Local Layers- Totem Pole
An Art education project with children with ASD in the UK. Learning about local eco systems and wildlife and how they all interelate. Drawings to design to sculpture to wood carving. Learning the process of making a large scale wooden totem pole from local natural materials.
Sustainable building methods- There is an urgent need to address the great challenges of our times: climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and peak oil. These issues are all accelerating rapidly, and all have strong links with the building industry. There is a growing consensus from scientists and the oil industry that we are going to reach peak oil in the next twenty years, and that we might have reached this point already. Global demand is soaring, whilst global production is declining, and oil is set to become increasingly expensive and scarce. The building industry is hugely dependent on cheap oil, from the manufacture and transportation of its materials, to the machinery and tools used in demolition and construction. In the UK, it uses vast quantities of fossil fuels, accounting for over half of total carbon emissions that lead to climate change. The built environment is also responsible for significant amounts of air, soil and water pollution, and millions of tonnes of landfill waste. This is a situation that clearly needs to change.
Green building is not only a wise choice for our future; it is also a necessary choice. The construction industry must adopt eco-friendly practices and materials that reduce its impacts, before we reach a point of irreversible damage to our life supporting systems. The UK Government is beginning to recognise this urgency, and is committed to integrating green specifications into building regulations and codes, but the process of developing policy is slow. The industry needs to take its own initiative and find alternative ways to build, using green, renewable energy resources, and adopt non-polluting practises and materials that reduce, recycle and reuse, before it is too late.
We learnt about:
- Local wildlife from the; sky, land and underground
- How all the wildlife needs each other and how we can protect and conserve it
- Green building techniques, specifically wood building, and why it is important
- Carving a totem pole stage by stage
- Digging the foundations for the totem pole and erecting on site as a public art piece
