Water: Inspiration and a warning for climate change in art and design.

Why blue remains the most relevant colour

DS.WRITER:

Σοφία Θρουβάλα

Vitrum was commissioned by the Design Museum Ghent for the exhibition Kleureyck, Van Eyck's Colours in Design, 2020 | Image Source: studioplastique.be

Blue has always been a symbolic colour. Long before it became linked with water and sustainability, issues that are now extremely relevant and urgent, it was linked through art with man’s greatest fears and later with the divine and the terror of nature. In Egypt, lapis lazuli, accompanied by gold, covers the faces of the greatest Pharaohs. References in ancient Greece are sparse and usually link the colour to death and the underworld. In later Roman times, blue takes its name from the blavus barbarians and so it bears the fear of the North and anything that comes from it. At the same time, during the western middle ages, blue covers church cupolas, emulating the sky, and it is only in the 15th century that it is linked “geographically” with the sea and the dangers it entails. On the maps of central Europe, the green colour that symbolised up until then the water borders is replaced with azure blue (azureus) and this colour will symbolise water once and for all! Later, blue will be associated with the blues and bluejeans, liberation movements and emancipation, while today it is the symbol of order, "security" and unity, since the most important international organisations and state mechanisms (such as Unesco, the European Union, the European council, police and liberal and/or right-wing parties) use blue in their logo, trusting psychiatry, which confirms that this colour creates conditions of safety and familiarity to the viewer.

So, the colour blue, as a modern symbol of water, is intertwined, both as a colour and as an element, with practical issues such as the economy, the nation, situations of danger or life and death as well as with identity, while modern art and design use it in order to conceptually and practically address two of the most important issues on a global scale. Climate change and the refugee crisis. Art comes to inform and question, and design to propose solutions that have more to do with sustainability and the use of water as a new source of energy.

Hanna Ljungh, in 2010, linked water to sustainability and proposed its use as an alternative energy source with the project Civilize a Waterfall, implying that this solution has already been ruled out by global warming. Accordingly, in 2013, Olafur Eliasson exhibited at MoMA real icebergs, which he called sculptures. The 800-year-old chunks of ice had just been sourced from Iceland's Vatnajokull glacier. The sensational work titled YOUR WASTE OF TIME was exhibited in a specially air-conditioned room, which operated in sub-zero temperatures, using solar panels.

Civilize a Waterfall, source: vimeo.com

Eve Mosher, from 2007 until today, has been carrying out a project entitled Highwaterline. Mosher reports on climate change developments by drawing chalk lines on the road, exactly 10 feet above sea level, to show the areas that will sink if global warming is not curbed or those areas don't take drastic measures. The project started after Hurricane Katrina in 2006, one of nature's first wake-up calls for what we are experiencing today.

Olafur Eliasson, Your waste of time | Image Source: olafureliasson.net

Eva Mosher, Highwaterline, till now | Image Source: activate.zone

In the field of design, in 2017, a group of 13 designers exhibited projects directly related to water at the London Design Festival. Kirsi Enkovaara created Landscapes of Waters, resembling the water of the Earth as it appears mapped from space. The goal of the exhibition was to promote water as an element with beneficial properties that is connected like no other to life on the planet. Enkovaara's ceramics are a post-human mapping of water on the planet.

Landscapes of Water by Kirsi Enkovaara, Source: kirsienkovaara.com

In 2019, Nilufar Gallery presented the fountain titled MetaFountain as part of the meta series. Designer Audrey Large used a 3d printer to create sculptural forms that evoke clusters of fountains in Japanese gardens. The colour blue is the element that evokes water and places the object in a reality with "historical" so to speak - albeit vague - references. The designer chooses to call her works invisible objects as she considers them to balance between the digital and the real world. In this case, it is the water that restores the work to an earthly state of functionality.

Nilufar, Audrey Large, METAFOUNTAIN | Image Source: nilufar.com

In 2020, Studio Plastique presented the installation entitled Vitrum. An impressive display of successive sheets of glass painted in shades of blue. The word Vitrum is a Latin word meaning both glass and indigo (meaning blue). The purpose of the slides was to examine how light passes and is diffused in the space, generating different reflections depending on the texture of the glass surface and the tone of the blue colour. The green lush landscape outside the windows of Schloss Hollenegg, the building that hosted the exhibition, functioned as a grid -a continuum- in the process of producing colour through the viewing of plants in order to render each distinct shade, thus speaking about how nature produces blue through green and how blue can be seen and admired under the right lighting conditions. The reflections of the glasses imitate the movement of water, a necessary element for the existence of plants. Thus, a circle is completed, an ode to nature and the colour blue, which accompanies all great moments in the history of art.

VITRUM | Image Source: studioplastique.be

Heleen Declercq | Image Source: studioplastique.be

Finally, very recently, in May 2021, the fashion house Balenciaga emptied its display windows and in place of the clothes installed only the work of Moreno Schweikle entitled Spring Coolers. The base of the sculpture is a classic cooler and crowning it is a miniature of a majestic fountain functioning as the "bottle". The project is inspired by the large neoclassical metropolitan fountains and the beneficial use of water in urban centers. By choosing this project, Balenciaga wishes to promote Schweikle's vision, that is, the return to an art and an architecture inspired and guided by the public historical fountains found in Europe as places of gathering and reconciliation of the world with art and nature, within a daily life that does not give many opportunities for escape.