deborah carruthers
The role of art and artists in providing a record of our evolving landscapes and environment is incalculable. Artwork can provide a record and timeline of loss and allow us to view and estimate rates of change. It can create nascent memories of what has vanished and remind us of our role in that loss. And in translating alternate perspectives of our ecologies it may provoke public discourse.
One of my preoccupations is the rate of change in the environment: that profound environmental changes occur over time is not in question, but the increasingly accelerated rates point to an environment whose balance has shifted towards an inevitably catastrophic decline if not unchecked. The resultant impact of our changing climate upon environments is not trivial and is of global concern. How can we provoke understanding and meaningful discussion around this loss?
While in New York for a meeting on climate change, I came across toy dinosaurs emerging from the melting snow. Although somewhat dystopian, they felt as though they perfectly mirrored the topics under discussion: the Anthropocene; rate of climate change and extreme weather events; what that means for species extinction rates; politics, especially given an apparent global trend toward populist policies; and the impact on future generations.
The environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s discussions on solastalgia [the distress resulting from the lived experience of environmental change] are particularly pertinent to human and more-than-human experiences today, both as they relate to such things as extreme weather events and their effects on habitats and the well-being of inhabitants now and in the future.
This notion of solastalgia and environment increasingly informs the narratives in my work. I delve into these topics as a non-musician visual artist/composer of graphic scores with artists, musicians, composers, scientists, writers, artisans and fabricators, philosophers, and the human and more-than-human community members. In my studio, I explore how I can express these narratives using a variety of media during my artistic process.
One of my preoccupations is the rate of change in the environment: that profound environmental changes occur over time is not in question, but the increasingly accelerated rates point to an environment whose balance has shifted towards an inevitably catastrophic decline if not unchecked. The resultant impact of our changing climate upon environments is not trivial and is of global concern. How can we provoke understanding and meaningful discussion around this loss?
While in New York for a meeting on climate change, I came across toy dinosaurs emerging from the melting snow. Although somewhat dystopian, they felt as though they perfectly mirrored the topics under discussion: the Anthropocene; rate of climate change and extreme weather events; what that means for species extinction rates; politics, especially given an apparent global trend toward populist policies; and the impact on future generations.
The environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s discussions on solastalgia [the distress resulting from the lived experience of environmental change] are particularly pertinent to human and more-than-human experiences today, both as they relate to such things as extreme weather events and their effects on habitats and the well-being of inhabitants now and in the future.
This notion of solastalgia and environment increasingly informs the narratives in my work. I delve into these topics as a non-musician visual artist/composer of graphic scores with artists, musicians, composers, scientists, writers, artisans and fabricators, philosophers, and the human and more-than-human community members. In my studio, I explore how I can express these narratives using a variety of media during my artistic process.
