Uppermost in my mind as I create this work are ideas about what is arguably the greatest challenge humankind has had to face in its entire history: the effect of Climate Change on a global scale in our foreseeable lifetime. I now consider this topic to be the most important subject to inform and engage my artistic practice.
Following a residency in Hobart earlier this year at the invitation of Lynchpin (a private scholarship program based at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies) my practise has been reinforced by an understanding of the Southern Ocean as the single most influential ocean in relation to our global climate. This puts Australia right at the forefront of discussion.
The work I am proposing is a video installation that combines footage from the Antarctic with footage I have taken that responds to what I see as the growing emotional burden the evidence around climate change is having on the scientific community and on the community at large.
My intention is to create a place where people can experience this burden in a metaphorical and visceral way free of rhetoric and politics, a place simply to acknowledge the emotions that arise without feeling the need to push them away in response to the the overwhelming helplessness of the situation.
I will be using projected video footage to create a space of immersion, placing my audience between two large satellite dishes placed opposite each other in a darkened room.
I will also be creating audio that will incorporate sound and spoken word. Poetry will be used to give voice to the amorphous, slowed down and continuous imagery: the relentless passage of ice floes on one side and the slow appearance and disappearance of the head and shoulders of a woman on the other.