Environmentalists are demanding urgent action to halt an aquatic gold rush along one of the Amazon River’s largest tributaries, where hundreds of illegal goldmining dredges have converged in search of the precious metal. The vast flotilla – so large one local website compared it to a floating neighbourhood – reportedly began forming on the Madeira River earlier […]
About Barbara Crane Navarro - Rainforest Art Project
I'm a French artist living near Paris.
From 1968 to 1973 I studied at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, then at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, for my BFA.
My work for many decades has been informed and inspired by time spent with indigenous communities. Various study trips devoted to the exploration of techniques and natural pigments took me originally to the Dogon of Mali, West Africa, and subsequently to Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil.
Over many years, during the winters, I studied the techniques of traditional Bogolan painting. Hand woven fabric is dyed with boiled bark from the Wolo tree or crushed leaves from other trees, then painted with mud from the Niger river which oxidizes in contact with the dye.
Through the Dogon and the Yanomami, my interest in the multiplicity of techniques and supports for aesthetic expression influenced my artistic practice. The voyages to the Amazon Rainforest have informed several series of paintings created while living among the Yanomami. The support used is roughly woven canvas prepared with acrylic medium then textured with a mixture of sand from the river bank and lava. This supple canvas is then rolled and transported on expeditions into the forest. They are then painted using a mixture of acrylic colors and Achiote and Genipap, the vegetal pigments used by the Yanomami for their ritual body paintings and on practical and shamanic implements.
My concern for the ongoing devastation of the Amazon Rainforest has inspired my films and installation projects. Since 2005, I've created a perfomance and film project - Fire Sculpture - to bring urgent attention to Rainforest issues. To protest against the continuing destruction, I've publicly set fire to my totemic sculptures. These burning sculptures symbolize the degradation of nature and the annihilation of indigenous cultures that depend on the forest for their survival.
This problem has been existing since I was 18 (nearly 50 years ago). Instead of getting better, it got worse. How does one not lose the belief in mankind?
Yes, we’ve been gripped by a frenzy of shopping for shiny objects for decades, intensified this year by manipulative Black Friday
deals that start weeks before and go on until the Holiday shopping season kicks in.
We need to examine this addiction and stop shopping for things we don’t genuinely need, none of which are gold baubles.
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This problem has been existing since I was 18 (nearly 50 years ago). Instead of getting better, it got worse. How does one not lose the belief in mankind?
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Yes, we’ve been gripped by a frenzy of shopping for shiny objects for decades, intensified this year by manipulative Black Friday
deals that start weeks before and go on until the Holiday shopping season kicks in.
We need to examine this addiction and stop shopping for things we don’t genuinely need, none of which are gold baubles.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I couldn’t agree more!!!
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Reblogged this on The Free.
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