Artists join researchers in climate change show

Melanie Goodfellow, contributor

Living Light No. 2 (Pyrocystis Fusiformis), 2011, by Erika Blumenfeld in collaboration with Michael Latz

Striking photographs of bioluminescent phytoplankton - electric blue against a black background, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock splatter - hang next to a haunting installation featuring a rotating globe slowly enveloped in a fluorescent green gas. Elsewhere, life-size, porcelain casts of dinosaur bones and elephant bird eggs are on show, delicately decorated with endangered Amazon flora and fauna. These diverse artworks form part of the climate-change-themed exhibition Carbon 12 at the Espace Fondation EDF in Paris, France.

Appropriately housed in an airy space in a former electricity substation in central Paris, Carbon 12 gathers the work of five teams of artists and research scientists around the theme of carbon-dioxide-related climate change, looking at how the phenomenon is affecting biodiversity, the oceans and atmosphere.

It is the latest project from the British arts and climate science foundation Cape Farewell, perhaps best known for its high-profile Arctic expeditions - such as a 2008 trip to Disko bay in Greenland - in which artists and scientists observe, record and take inspiration from the effects of climate change close-up.

?We?ve been around for 12 years now but this is the first time we?ve exhibited the scientists? work alongside that of artists,? says Cape Farewell?s founding curator and director David Buckland.

?The ambition for this project was for the artists to create works of art that resonate in their own right? we didn?t want the artists to campaign but rather to find a different language to communicate the science surrounding climate change in a new and exciting way,? he says.

Buckland?s contribution to the exhibition, for example, explores the work of Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University, UK, on how the acidification of the oceans is affecting the ability of Arctic coccolithophore algae to absorb carbon.

His artistic response - a large installation representing a chalk cliff - is displayed alongside Iglesias-Rodriguez?s calculations, sketches and reflections, and a 5-minute film in which she talks about her work.

Another artist, Erika Blumenfeld, first started collaborating in 2001 with Michael Latz, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where he specialises in the phenomenon of bioluminescence - the production and emission of light by living organisms - in phytoplankton (see top photo).

?I?ve always been fascinated by the abstract and beautiful patterns produced by these microscopic organisms,? says Latz. ?Monitoring bioluminescence in phytoplankton is a simple way to assess changes in the health of the ocean. As global warming changes ocean flows, these micro-organisms are increasingly at risk. Changes in phytoplankton will impact all of the food chain.?

Blumenfeld spent a week as an artist in residence in Latz?s lab at the Scripps Institute last year, painstakingly capturing the bioluminescent phytoplankton he cultivates in tanks.

?I wanted to isolate the plankton into single cells and capture it close up. It would have been impossible to do this in the sea,? says the artist.

The resulting work is a series of arresting digital pigment prints, capturing the movement of the phytoplankton in electric blue against a jet-black background. They are displayed in a darkened environment mimicking the conditions of Latz?s lab.

Detail from Amazonia, 2009-2010, by Lucy and Jorge Orta

Artists Lucy and Jorge Orta are exhibiting artworks from their Amazonia project, inspired by a four-week Cape Farewell expedition in 2009 to the Peruvian Amazon with scientists from the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford, UK, which culminated in a stay at the Manu Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the largest protected area in Peru.

Highlighting the rich but fragile biodiversity of the Amazon, Amazonia Collection: Aepyronis, Gallimimus, Allosaurus and Paleomastodon is a series of porcelain casts of dinosaur fossils and elephant bird eggs decorated with Amazonian flora and fauna.

?Like the dinosaurs, the Amazon?s biodiversity also risks disappearing,? says Lucy Orta.

Carbon 12 is the first in a trilogy of shows. There will be a Carbon 13 in the Texan artists' town of Marfa next year, and a Carbon 14, is scheduled for Toronto, Canada, in 2014.?We?ve started off with Carbon 12, which is an isotope of carbon in its most stable form, which makes perfect sense. Expect Carbon 13 and 14 to be more political, more disruptive,? says Buckland.

Carbon 12 runs until 16 September at?Espace Foundation EDF, Paris, France

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