Peaks in the cycle

Two rock-climbing artists are creating lofty images depicting the fragility of the planet, writes BERNADETTE RAE.

The photographic images show huge walls of granite, chiselled out of a cobalt sky. But the rock face is far from grey. Water has etched it and lichens have painted it in softest greens, yellows and a dark, glistening blue.

Against these giant, muted, licorice allsort-like landscapes the figures of Martin Hill and Philippa Jones, Auckland environmental artists and communicators, crawl like tiny ants.

The peak they have just climbed is Karambony, a 400m rock face in the southern highlands of Madagascar.

The world's fourth-largest island, geographically isolated from the east coast of Africa for millions of years, Madagascar has been a living laboratory for evolution. But its unique and wildly diverse flora and fauna is now in a state of ecological crisis.

The urgency of its conservation needs - and the recent discovery of its challenging rock climbs - have earned Madagascar a place on their The Fine Line project.

Hill and Jones not only climbed the rock face, a full day's exercise. They also created a sculpture - two discs, more than a metre each in diameter - at the top, then settled in for the night so that the work could be photographed at dawn, illuminated by a brilliant sunrise.

Connoisseurs of fine photographic prints, cards, calendars and books will be familiar with their works - ephemeral sculptures created from materials found at the site, caught on camera, and then left to gracefully return to nature. A stone circle that seems to float in the sky, a crimson petal circle on a forest floor and an arch of balancing boulders rising from the sea are some of their bestknown images.

Their beauty, surprise, their circular or spiralling shapes, symbolic of the perfect cycles of nature, have been available since 1995.

The Fine Line project, in which Hill and Jones will create and record sculptural works at 12 lofty sites, linked by a single line encircling the Earth, is an attempt to develop their concept of art as a powerful voice for conservation.

The global circle that links the 12 sites is itself symbolic of nature's cyclical systems, the perfect design model, according to Hill.

"Nature doesn't know waste, for example," he says. "In nature all waste is food. Everything is valuable to the next species in the chain and diversity is absolutely essential to the whole system. In contrast our industrial model is linear. We take stuff from the earth, make things and in the process create waste - much of it not absorbable by the natural system.

"The problem facing our planet - which only we, the human species, can do anything about - is a systemic design problem."

He also sees their art as "environmental communication'.'

"It starts with our love of what we do. We love the wilderness, travelling in it, the whole adventure. We also love the business of making works in nature - and the business of art and design.

"We want to use the project to link with environmental information - to use our strong images and ideas to bring people to the subject.

"So much environmental information does not employ the most significant techniques available to send the message out."

Much of Hill's working life has been spent as creative director of prominent design companies in Britain, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand, and he has been the winner of many international and national awards in the design field.

"As a designer I know how to use communication to put ideas into the marketplace, to get people interested in certain things, to do certain things," he says. "But those sophisticated techniques are not often used in environmental issues - where it seems to be so urgent."

Jones worked as a craft basketmaker during the 70s and 80s, in newspapers as a subeditor into the 90s and is now a freelance writer as well as collaborator in the project.

The climbing and sculptural adventures are just the first step in The Fine Line project. A book, in which Jones' skills as a writer come to the fore, a travelling exhibition and lecture tours and a film or video for broadcast are also being planned. There have already been The Fine Line exhibitions in four major cities in Japan and a number of workshops and lectures held there.

"If Japan could change its attitude to sustainability," says Hill, "and the signs are there - that alone would change the world."

Madagascar is just one chapter in The Fine Line. Number 10 on the list of a dozen sites, it is the third to be completed. The fine, global line is not being worked in sequence, but Hill expects to complete the project within a handful of years.

The first sculpture was a carved snow circle, enclosing a triangle, made on the summit of Mt Ngauruhoe. The final sculpture will also be created there.

Then a spiral was created on a granite slab teetering on an overhang, high on the summit of Half Dome in the Yosemite National Park in California, the place where big wall climbing began.

The work made in Madagascar was not created from materials found on site, as Hill's other works have always been.

"There was actually nothing there we could use, without causing damage," he says. "It was a pretty cleanswept surface - with cactus and alpine flora and lizards and things, but few loose rocks, very little gravel. Nothing I wanted to disturb."

But the valley floor below was a grassland, where subsistence farmers slash and burn to get a "green bite" for their cattle. So Hill and Jones cut bundles of grass and bound it with sisal, which also grows across the valley. They used sticks to support the two disc structures created - and carried the whole lot up to their chosen summit.

Hill did not want to leave the sculptures in place when the photographs were finally done. "It would have taken a long time for them to disperse."

The locals, who helped to carry them up - and the considerable photographic equipment required - decided on their eventual demise.

The discs were hurled off the cliff. Hill missed the moment. "I heard that they flew out into space and just suddenly disintegrated."