Daan Roosegaarde’s latest artwork GROW is an homage to the beauty of agriculture. The project appears as a luminous dreamscape of red and blue waves of light over an enormous field. GROW is inspired by scientific light recipes which improve plants’ growth and resilience.
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Born in 1979, Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch artist and founder of Studio Roosegaarde, a studio develops projects that combine technology and art in urban environments. For his latest project, Daan Roosegaarde has recently set twenty thousand square metres of art installation in a field of the Dutch countryside. The project is called Grow and focuses on the beauty of nature. It is an homage to agriculture, an essential dimension for human development and nourishment, which is sadly often undervalued by most people. With this spectacular installation, the artist’s intention is to highlight the meaning of innovation within the agricultural system.
"Most of the time we barely notice the huge areas of the Earth that are literally feeding us," explains Dann Roosegaarde in his video presentation, "Grow stresses the importance of innovation in the agricultural system: how can pioneering light design help floras grow more sustainably?”
The answer to this complex question has been found by combining art and sustainability in a unique installation. An area of red and blue lights transforms the fields into an enchanted site, but at the same time the employment of ultraviolet rays supports crop in his growth, considerably reducing the use of chemical insecticides.
"Grow is a dream landscape that merges the beauty of light and sustainability” remarked the artist.
This project is definitely suitable for the environment, but at the same time it is conceived as a light of faith and hope aimed for reaching as people as possible. It also tries to give a renovated value to the word “agri-culture” by reshaping the natural scenario as a vibrant cultural work of art.
In general, light plays a fundamental role in Roosegaarde's artistic research. In 2015, he developed Waterlicht, an art installation designed to increase consciousness about the risk of rising tides, while the year before he created Van Gogh Path, the famous roadway in Brabant, where the sensation is to cycle through Van Gogh's painting “Starry Night”.
Cover image: GROW by Daan Roosegaarde's Studio. Courtesy of studioroosegaarde.net
Written by Elena Parcianello