Local artist Ulrike Arnold paints with earth and travels all over the world to collect it, between her homes in Flagstaff and Germany to places like Iceland and Australia. Her latest work, “The One World Painting,” is a nearly 30-foot-high canvas in the shape of an exclamation point. It’s colored with material from six continents and even a bit of outer space. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with her just after the painting was hoisted up on a crane and displayed for the first time.
We’re here at the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Happy Jack and we just watched them crane this into place. It’s got to be one of the few places that has a crane high enough that you can test this out. Is this the first test run that you’ve had to hang it up?
This is the first day, so that is—I’m so excited to see it now, hanging here, my god it looks amazing! Because I always paint on the ground.
So you collected all of the material, all of the natural material that’s on this artwork yourself, from all over the world?
Yeah, yeah. I do that always myself, so let’s say I’m in the middle of nowhere in Australia. I painted there with the local dirt and rocks and sand, crush it, mix with glue and put it on the canvas. And I roll the canvas up and take with me…. And you see the color, the really strong yellows, some grayish blue, some pink—oh you know, that really strong pink, that’s from Brazil… But you see always these black lines? That’s Flagstaff.
Flagstaff volcanic rock, right?
Yeah, the volcanic material, the cinder…. And you know, I have something very special in the painting. I get material from the meteorite man, Marvin Killgore, the Southwest Meteorite Lab… and through him I get material from outer space. When he finds a meteorite, he has to cut a slice, and then there are all these filings. He never throws it away because it was so precious. When he heard what I was doing… he said, Ulrike, you want some of that material? I have something for you!... And I’m the lucky one who gets this material, which represents for me here, heaven.
Why the exclamation point? Why that shape?
Yeah, because—it’s not a warning, but it’s pointing out, pointing out, that everything that we have to work together with all the continents, with all people. We have to work together in our endangered world…. But it’s a dream to have it going to different places and find a destination where it can hang forever. Like maybe a parliament building, a political building, where people come thinking about our times, our environment, which is endangered, how precious is our earth, and about peace, because here they’re all in peace with each other.
What draws you to do work like this with natural material?
It started when I was 21 and saw this famous, famous cave painting, Lascaux in France. I was so overwhelmed. It was such an impact. They are 17,000 years old. My question was, how started creativity? How come the first human had the idea to create, and why?... The idea was born, I want to paint like the caveman and cavewoman. Just with the earth itself. Then you touch the painting—I allow to touch it—it is like a crust. You see here? And you can even smell the earth, when there is sulfur in… I had a show in Santiago de Chile in the German embassy, and we invited blind kids and let them touch the painting…. But you can imagine you are a scientist looking through a microscope and it’s a new world.
Well, it’s lovely, thank you so much for sharing it with me today.
Thank you very much, very much.
Learn more about the One World Painting.
