Betty Beaumont
New York based artist, Betty Beaumont is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores social structures, politics, the environment, feminism and spatiality. Born in Toronto in 1946, Beaumont moved to California at an early age. Here she became interested in the relationship between humans and nature. Before Ocean Landmark she did severall works exploring this idea. While studying architecture in California she documented the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the terrible devastation it brought to the area. She continued exploring these ideas with site-specific installations, after living with a Native American tribe called Hopi. Her early work ran parallel with the west coast feminist art movement of the late 60s and early 70s. Much of her work is a meditation on the social structures and the nature, cultures and people suffering under these.
Most of her work is extremely research based, and works in the intersections between art, science and architecture. Many of her projects are broader themes, which contain several bodies of work in different medias. She utilizes sculptures, videos, audio which usually are heavy metaphor filled.
Chosen Works
Ocean Landmark
At the end of the sixties a new art artform blossomed that tried to restore natural sites, particularly those that had been damaged by heavy production and industries. This was called reclamation art. These projects were not only interested in the aesthetics of these exhausted spaces, but also sought to revitalize them. The artists worked closely with landscape architects, engineers, scientists and environmental specialist. The Ocean Landmark project was one of the first large scale reclamation projects.
Ocean landmark was a culmination of a decade long exploration of the relationship between nature and human. In Ocean landmark Beaumont collaborated with specialist who had created a process
in which coal residue could be made into blocks that could stabilize the toxicity balance in the water. Together with marine biologist and engineers she planned to create an artificial reef outside of New York. By visiting Japan she had found out that a certain kind of shape and size attracted specific kinds of fish. Many of these blocks of coal where released in the atlantic ocean- a little of New York. Documentation was done through sculptures, video and drawings. Today the site is listed as a fish haven by NOAA. The project was sponsored by several notable institutions like the US department of energy, the smithsonian institution, bell labs, and Columbia university and cost 3 million dollars.
Energy was something that had interested Beaumont ever since the first OPEC constructed energy crisis in 1973. In Ocean Landmark she focused her attentions on coal. “Coal is a fossil fuel: the trans- formed remains of plants that have been underground at high temperature and great pressure for millions of years. It is mined, burned in a flash, and then its ashes are thrown away.” Beaumont says. In the project she aims to use waste from this process and turn it into the building blocks for a thriving ecosystem.
While the project has garnered international praise there exist very little documentation of the project online. Beaumont has said that earlier said that she doesn’t believe photos could adequately describe the project. She has since made a VR representation, but I still haven’t been able to find this online. Many projects have in the later years worked off the idea of creating artificial reefs. Notable examples are Biorock, Reef Balls and the artists Jason Decaires Taylor and Damien Hirst.
Scientific background
Coal as a purifier
Charcoal purifies water by adsorbing impurities. While absorption is the process in which substances dissolve or are vacuumed in an absorbent volume, adsorption is the process in which substances merely adhere to an adsorbent surface.
Artificial reefs
Artificial reefs are man made structures built on featureless bottoms meant to accommodate life. On a featureless bottom there are no hard surfaces where algae and invertebrates can attach. The idea is that these reefs can provide these surfaces and thus be the starting building blocks of a larger ecosystem. Many places in the oceans have been made featurless by fillings and by human waste. The reefs can be made by existing materials, such as sinking ships or oil rigs or waste such as tires, or these reefs can be made on purpose with PVC or concrete. Beaumonts project is a mixture of old material which has been repurpossed.
Coral reefs
From science Daily: A coral reef is a type of biotic reef that develops in tropical waters by the growth of coralline algae, hermatypic corals, and other marine organisms. Coral reefs are typically massive biogenic formations of calcium carbonate (limestone) that is deposited within or around the bodies of the inhabitants of the reef as skeletal material. This material gradually accumulates as debris and/or is knitted together by the continued growth of the attached forms living on the reef.
Effectiveness of Artificial Reefs
Summary of papers published Journal of Environmental Managment, text from science daily: “Re- searchers have examined diving habits and behavior around Eilat’s natural and artificial reefs. Accord- ing to study, the average diver density at the artificial reef was higher than at the two nearby natural knolls, and the Tamar reef effectively diverts divers from natural knolls. Secondly, the study found that regarding attitudes toward natural versus artificial reefs, divers consider the artificial reefs more appro- priate for training, but they feel less relaxed around them.”
Other successful artificial reefs
Jason DeCaires Taylor has created underwater sculptures of people out of a special PH-neutral concrete. These objects act as reefs and underwaterscultpture parks, open for the public to visit. The projects is a good example of how art and science can work together in a sustainable and thought provoking way.
Reef balls an american NGO that also creates underwater structures with PH-neutral cement. Ac- cording to Reef Ball research, normal cement has a pH of 13, and alkaline levels are too high for coral to colonize when the structures are initially installed, therefore more aggressive life forms, such as barnacles and algae get there first and inhibit coral growth. The pH in the cement is neutralized through mixing additives, such as micro silica, and curing of the cement for at least 30 days. (Sean Hunter Williams)
A surprising kind of artificial reefs are oil rigs. Life fixes itself on the structure underwater. Today de- commissioned oil rigs are being kept instead of being torn down to take care of the life that has been created around them. Also decommissioned ships can be used for artificial reefs. In the united states several war ships have been cleaned and sunk to create underwater parks.
From reef balls website:
Designed reefs function better when they mimic nature. Natural reefs vary and Reef Balls vary in size from 1 foot to 5 feet in height. The number and placement of holes can be altered for each unit to create a variety similar to that found in nature and surface textures enhance marine life settlement. Hollow interior spaces provide ideal habitat and shelter for a variety of species. Advanced coral trans- plantation techniques allow the addition of coral plugs for quick initiation of growth and rescue and propagation of hard and soft corals damaged by storms, dredging, etc.
PH-value
From http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/184ph. html
Acidic and basic are two extremes that describe a chemical property chemicals. Mixing acids and bases can cancel out or neutralize their extreme effects. A substance that is neither acidic nor basic is neutral.
The pH scale measures how acidic or basic a sub- stance is. The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14. A pH of 7 is neutral. A pH less than 7 is acidic. A pH greater than 7 is basic.
The pH scale is logarithmic and as a result, each whole pH value below 7 is ten times more acidic than the next higher value. For example, pH 4 is ten times more acidic than pH 5 and 100 times (10 times 10) more acidic than pH 6. The same holds true for pH values above 7, each of which is ten times more alkaline (another way to say basic) than the next lower whole value. For example, pH 10 is ten times more alkaline than pH 9 and 100 times (10 times 10) more alkaline than pH 8.
Pure water is neutral. But when chemicals are mixed with water, the mixture can become either acidic or basic. Examples of acidic substances are vinegar and lemon juice. Lye, milk of magnesia, and am- monia are examples of basic substances.
Methods
In the project I’ve worked together with Mats, who also works with artificial reefs. What interested me about Beau- monts projects is how human-made objects can be used to promote underwater life. This is done through spatial and material understanding, therefore perfectly suited for an architect’s skillset.
In the research phase it became clear to us how large the theme we were tackling actually is. To create a successful artificial reef one needs to do a lot of research on site. PH-value needs to be measured, the bottoms typography must be explored and what kinds of organism live there.
To be able to tackle these issues one needs to work cross-disciplinary, so we have contacted people from other fields. Mats is great at talking on the phone, so he has gotten a good relationship with an art museum in oslo which has made an artificial reef with Jason Decaires Taylor. Hopefully we’ll be able to talk to Taylor later in the course. Next week we are planning to go to Havforskningsinstituttet to hear how they would go about doing a project like this. We have also contacted many people about making PH-neutral concrete, this has proven difficult so far.
We created four tests-sculptures. These were based upon the circular design given by the task. Sculpture 1 and 2 we wanted to test out using wood inside of the concrete mould, and then later burn the wood. The idea here was that burned away wood would create intiriguing inside-outside spaces and the coal would act as a purifier of the water. In scultpture 3 we worked with creating a texture on top of an existing concrete block. Sculpture number 4 we are planning to bore holes through, creating small pockets organisms can inhabit. These models are not made in PH-neutral concrete, since none of the experts in Bergen we have talked to know how to do this.
The tests were interesting but they were not the kind of design that would create an interesting result underwater. We want to create a module based design. So we can mass-produce one smaller module and put it together underwater. That way we can create a larger sculpture with many different inside and outside spaces, attracting a diverse species pool.
Keywords
Cross-disciplinary
Feminism
Fish haven
Reclamation art
Coal
Purify
Artificial reef
References and links
- Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (John K. Grande)
- The Ethics of Earth Art (Amanda Boetzkes)
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/artificial_reef.htm
- http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/184ph.html
- https://www.nature.com/articles/4311039a