Signal Arts Centre is delighted to present an unusual exhibition of work
By the artist- Lorraine Cross-.
This exhibition will feature large-scale charcoal drawings and photography to gaze on this timely and provocative topic of mining in the industrial heartland of Germany.
An award-winning artist Cross-is known for her dynamic and thought provoking exhibitions on our use/abuse of fossil fuels. Garzweiler, built in the 1200s was the first village erased as part of industrial scale mining from the 1980s using massive machinery to dig vast open pits and railway tracks to transport the coal to the power plants dotted in plain sight emitting their carbon emissions. In the process of claiming land to mine the coal up to 30,000 people have been displaced along with their villages “for the Greater Good” of us all.
Cross-has exhibited in Italy and at home on this project over the past few years since learning of the involuntary displacement of people in order to mine coal beneath their homes. Drawn by the fact that so little is known about this upheaval of land and people she believes in the potential of the aesthetic experience to question reality and turn our political and ideological resignation that too often means we pull down the blind on what is happening around us.
Cross-believes that “If we can imagine the wider global effects of fracking, gas and oil explorations, then mining becomes more like sucking the guts from the core of the Earth.” She says “that ultimately this is not just about Germany but using art as a wake up call that we are all implicated as participants in the web of our ecological and human existence. It is up to us all to find some common space to reinvent an ecological intelligence about our complex world. If we demand this as cognitive and caring human beings then institutions will follow.”
brayarts 