for example, residents overlook a shallow water rill and a fragrant garden planted with lavender, rosemary and strawberries, a tribute to the patterned canvases of artist Bridget Riley. Here there are benches to sit on with a book or to enjoy a peaceful moment listening to the sound of the water.

Read more: How Gaggenau is innovating the ancient art of steam cooking

Meanwhile Whistler Square, in the northern part of the Barracks, is named after the artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who lived in Belgravia and Old Chelsea. It has as its focal point a bronze-edged Cumbrian black-slate scrim, no deeper than a finger nail, decorated with fragile etched lines to represent the lost rivers of London.

But culture, as much as gardens, is at the heart of the development. Garrison Chapel, which forms the centrepiece of the development, is a restored, listed and significant historical structure. It has been painstakingly restored by a host of British artisans including lime plasterers, fresco artists and stained-glass experts and will once again be a place for locals to gather. The new bell, an exact replica of the damaged original, was commissioned from Britain’s last surviving bell maker, John Taylor & Co of Loughborough.

Strikingly positioned, it will be the centre of an art and culture programme, which will spill out into the squares and spaces. It will involve performance art and installation as well as static art, with a focus on giving young and emerging artists a bedrock in the centre of London, an area for so long dominated by art dealers rather than artists. Striking also is the focus away from just retail: life, space and culture, rather than transaction, is what this new area aims to be about.

Public artwork at Chelsea Barracks

A tree-like sculpture by Conrad Shawcross is the first public artwork to be installed at Chelsea Barracks. Casting dappled shade onto Dove Place, the pedestrian entrance to the development, Bicameral comprises 693 components and stands 8m in height. It can be  seen, as Shawcross explains, as an Arcadian symbol for reason, humanity, rationalism, progress and hope, and it was designed to pay homage to the craftsmanship found at the Barracks. The sculpture was created entirely without welding; its interlocking forms are held together by techniques derived from Japanese wood joinery.

Chelsea Barracks in numbers

• Apartments in Chelsea Barracks cost from £5.25 million.
• Townhouses, each with a roof terrace, spa with pool, gym, garden and private garage, cost from £38 million.
• The Garrison Club is for the exclusive use of residents. With all the advantages of a private club, amenities include a 1,800 sq m spa and gym; private cinema, games room, residents’ lounge and business suite with two boardrooms.

Find out more: chelseabarracks.com

This article was originally published in the Summer 2020 Issue.