Mapping a better world: more than 30 years ago, Helen and Newton Harrison decided to devote themselves to environmentally beneficial art. Their latest project, "Peninsula Europe," envisions nothing less than the greening of most of an entire continent - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

The exhibition offered a survey of recent projects with an emphasis on one named "Peninsula Europe," which looks at Europe as an ecological whole rather than a collection of distinct and often embattled countries. Map, photo and sound installations relating to this project dominated the front gallery, while the back gallery provided an overview of another major scheme, "A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland" (1995-96). Other related projects in which the Harrisons' ideas were embodied at a smaller scale appeared throughout the two rooms.

"Peninsula Europe" was initiated at the request of a German foundation, the Schweisfurth-Stiftung, for presentation at the 2000 World's Fair in Hannover. It focuses on the rivers and mountain ranges that preceded Europe's national boundaries and will long outlast them. Essentially, the project is a 50-year plan to link the drain basins and forests of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Carpathians, transforming them into a series of "biodiversity ribbons." Highland areas would be reforested to create a filter through which rain and groundwater could be purified for use in the more populated valleys and lowlands. Land would be further revitalized by restoring wetlands and bringing back ecologically responsible land uses.

The plan contains many of the Harrisons' familiar themes. Here, as in other proposals, they advocate allowing nature to repair itself through the reintroduction of diverse species of flora and fauna to areas devastated by overpopulation or industrial pollution. They support "green" farming, and promise new revenues and jobs from ecotourism and the sale of organic produce and purified water. They also argue that the apparently prohibitive costs of such undertakings are in fact far less than the eventual costs of simply doing nothing.

At Feldman, the Harrisons made the case for "Peninsula Europe" with a series of map-based installations. The recurring motif in each was a shape created by isolating the mountain ranges of the region against a blank ground. Familiar national outlines disappear as a linear design emerges that suggests the skeletal remains of some ancient mammal. (The head is formed by the mountain ranges of Spain, a foreleg runs the length of Italy and the hindquarters encircle Eastern Europe and the Balkans.) This "icon," as the Harrisons refer to it, symbolizes and encompasses a border-free Europe.

On one wall, the Harrisons paired a conventional map of Europe with one in which the icon has been isolated. Another map titled The Return of the Bear and the Wolf and Even the Lynx (2001), installed on a low-lying, wedge-shaped platform, presented the icon with pictures of wild animals painted over it to reflect the return of indigenous species to the highlands. Another map showed the icon as negative space and emphasized the lowlands instead, thereby making Europe resemble a kind of jigsaw puzzle. Yet another included a large map set under plastic on the floor which viewers could walk over to seek out towns and rivers of the area under consideration. A "listening pad" at the edge of this map was placed directly under a pair of speakers, which transmitted a recording of the Harrisons explaining the work.