The text below is taken from the BBC website. BBC Radio 4’s Art of Now: Filth was first broadcast on Tuesday 28 January 2020 and includes the work of Gallery Les Bois artist John Sabraw. Listen to the original BBC programme.
In the hands of artists, smog, landfill and sewage become beautiful, witty and challenging statements.
As the scale of pollution intensifies, Emma meets the artists who are finding original and compelling ways to make us understand and feel the crisis of filth.
Zack Denfeld and Cat Kramer harvest air pollution in cities around the world, whipping up egg whites on street corners. They bake them into meringues and hand them out to the public who can't help but react to eating the city's pollutants.
Mexican collective Tres guide Emma through their studio, piled high with collected rubbish: they've filled a gallery with 300,000 stinking cigarette butts, taken over the streets to preserve fossilized chewing gum and crawled for months on Australian beaches filtering through marine plastic.
Nut Brother has courted controversy with his performance of dragging 10,000 bottles of polluted water from Shaanxi to Beijing while John Sabraw wades through Ohio's filthy streams, capturing iron oxide from unsealed mines and turning sludge into glorious paints.
Emma delves through rails of Kasia Molga's costumes which glow red in response to carbon, she listens to an orchestra of Lucy Sabin's breath and takes us down under the River Thames to meet her collaborator Lee Berwick: they're working on an installation about underwater sound pollution, experimenting with sounds in the Greenwich foot tunnel for an installation opening in March.
These provocative and entertaining artists discuss the relationship between art and activism, taking us beyond the facts and figures to face head on and experience the contamination we are inflicting on the planet.
Producer: Sarah Bowen
Gallery Les Bois perspective
BBC Radio 4’s programme places John Sabraw within a wider group of artists confronting pollution through material transformation. Sabraw recovers iron oxide from acid mine drainage in Ohio and develops it into artist pigments, turning a damaging residue into paintings of remarkable chromatic intensity. The related Grist feature explores the environmental collaboration behind this process in greater depth.
For Gallery Les Bois, sustainable material innovation is meaningful because it is matched by artistic quality, technical rigour and a distinctive visual language. Collectors considering a Sabraw work should assess the strength of the individual composition alongside pigment provenance, condition, scale, rarity and its relationship to the artist’s wider practice.
Explore John Sabraw’s available works, the wider artwork collection and Gallery Les Bois Guides. For tailored collecting support, visit Art Advisory or contact the gallery.
Collector questions
What is BBC Radio 4’s Art of Now: Filth about?
The programme examines how artists respond to pollution—including smog, landfill, sewage, marine plastic, carbon and contaminated water—through works that move beyond facts and figures to make environmental damage tangible.
How is John Sabraw featured in the programme?
John Sabraw is featured for recovering iron oxide from polluted streams affected by unsealed mines in Ohio and transforming that material into artist pigments and paintings.
How can I enquire about an available work by John Sabraw?
View John Sabraw’s works and use the enquiry option on an individual artwork, or contact Gallery Les Bois to discuss availability, provenance and private viewing arrangements.
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