The British sculptor Anish Kapoor recently debuted an unorthodox project in the North Sea. BUTCHERED (2025) was not freestanding or wall-mounted: it took the form of pigment sprayed down the side of a gas rig owned by Shell. The 1,000-square-foot work was a climate protest composed of seawater, beetroot powder and food-grade dye, and executed in collaboration with seven climbers working with Greenpeace. While the art world turned its eyes toward London for Frieze, we spoke to Greenpeace climate campaigner Philip Evans about how the work came about and what goals it might achieve.
How did the idea for this project come about? At what point did the concept of art come into it?
We have been thinking for a while about creative ways to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the climate chaos it’s causing. Most people understand the links between burning fossil fuels and climate change and how, in turn, climate change leads to more extreme weather like floods, wildfires and heatwaves. And thanks to so-called attribution studies, we can now even detect the fingerprints of human-made climate change behind individual extreme weather events. But when it comes to taking the big polluters to task over the devastation they’re causing, something is still missing. That’s why we wanted to do something big and bold that speaks to people not at an abstract level but at an emotional, almost visceral one. So we invited Anish Kapoor to imagine what something like this could be, knowing that with his visionary approach to artmaking and the tools and themes of his practice, any work emerging was likely to encapsulate our message in an incredibly powerful image. We were thrilled when he immediately accepted, and his concept for BUTCHERED followed soon after.
What specific issues was this artwork attempting to draw attention to?
This artwork is an attempt to make visible the harm caused by the oil and gas industry as it fuels extreme weather around the world. We installed it on a Shell gas platform in the middle of the North Sea to visualize the human suffering that fossil fuel giants are causing right at the place where it starts. This industry is responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions that are cranking up the planet’s thermostat and unleashing more extreme weather like heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and floods. And yet they keep raking in billions in profits while leaving ordinary people to pick up the bills for the damage they cause. We desperately need governments to step in, hold carbon polluters to account and make them pay their fair share of the enormous cost of these climate disasters. We need a lot more money to boost emergency responders like firefighters, build new flood defenses and help communities around the world recover from extreme weather. Why should the public have to foot the bill when oil giants like Shell keep pouring fuel on the fire and making billions of pounds out of it?
How did Anish Kapoor come to be involved? What was it like working with him?
Working with a bold, visionary artist like Anish Kapoor has been an amazing experience. We collaborated very closely with him and his amazing team from inception to delivery. This was a logistically complex project involving highly skilled specialists, boats, ships, a giant aluminum truss, a canvas half the size of a tennis court and a high-pressure firehose. It’s up there as one of the most technically difficult things we have ever done at Greenpeace, and especially challenging at sea. The precision required to execute an original Anish Kapoor fine art work on a North Sea gas platform was what really kept us on our toes, pushing the comfort zones of both Greenpeace and Anish Kapoor’s technical teams to retain his vision.
Kapoor is known for his pigments. Can you tell me more about this one that he conceived for the project? What were his goals for it?
Blood is absolutely central to the BUTCHERED concept, of course. And to be red as blood, the viscosity and color had to be absolutely right. But there were logistical limitations that made things harder: it’s a considerable challenge to transport 1,000 liters of liquid from a workshop onto a ship and across the ocean, and of course, we needed to ensure we wouldn’t damage marine ecosystems with the substance. Beginning with a base material that Anish Kapoor uses in his works, there were long experimentation sessions exploring different combinations of materials to develop the food-based, non-toxic recipe we used in the end. And we’re very happy with the result.
We’ve seen a lot of intersections between climate activism and art, but it’s usually more about students throwing soup at classic paintings. How do you feel about those efforts? Yours is a bit more ambitious.
There are many different ways for activists and campaigners to deliver a message. Groups like Just Stop Oil used the shock factor of throwing soup at a famous painting to spark a conversation about the climate crisis. But long before that, artist collectives like Liberate Tate were making climate art-activism interventions in Tate galleries in the U.K. to get Big Oil out of the cultural estate, a sponsorship stronghold that was heavily defended by the fossil fuel industry as part of its social license to operate. We’re part of that lineage of climate-driven artistic activism situated with strategy and precision. We’re extremely fortunate that, as a global NGO, we have access to ships and big logistics, allowing us to physically get to oil and gas platforms in the North Sea. And we are grateful to have been able to collaborate with one of the world’s most famous artists to push our ambition further than usual and install an artwork that directly challenges a big oil company at the place where the climate crisis starts. But whatever the scale, and whether these projects are grassroots or NGO-led, the goal is very much the same: we need to draw everyone’s attention to the industry that’s fueling the climate crisis. And creative, imaginative, peaceful protest is the way we do it.
How has the response been to your project? Have you heard anything from Shell?
The reaction we were aiming for was: what on earth is going on? And that would be the cue for a conversation about fossil fuel giants and their responsibility for the huge suffering caused by the climate crisis. And that’s pretty much what happened. The artwork has generated a fair amount of noise on social and news media, as well as in the art world. As for Shell, they haven’t told us what they thought of the artwork—but we did hear from their lawyers.
What are you hoping this work will inspire in my readers? What are some concrete steps they can take if they feel moved by it?
I hope your readers will appreciate the artwork in itself, its visceral and shocking quality, the unique location it’s in conversation with and the technical expertise that went into installing it. And of course, like with everything else we do, we want people to take action. If your readers agree that oil, coal and gas corporations should pay their fair share for the damages they cause instead of leaving ordinary people to pick up the bill, then they can join the Polluters Pay Pact. It’s a global alliance of communities on the front lines of climate disasters, concerned citizens, first responders like firefighters, humanitarian groups and political leaders. They’re demanding that governments start treating the climate crisis for the car crash that it is: those who caused the crash should pay for the damage.
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