Synopsis
Featuring incredible photography of spellbinding landscapes, extensive archival footage and a soundtrack by the Oscar nominated artist Hauschka, Hank Levine's latest documentary Dialogue Earth accompanies the internationally acclaimed earth painter Ulrike Arnold on her expedition into the wilderness of southern Utah.
As President Trump announced his executive order permitting the dismantling of national monuments to open up more federal land for exploitation, she decided to create the symbolic One World Painting, bringing together all of the earth she has been collecting over the past four decades from all over the globe as a statement to preserve our unique planet. 'It comes from within the Earth, spreads out to the Sun and continues on into space' in the words of Eli Secody of the Navajo Tribe.
”Earth has been the theme of my work for almost four decades, earth in a most concrete and tangible way: I paint outside with earth materials allowing nature – wind, rain and sun - to be my accomplices. I have traveled the world to work on every continent. Only authentic and local materials are used on site to express the essence of place: Minerals, sand, incrustations, glimmer and mud.”
“This earth painting is the essence of my work: the ONE WORLD PAINTING unites pigments from all the continents where I have painted and collected earth colours over the past 38 years: reds and browns from Chile, Icelandic greens, Australian reds, strong greens from Armenia, black lava from Arizona with Senegalese red, white from the Easter Islands and yellow from Egypt and many more. The canvas is a dialogue of colours, a visual expression of the diversity of the continents, their countries, their histories and their peoples.
It is a statement of peace and community, an articulation of unity and equality. The circle painting completes this project into an exclamation mark, a statement for the preservation and protection of our unique planet earth, peace and harmony.”
Ulrike Arnold, July 2018