Huge ‘Butchered’ artwork installed on North Sea gas rig by Greenpeace activists | Greenpeace

Greenpeace activists have scaled a gas rig, stretched a 96 sq metre canvas across its side and stained it crimson, in a protest designed with Anish Kapoor.

The work, in the North Sea, is believed to be the first piece of fine art exhibited from a working gas extraction platform.

“I call it Butchered,” the British sculptor told the Guardian. “I’m referring to the butchering of our environment. It is at the simplest level blood on a canvas. A reference to the destruction – the bleeding – of our globe of our state, of being.

Early on Wednesday, Greenpeace activists, who had waited for the most favourable weather conditions, sailed onboard the Arctic Sunrise to the Shell rig Skiff, 45 nautical miles off the coast of Norfolk.

Seven experienced climbers scaled the rig, hoisted a 12-metre by 8-metre truss on to its side and stretched the vast canvas across it. They then used a high-pressure hose to spray a deep-red stain on it.

The blood-like solution, designed specifically for the artwork, was a mix of seawater, beetroot powder and non-toxic, food-based pond dye, Greenpeace said.

The artwork, erected during the fourth heatwave this summer, was intended to convey “the vast suffering extreme weather is causing”, a source at the environmental campaign group said.

Kapoor said he wanted the work to dispel the collective amnesia around the real causes of climate breakdown. “There seems to be, first of all, a collective will to not look at who are the real perpetrators of global warming,” he said.

“We seem to live in an age of denials – I mean [by] president of the US of bloody A, and the rest, and many others. And then there is the sense amongst us all that we are culpable, we, each individual. ‘Oh I use that much less plastic, or if I switch the lights off, or if I whatever.’

“Our collective global witness, if you like, to global warming is less than 10% of the actual numbers. Most of it is caused by these big oil and gas companies.”

Greenpeace has a long history of taking action on fossil fuel and other environmentally damaging installations at sea. Last year, Shell agreed to settle a controversial multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Greenpeace over an action the year before in which activists occupied a moving oil platform off the coast of the Canary Islands for 13 days.

Kapoor said he had been “deeply interested” in Greenpeace’s “heroic” actions for some time, and for several years had been liaising with Greenpeace UK to find a way he could be more actively involved.

“And then there was this idea about a year ago to do something on the gas rig, oil rig,” he said. “I thought about what one could do and came up with Butchered.”

There was no guarantee the work could be properly executed, and Wednesday’s action had in fact been a second attempt, after an initial go at it had failed last year, Kapoor told the Guardian.

The artists called on “colleagues, friends, people of all kinds” to join in with protest.

“It is our duty as citizens to … have at least some kind of political agenda,” he said.

“It’s tragic that governments all over the world are forbidding protests – not just forbidding it, actually arresting people. What’s wrong with us? this is our right and duty as citizens to protest and keep our consciousness alive.

“If people wish to protest about Palestine, so they should, and much else. To say we’re living in fascist times seems to be an underestimate of what levels of freedom the individual is allowed today.”

A Shell UK spokesperson said: “Safety at sea is our priority. Greenpeace entered a restricted safety zone around the platform without permission, which is established under UK law to protect people and prevent collisions. Their actions were extremely dangerous, involved illegally trespassing and put their own and others’ lives at risk.

“We respect the right of individuals and organisations to protest, but it must be done safely and lawfully.”