art

Georgia Hirsty writes about her role in the recreation of Vitruvian Man. She's a deckhand aboard the Arctic Sunrise, at 80 degrees north.

Everything north of Holland was new territory for me. I’d never seen the ice and could barely imagine it. When I asked a shipmate of mine what it was like, he said: “you feel how old it is, how untouched.”

It's been an arty week for me. After the polar bear sculptures in the US, an outdoor art group in Devon - Trail Recycled Art in Landscape (Trail) - has made a trawler boat out of 5,000 plastic bags and named it Rainbow Worrier after our legendary ship the Rainbow Warrior. They even filled it up with plastic fish in fishing nets to highlight how plastic is destroying marine ecosystems.

Plastic waste isn't just what you see on beaches and coast lines. A plastic dump in the Pacific Ocean as large as Texas is constantly swirling in a massive gyre that is referred to as the 'trash vortex'. Other unflattering names include Asian trash trail and the Eastern Garbage Patch where six kilos of plastic swirls for every kilo of plankton.

Judging from recent comments on this site, it seems there are a few people out there who still believe the myths that compact fluorescent bulbs are ugly, ungainly and undimmable.

But going green doesn't mean sacrificing good design, and CFLs can be versatile, stylish and even beautiful. We've been working with designer Jason Bruges (he of Wind to Light renown) on an installation using fully dimmable, compact fluorescent bulbs and, well, I'll let the film do the talking:

That was bound to get your attention. And that is precisely what 600 volunteers thought when they took off their clothes on a glacier in the Swiss Alps to call for action against climate change.

The nude volunteers posed for our Swiss office and renowned installation artist Spencer Tunick on the Aletsch Glacier. Known around the world for his installations, Spencer Tunick wants people to know that global climate change is not an abstract issue, but a hazardous threat which affects us all.

A big thanks once again to all of you who took part in our Glastonbury competition. Here are some of the best entries in the video section - it's a shame there could only be one winner in each category.

My birthday in the park (living with climate change...)