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Glacial Oddkin

Melting glaciers are the facts and the symbols of climate change.  In the Arctic massive cliffs of ice fall dramatically into the sea.  In the French Alps entrepreneurs wrap the remaining ice to protect it from the warming sun. Tourists who visited the magnificent glacier are less interested in melt water.   

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CORE COCKTAILS.

Kathryn Yusoff fantasises about placing ice cores next to the central core of books in the British Library:  the cultural next to the biophysical, identifying two different ways of seeing history, of understanding environmental knowledge.  It is rather reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson line:  "The world is so full of a number of things.  I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."  If we put things side by side to astonish the viewer we can create a marvellous dissonance.

 

Finding that making moulds to create animals, even slices of animals in ice was complex I trapped them in ice instead and found they were more exciting. The use of plastic, which is unusual for me, can be seen as a comment on the overuse of the material and its ongoing damage to the environment.  The bright colours of the petroleum based material clashing dramatically with the more muted colours of water and earth.

I comment on the shocking things that are happening to animals and to their environment. The animals are trapped and the climate is acting in unexpected and frightening ways.

In addition these plastic animals are toys.  Humanity plays with the Earth without considering the consequences.

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CLIMATE GRIEF

Tears have to be shed for the state of the planet.  New thoughts new actions can only arise by staying with the trouble, facing the facts.  I stitched slugs and chairs into the splatted ice cream for their house and garden domesticity.  

Claes Oldenburg made ice creams in plaster and concrete.  The luscious treat is a symbol of pleasure.  In Oldenburg's work they symbolise what was once a luxury turning into an everyday food.  The bloated world of Capitalism and its intimate connection with the Anthropocene beckons. 

Pass the parcel! Yessss! Delight, nervousness that's so close to excitement!  Will it be me?  Will the music stop with me?  Will I get to unwrap? Will it be the last one wrapping? Will I get the prize? Will it be me?

Thymann and Norfolk are interested in the financial repercussions of melting glaciers and have photographed one in the Rhone Vally wrapped against global warming to save livelihoods from tourism. The wrapping of a glacier is an uncanny thing! Glaciers become parcels to pass and also contain parcels.  Christo and Jeanne-Claude have wrapped objects as big as cliffs and cathedrals but the wrapping of glaciers makes us shiver, less with cold than with fear of the future.

As glaciers melt extraordinary things appear.  A mammoth tusk, an ancient walking boot, a skeleton.  In the case of this parcel the viewer may be intrigued but it will not be unwrapped, creating a mystery as the contents will not be revealed, however many times it is passed around the circle.

Alice Anderson is know for her wrapping of objects, be it the Freud Museum or all the objects in her studio.  Wrapping  and winding objects allows for strangeness and questions.

"The Earth is our home and we are making ourselves homeless.  We are involved in a kind of lostness in which most people are participating more or less unconsciously in the destruction of the natural world, which is to say the source of our own lives."  

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Wendell Berry  Farmer and climate activist

PASS THE PARCEL

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Thymann and Norfolk

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Lucy and Jorge Orta.     World Passport

 

Claes Oldenburg  Ice Cream

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Project Pressure

Christo and Jeanne Claude   Coast

Alice Anderson.  Bobbin

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