Luxury skincare brand La Prairie has renewed its mission for the arts by supporting artist Douglas Mandry, who is raising awareness on the importance of preserving the beauty of nature and its endangered landscapes.
Mandry initiated his investigation of glaciers in 2018, creating photograms of melting ice and working with archival photographs of alpine expeditions printed on glacier protective fleece covers.
His latest work, Gravity Flow, is a public installation displayed in Swiss nature meant to address the urgent topic of climate change and its visible impact on Swiss glaciers, visibly receding from melting as a result of the passing of time and climate change.
A series of five sculptures made of 100 per cent recycled glass, they question how humans perceive, represent and interact with their natural surroundings.
By choosing to represent glaciers, Mandry transmits a time-sensitive message about the unprecedented rate at which climate change occurs and its impact in a very visual way.
Mandry says since the sculptures are integrating a natural ecosystem, the experiment is meant to let the public experience all cycles of nature – the four seasons – and see how this will have an influence on the material.
"The Engadine area in Switzerland experiences some of the most drastic weather changes, from mild temperatures to rough and cold weather. Hopefully, the sculptures will keep a trace of this and become themselves like a record of this area, during a certain time, like time capsules," he says.
Mandry says since all his research aims at exploring human's relationship to nature, climate change is automatically a phenomenon he is drawn to.
"It is interconnected to our life and history since we started evolving into it as a cultural entity. Glaciers have been a big part of my work as they are part of my life as a Swiss artist but there are many other subjects to be explored and addressed. I started working on corals being illegally exported, as well as the shifting of natural elements such as sand, which is one of the most threatened material in the world.
Gravity Flow is a reference to the constant motion caused by a perpetual force. The sculptures reproduce the contours of cavities that can be found beneath the surface of glaciers.
These glacier mills are formed by meltwater streaming downwards, gradually carving hollow spaces within the ice – the result of the acceleration of climate change.
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