Earthscapes 2019: Motivation, Intent and Voice
The seed for this body of work was planted many years ago when travelling as a young adult, I was emotionally devastated by the sight of garbage being dumped off of a passenger ship into the Mediterranean Sea.
It was tweaked by finding lost, forgotten, or abandoned items on hikes to remote locations. It became compelling when I moved to ‘cottage country’ and began to amass a large assortment of found objects/garbage that I collected on walks, hikes, paddles, and camping trips.
The works are divided into four groupings; Earth Gifts, Transition, Contact, Outcomes,
Aside -I apologize to any Astronomers who see this work. I did reference NASA images to get a feel for Earth, galaxies, and space, but in the end these are works of art.Unrequited
Unrequited
I gave;
My gold, my jewels,
My robes of emerald green.
You took;
My breath, my blood,
My soul of purest white.
I could not give enough.
There is no more to take.
It is your turn, my love.
Laurie O’Reilly
With this body of work, I wanted to speak to:
- How unique, special and worthy of respect our planet is.
- Our carelessness and nearsighted behaviour.
- The need to change.
This exhibition starts with Transition photos and ends with Earth Gifts.
Transition
is an introduction using three photographs that speak to those first moments when we discarded/left/forgot/lost/ one thing in what should have stayed a pristine environment.
Everest Summiteers Association says there is approximately 30 tons of trash on Mount Everest.
www.oceancleanup.com states that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers 1.6 million sq. km and includes 80,000 metric tons of garbage.
In 2008 Robin McKie and Michael Day wrote in ‘Warning of Catastrophe from Space Junk’ (the Observer, 24 Feb. 2008), that there was estimated to be 5,000 ton of space debris orbiting the earth.
Contact
Contact pieces are landscapes, with accompanying found items.
Walk on the Beach has a doll in a net. If we were convinced that in the future our children will be as endangered by the garbage in the oceans as our animals are presently, we would work harder and faster.
Cruise on the Ocean. The basin has 4 dolphins. The deepest one is entangled in plastic, the top one has mutated to mimic the plastic in its environment.
Over a Barrel has a photomontaged ‘equatorial strip’ image of a rusty oil barrel. The globe is divided into sections of fire and flooding.
Voyage through Low Earth’s Orbit has been Cancelled speaks to the millions of pieces of space garbage that are floating in our gravitational orbit. According to Ed Tuft (Wikipedia) in addition to the millions of pieces of satellite debris there is, a glove, two lost cameras, a thermal blanket, jettisoned garbage bags, a wrench, a toothbrush, a pair of pliers, and a briefcase size tool bag. I have tried to represent some of these orbiting objects.
Outcomes
In reality there is no planet ‘B’ and there is no absolution, we are going to have to work hard to change our present trajectory. These pieces are hypothetical projections
Preservation of the Species, I have done the best that I could with what I have available, hopefully someday someone will come and help me label these speaks to a time in the future when much of Earth’s fauna is extinct and found bones are so mutated and engineered that it is no longer possible to classify many of them.
Walk off the Earth (exodus ll). The equator on this piece extends to a new vibrant looking planet from an earth that is burnt and lifeless. People are walking this bridge and taking what will become garbage
and then there were none has an encased animal matter component, an encased plant matter component, a human reference and a metal, water, atmosphere, and galaxy component. All disembodied from planet Earth.
Earth Gift
Some of the wonders that make planet Earth habitable.
Earth Dance. The orbit, rotation, and angle of the Earth around the Sun, and the Moon around the Earth, give us our seasons, our temperate climate, our days and nights, and our planetary stability. We have the ‘Goldilocks’ planet.
Earth Bones
This was the germinating piece for this body of work. It speaks to the shelter the earth offers humans and the fact that the caves and rocks provided some of the first canvases for artists. As an art piece it started as a manipulated photograph of tree roots reflected in water. This evolved to an image embedded in handmade paper, and then a totem of images. Because it missed the mark on cave dwellings and paintings, that totem became the equator that you see on the globe. Wax, hand prints, a built sense of bone, rock, and minerals became the covering on an earth hemisphere. Lastly after much consideration, the galaxy was added and the globe mounted.
Earth Breath references our protective atmosphere. It has a ‘last minute crop of solid bodies’ that delivered a burst of atmosphere enriching volatiles’. britannica.com/topic/evolution-of-the-atmosphere-1703862
Earth Blood references our watery planet. There is a river goddess, captured in a photograph of our river, in the ‘equatorial strip’.
Extras
- Video: Disturbances, Thank you to Karen Armstrong for playing Ode to Joy and Shirley Barker for picking out notes(glasses).
- Sound track: Crystal Harmony, Robert Tito, distributed by CD Baby
This post is a look at many of the pieces in the Earthscapes exhibition.