At Kvalsvik outside Haugesund, Norway artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s The Rising Tide is exhibited at the beach edge on what is one of the city’s gems, – The Coastal Path. The horse heads switched to drilling derricks, are to symbolize what has polluted the world – oil and oil products. The children sit on two horses that have got their heads up and looking forward to the green shift. That’s when it gets ripped, rattling wrong, for they look at the wind turbines, the biggest natural destroyers of modern times. Fortunately, the track continues, on a new coastal path that continues along the beautiful, incomparable coastal landscape along the Haugaland. At its height are the remains of a fort from the last world war. It is about to disappear beneath grass and soil. It’s the green shift. That sheep and cows should graze in elevated tranquility here on the border between dream and cruel reality.
Grass BY CARL SANDBURG:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
