Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

I recently embarked on an expedition to the High Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway. From aboard the barquentine Antigua, I gained access to landscapes that tended toward the sublime. Not unlike the collections of toppled stone found throughout the sites that I study in ancient Rome, the sheer magnitude of watching a daily recurrence of glaciers crumbling into the sea brought the ancient past into immediate focus. It seemed that the equivalent of the whole of Rome’s Imperial Forum would be filled by no more than an hour’s worth of glacial calving. Furthermore, my time spent on remote Svalbard beaches involved many hours of picking up plastic flotsam deposited by ocean currents. The scale of consumption common to much of the industrialized world, represented by millions of plastic throwaways, was in some strange irony overlaying the arctic shorelines that themselves would dissolve under the effects of global warming. From this experience, The Elemental Materials of Endurance recognizes climate change and explore the anthropocentric cycle upon which our current epoch is perched. I am preoccupied by whether or not we (humans) are able to acknowledge our whereabouts along the cyclical nature of civilization. My field research acknowledges the photographic account, where evidence found in the High Arctic may coalesce with a record of ancient Roman ruins to inform a new body of sculptural work. I wish to present my research and its impact on my studio practice, with the hope to change the way we think about materials, craft, and consumption.