2021
This is our inheritance
22:40 / Seyðisfjörður
/STATEMENT
In December 2020, the small Icelandic town of Seyðisfjörður experienced an unexpected landslide, triggered by unprecedented levels of rainfall over a 5 day period. The landslide permanently displaced a significant portion of the residents, with 14 buildings destroyed and access to parts of the town blocked off while the clean up and recovery continued over the months that followed. This work follows the footsteps of travelling across the site of disruption for the first time. The footage is overlaid with an abridged version of the first chapter of influential North American environmentalist, Rachel Carson’s third book, ‘The Sea Around Us’ written in 1951, to the background of the disaster recovery volunteers continuing to remove mud and salvage personal items from the rubble.
The piece has a range of different affects on viewers. While the visuals provide a very horizontal and flat experience of walking on the earth’s crust, the audible content takes the viewer on an expansive vertical exploration, stretching time into a non-human experience and connecting us back to our primeval beginnings. Some viewers sink into the story, some viewers sink into the trance of concrete and mud, and some viewers simply feel sick.
Despite the radical changes human civilisation has affected on the Earth’s crust in the last 70 years since these passages were written, in the non-human relationship of the mountains to the ocean floor, this act of returning the sediment to the sea continues with seemingly apathetic vigour, in a quiet and ancient pursuit, both in opposition to and accelerated by, human domination and our expectations of the world around us.
The work evokes thoughts on our responsibilities as land animals, custodianship and care, the liveliness of the earth that feels so particularly present in volcanic places such as this and the sentience of more-than-human interconnections that are enacting agency all around us.
THE MOUNTAINS BENEATH MY FEET PART. 1
shoes and mud / Seyðisfjörður
/statement
The starting point for ‘This is our inheritance’, The Mountains Beneath my Feet Part. 1 is a pair of Janoski Nike shoes covered in Icelandic landscapes of East Iceland, painted in mud. Created by walking over the Seyðisfjörður landslide site, the work questions the role of the artist. Did I create the work by walking, or is the mountain and its mud the painter? An earthly gift, bestowed upon me in the hopes I’ll notice, in the hope I’ll listen. In the hope of connection.
The work evokes thoughts on non-human agency, human consumption, human busy-ness and the connections we miss while we are beholden to all this engrossing activity.
i am PRESENT
wood, paint, mod podge, inkjet print, transparency, paper / The Net Factory
/Statement
I am present is a work made up of leftover and upcycled art materials from past projects, experimentations and abandoned objects lying around the Net Factory. The Net Factory in Seyðisfjörður is a busy place, where minds are fully occupied by doing and exploring. But this doing is always in context, with more-than-human activity. The shoreline of the fjörd is one such hive of activity; nurturing, creating, doing; present while always in flux, producing alongside these artists.
I am present brings the shoreline inside to work alongside the artists. Installed in secret and camouflaged into the architecture of the building, the work hopes to be noticed. In the same way that our kinship to more-than-human surroundings hopes for us to slow down long enough to draw attention and enable our reconnection to it, this work shares the same ambition, should only the artists stop to observe long enough to find it.
TRAVELLERS
Roadside Angelica, sticky tak and concrete / Hallormsstaður & Seyðisfjörður
/statement
Travellers is a work that expresses the unease of landing in a place we’re not ready for, or being in a place that is not ready for us. It is a response and reflection on coming to work in a place that is recovering from trauma. The work evokes conversations around the ethics of taking trips, tourism and consent, our desire for belonging and acceptance in new places, and the hope and opportunity for, post-traumatic growth, rebirth and renewal out of difficult situations.
SHIFT STILL/ísafjörður
4:09 / ísafjörður
/STatement
Created as part of a Coastal Communities and Regional Development Masters program focusing on tourism in the Arctic, this digital storytelling piece is a collaboration that tells the story of human presence in the changing seasons of Ísafjörður, in the Westfjords of Iceland.
The work is made as a sigh, a pause, a reprieve; from the impending COVID-19 pandemic.
content
sand in salt and pepper shakers / The Nullarbor
/STATEMENT
Content is a collection of sands from locations across the horizontal axis of the Australian continent. Placed into salt and pepper shakers, the work evokes thoughts on land and locations, and how it is packaged and consumed by humans within Western hegemonic ways of being.
The title Content, not only refers to the way we see earth as content for our use, but also that we are content with this relationship. Until recently, to possess and use, outside of relational reciprocity has worked for us. The work calls on our relationship and reliance to finite resources, our fears of how we’ll have to step out of comfort to address climate change and a reevaluation of Western dominant thought.
