Pollution Forrest

 For NuArt Aberdeen 2023

Spanish artist Escif returns to Nuart with one of his tertiary landscapes, using the recently adopted medium of ink made from harvested pollution. With the topic of this year’s festival being Rewilding, Escif’s muted landscape adds another dimension to an otherwise ordinary Aberdonian urban parking lot.

The image chosen by the artist was taken from the Caledonian Forest, an ancient temperate forest in Scotland. The forest has due to human actions over thousands of year reduced in size to its current extent. By the 1950s, only 1 precent of the original Caledonian Forest, that once covered most of Scotland, remained.

The mural was painted using @air.ink, which is the world’s first ink made out of air pollution particulate matters. By creating a new pictoral forest by using ink created from one of humanities most destructive inputs on the landscape, the choice of material and image reinforces the themes of the work and the festival at large.