• :Pantea Armanfar

ASN MA DEGREE SHOWS

•

•= it, they, he, she, آن

In telling •‘s story I should ask: who is •? or what is •? or where is •? This piece of text explores these questions by addressing and rephrasing these questions in the context of • itself. Thereby, the works mentioned in this text are not representative on their own but unpack processes within which •‘s story unfolds. I am neither the conductor nor the observer, but a dynamic relationship born out of the act of seeking •. I use the English language as a tool to write, and occasionally think in the Persian language. I expand my mind to think in both a second language and in a second world of •. I practice art to become with •.

“What you seek is seeking you” or “You are what you are seeking”      Mevlana.

Voynich Manuscript

The search for • began early on with the “Collaboration with Audacity” which was the representation of a failure: the difficulty of representing the sense of a place within a gallery context. Images of the place were turned into sounds by manipulating their visual data. • became the difficulty of the task to transfer the experience of being present in a landscape to another place. This was explored and narrated in a field-trip to east coast of Scotland where thoughts and differences were washed away on the shoreline among rocks and creatures. The presence left space for • to transform into different definitions of time, place and persona.

[click here to play the sound]

This transformation let • grow as a more complex form of exploration where I became a context for new conversations to form within. The physical and imaginative body that constituted me started to share life with • who formed connections between people of another history and land. The shared life was the process and exploration which represented a commonality. In “conversations”, a collective of photographs archiving the history of the Western Isles in Scotland are juxtaposed with a series of photographs from the current Iran, mostly taken in Hormuz island. Worlds, histories, cultures, artists, colours, shades, roots, rocks, soils and souls converse. Where is Iran and where is Scotland? The audience ask and answer in the game of juxtaposition. The conversation and commonality disturb the familiarity and brings about questions about politics of borders and information, the archeology of human-beings and what it takes to record this. A commonality that goes beyond differences, thus the challenging task of sharing “interests in common that are not the same interests” (Blaser & de la Cadena 2017) becomes possible.

“A connection at a level of the soul that goes deeper than superficial cultural differences; a connection simply by virtue of our underlying humanity.” Alastair McIntosh

The shared life soon formed a bond in a land of transformations and cross-livings: Wetlands. Lands of water or oceans of solid organic matters layered on top of one another throughout thousands of years (Mitsch & Gosselink 2007) Being “one of the most important ecosystems on Earth” (ibid. 3) they are known as “the kidneys of landscape” and “ecological supermarkets” (ibid.). “In the great scheme of things, the swampy environment of the Carboniferous period produced and preserved many of the fossil fuels on which our society now depends.” (ibid.) The complexity of these environments, their abundance in the new land I had migrated to and their “half-way” quality that couldn’t fit into categories and boundaries (ibid., p.30) easily was the life of • . Their calmness and marginalization weaved us together: two continents, two languages, two bodies of life together in one place. I became • and • became the landscape.

Spending time in wetlands connected me to people working in peatlands in the Flow Country, my friends in Iran and new collaborations to begin one of which was the Wetlands Sketches Project. The possibilities brought by the landscape connected me to on-going and ever-evolving becoming with •, whether present or absent. New ideas, new people, new beginnings, new endings, new failures. Together with Kate Foster the Wetlands Sketches Project invited people to share their incomplete ideas about wetlands art which was presented in a form of an audio-visual installation at Wetlands International Day 2019. The event was celebrating the presence of a single Siberian Crane (Grus leucogeranus) that takes a two-month journey of 5000 KM from Uvat in western Siberia to Fereydunkenar wetlands in Iran for the past few years. The crane who is the only remaining one to take this route has been called “Omid” by the locals which means hope in Persian. He showed up again in November 2018 after years of absence caused by his partner’s death. The locals celebrated his presence who brought omid (hope) with himself.

[Sound Installation – click here or on image to see full video]

Siberian Crane

The research about the plant sundew (Drosera) was a turning point for an exploration in the absence of the case study. The “bubble world” (Tsing, 2015, p. 156) of •, called by humans, is Drosera or Sundew. I like Sundew more: “The Dewe of the Sonne” (Sundews n.d.). An expression used to connect dew with the sun. They used me, they drew me, they loved me (Enquist, 2016) and I became present. The presence of the others made me reach my sensors of attention into the air, and my limitations of my attention glitters in your eye beneath the sun (Darwin, 1875, pp. 1-14). The “bubble world” (Tsing, 2015, p. 156) of a human burst into a new world that challenged the premade categorizations and classifications. The plant grew in me and lived a new life. A text was written to describe the sundew’s world from its own point of view. An attempt to re-define what it means to be a scientist, an artist, a human or a plant.

The shared life of • found a new kind of presence. • took various forms and found different ways to become present through absence. The absence of others gave voice to solo travelers and migrators such as me or Omid. “Absence” represented a presence in a forest, a gathering of people and a lone wolf. The absence of • became present both in the field and in the gallery.

• becomes present in the process of thinking about • and • become present in •‘s physical absence. An ongoing attempt to spend time with the plant sundew is the new work. An ongoing attempt to spend time with the human Pantea Armanfar is the new work. The journey to look for each other began in summer 2019 around Scottish wetlands and first came to happen in Kirkconnel Flow in Dumfries, Scotland. Soon after • reunited in peatlands in Scottish Borders area, Red Moss and Knowetops Loch. Their business, life, love and death crossed one another. The shared life brought about possibilities beyond one another.

Pantea Armanfar and the sundew share the life of • . • proposes an imaginary landscape where urban life weaves together with wetlands. They encourage listening and being in a landscape that is fascinating and subtle, but not orderly and quiet. A proposal for an imagined place, time and society to be sought. • becomes present in my response to reaching, thinking and spending time with • .

•  is “آن” and thinks as “آن“ .”آن” stands for the Persian article for “he/she/it/them/you”. As Mevlana puts it “هر آن‌چه در جستن آنی آنی” : what you seek is seeking you or you are what you are seeking or whatever “آن” you are seeking to be, you are “آن”. •‘s livability is dependent not on •‘s knowledge of •, but on the diversity of ways in which • can think of • or possibly live •. In this sense, • unlearns, • unseeks, • undoes, • stops knowing.

Pantea Armanfar is an artist working with experimental documentary, analogue photography and field recording to explore new ways of telling stories. She studies themes of the environment, immigration and wetlands.

 

Bibliography:

Books

Allaby, M., 2006. A Dictionary of Plant Sciences 2nd ed., Oxford University Press (Oxford Reference Online), accessed 24 March 2019, DOI: 10.1093/acref/9780198608912.001.0001.

Cambridge, G 2000, Nothing but heather!’: Scottish nature in poems, photographs and prose, Luath Press Ltd., Edinburgh.

Darwin, C., 1875. Insectivorous Plants, Place of publication not identified: publisher not identified.

Mitsch, W.J. & Gosselink, J.G., 2007. Wetlands, 4th edn, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Tsing, A.L., 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Webpages

Enquist, S., ‘Charles Darwin’s Love Affair: The Sundew to his Moondew’, The recovery discovery, 19 May 2016, accessed 10 March 2019, http://blogs.evergreen.edu/pim-group1/charles-darwins-love- affair/

Sundews n.d., Carnivorous Plant Resource, Accessed 10 March 2019, https:// carnivorousplantresource.com/the-plants/sundews/

Images

Voynich Manuscript 2014, Yale University Library, accessed 24 March 2019,  http://beinecke1.library.yale.edu/download/Voynich-New/

Siberian Crane ‘Omid’ returns to Iran brings hope, TehranTimes, 1 December 2018, accessed 20 July 2019, https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/430098/Siberian-crane-Omid-returns-to-Iran-brings- hope

A Continuation of Autumn: ASN1 exhibition at the Johnston Terrace Garden

At the start of March, ASN1 students held their ephemeral exhibition A Continuation of Autumn at the Johnston Terrace Garden, which was open to the public for a single day. Visitors were guided into the garden to discover each of the students’ work.

The students’ research of the place and its plant and animal inhabitants started last autumn and spanned over several months. What they found was a living garden, teeming with interactions and constant change.

When first entering the garden, visitors were greeted by Hsin-Yi Wang’s dynamic work.

In Winter Rhythms,  Wang attempts to capture the movement of the wind with strips of fabric strung between trees, each dyed in a colour she was able to identify within the garden.

Directly onto the right, the side-path leading to the back of the garden is colonised by Yanzhen Wu’s trail of paper.

Only a handful of visitors choose to carefully tread the covered path rather than use the other. Through Intervened Path, Wu is asking us to considered the relationship between human intervention and landscape.

Yanzhen’s Intervened Path and part of Scott Hunter’s Inscapes

Using the garden as an extension of the bigger landscape, Scott Hunter’s Inscapes photographs are scattered throughout the garden depicting a child’s view of the world, free from constraints and distinguished by exploration.

At the centre of the garden, inside Bobby Niven’s Palm House (2017), Joanne Mathews’ Collaboration: Periparus Ater places us directly in the spot where the artist spent hours, over several months observing a common Coat Tit.

Collaboration: Periparus Ater charts the birds’ movements in a series of drawings. These maps are a meditation on avian time.

At the back of the garden, amidst the foliage and cover of some trees, a white chair invites the visitor to sit and reflect, literally, upon where they situate themselves within the garden.

In here/there, Tzu-Yun Liang asks us to consider our position as humans within what we understand as ‘nature’.

Tzu-Yun with her piece

 

The Johnston Terrace Garden is an enclosed garden at the heart of Edinburgh, looked after by the Scottish Wildlife Trust. Bobby Niven’s Palm House (2017), is managed by the Edinburgh Art Festival.

 

Art, Space + Nature graduate sojourns to space

Recent ASN graduate, Luis Guzman is one of nine international artists to be included in the MIT ‘Sojourners 2020’ Project on the International Space Station. His project titled “Bioarchitectures” seeks to rethink the relationship of terrestrial life with the gravity of the planet in the context of space exploration.

His project was on board the SpaceX FALCON 9 CRS-20 rocket which was successfully launched this week. His work will spend thirty days on the Space Station before being returned to earth and developed into an installation/exhibition.

Luis will return to ASN, this semester to discuss his project with the current students.

https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/sojourner-2020/

https://asnse.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/sculpting-the-hyperobject/

Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame with Alix Villanueva

ASN artist-in-residence, Alix Villanueva, is part of an exhibition running from mid-January to mid-March, alongside three other artists. In this exhibition curated by Wendy Law, the four female artists investigate and uncover managed histories, strange landscapes and the power of myth-making and folklore. The artists research, re-claim, reveal and re-present semi imagined old pasts, new futures, and truth.

In the exhibition, Alix Villanueva exhibits her new film A Garden Phenomenology, as well as other works including costumes, hand-crafted ceremonial brushes, writing, curiosity cabinets…

©Cat Thomson, 2020

 

The term `cosmoecology’ is adopted by Villanueva as a way of making space for the unknowns arising from our age of great political and environmental uncertainty. Villanueva’s art embodies the co-existence of her own personal experiences of the world with the larger landscape and notions of the cosmos such as mythology, gods, folklore, ghosts, death, and after-death.

A muslin shroud-like garment hangs from a domestic clotheshorse. A collection of ceremonial brushes are created from the artist’s own hair and objects gleaned from the Scottish shoreline.

©Cat Thomson, 2020

In the accompanying soundscape, sound designer Paul Koutselos internalises the liminal space between mind, body, interior and garden.

In Villanueva’s short collage film Bonnard, the Hand and the Maggot, the protagonist, of whom we only ever see the hand, leads artist Pierre Bonnard in a dance around a garden, looking for the latter’s wife, Marthe. The film uses collage techniques to touch upon themes such as the creative and fruitful relationship between death and life, the fragmentation of the self and the body, and the relationship between interior and exterior spaces. Villanueva believes that Marthe Bonnard (known in the arts as Marthe Méligny) is given little agency as a woman and artist: in writings about the Bonnards,’ Marthe tends to be portrayed as either a negative influence on Bonnard as an early modernist painter, confining him to interior scenes, or portrayed as a lifeless corpse, Ophelia-like in a bathtub and decapitated in his garden photography.

 

©Cat Thomson, 2020

For Villanueva, the garden is a zone of simultaneous enclosure and porosity, of decay and fruitfulness. In her film A Garden Phenomenology, Villanueva considers ways in which our bodies are the primary point of contact with the world around us, by going through each of the five senses. This work, informed by the medieval tapestries “La Dame à la Licorne”, also investigates a possible sixth sense through the poetry of the garden, the insistence of ritual, and a different way of letting things grow.

 

©Cat Thomson

Further along the exhibition space, two cabinets stand side by side, holding fragments of rituals. Ritual and ceremony have an important role in Villanueva’s work.  In her ritual ‘Gleaning Ghosts,’  Villanueva walked along the banks of the River Almond to Cramond Island wearing her hand-crafted ‘landscapes skirt’ to which she tied the rocks she had gathered along the way. The too long skirt became heavier, a test of resilience, dragging the artist along while the material, like a canvas, charted each interaction between her body and the environment.

In A Healing at Cramond, Villanueva entered the cold sea wearing her hand-crafted ritual gown, both hospital robe and folkloric costume. Through this ritual Villanueva attempted to understand the lasting aches of chronic pain through holisticity, calling to folklore for answers. It is Cailleach Bhéara, the hag, the healer, the witch figure, who points out the disharmonies between this world and the Otherworld, the sacred natural, which are thought to be the root cause of ill-health in our realm.

©Cat Thomson, 2020

 

As part of the exhibition, Alix Villanueva was also invited to speak about her work through SPIN, a contemporary art programme run by the National Galleries of Scotland.

She will also be part-taking in the discussion event ‘The Women We Know’, marking International Women’s Day and contextualising women and the arts, through the focus of the exhibition Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame.

 

‘Grey to Blue: Ecological Entanglements’ at the Edinburgh Art Festival

Detail of Pawpaw | Dark Flower Scarab Beetle sculptural installation, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

Earlier this year, ASN graduate Yulia Kovanova took part at the Edinburgh Art Festival, presenting a new body of work ‘Grey to Blue: Ecological Entanglements’. The exhibition was hosted by the Tent Gallery and the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh.

Through an investigation of ecological interactions, Grey to Blue focuses on the exploration of colour and its spatio-temporal dynamics, to reconsider perceptual boundaries, looking at how spaces are shared with human and nonhuman.  Each artwork explores the in-betweenness of things and how seemingly separate objects, bodies and phenomena relate. 

A series of abstract interactions are presented through sculptural, photographic, moving image and sound based works, drawing attention to the role of colour in the living world, while highlighting ecological loss and absence. 

“Our world is a web of intricate relationships and interactions – some easily accessible to human senses and some less so. It is those very delicate relationships that Grey to Blue takes as its focus.” — Yulia Kovanova

Taking inspiration from the natural world, the work looks at how different organisms interact with their environment, and questions the place of humans within their surroundings.

Yulia Kovanova, Red Silky Oak | Swallow-tailed Hummingbird installation, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

A sculptural installation comprising of thin multi-coloured wooden rods [above] looks at the interaction of a hummingbird and its flower as the bird enters the flower to drink nectar. The coloured lines representing the flower interpenetrate the colours of the hummingbird, creating one spatial experience. The audience can walk through the piece, thereby entering the hummingbird-flower experience.

Avocado | Giant Sloth installation, sound, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

A pile of real soil spanning almost six metres is studded with casts of avocado stones of different shapes and sizes. The sculptures are absolutely white; their hue is missing – reflecting the extinct large mammals who would swallow and distribute the avocado stones. Those animals are long gone, yet the fruit hasn’t caught up to this reality, and continues to call for its lost partners.  Sound piece by Lars Koens.

Further element of Avocado | Giant Sloth installation, 2019. Image by Michal Jesionowski

As the hue left the avocado pits, the actual avocado dye became one of the components of the three plaster casts, presented next to the soil. This piece shows the various shades that can be derived from avocado dye. With the giant mammals gone, it is the role of the human as a surrogate to continue the work of helping these plants disseminate.

Purple Coneflower | Rusty Patched Bumble Bee installation, sound 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

Developed in collaboration with light programmer Siyao Zhou, the ‘Purple Coneflower | Rusty Patched Bumble Bee’ installation explores relationships between bees and flowers. The lights are mapped to a bee’s movement, lit with the colour that of the flower, so the piece creates an experience of a bee-flower, as one entity – alive only in coexistence. Sound piece by Lars Koens.

Detail of Mango | Stegomastodon instant image installation, sound 2019. Image: Kieran Gosney.

A mango ages from unripe to spoilt in a progression of instant photographs that trail to the floor, much like the fall of a mango from its tree to where it will lie uneaten by its extinct evolutionary companion, the Stegomastodon. Thousands of years ago this great giant swallowed the entire fruit with its pit, helping the plant to disseminate. With the animal now extinct, the fruit continues to appeal to its ghost of a giant.

Detail of Red Silky Oak | Swallow-tailed Hummingbird installation, sound, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

The Red Silky Oak | Swallow-tailed Hummingbird installation is comprised of a blurred video of a brightly coloured hummingbird and a flower projected onto an imposing fractured ‘screen’ made of suspended paper tubes, along with a sound piece by Lars Koens that carries the audience through the columns.

The exhibition is supported by the University of Edinburgh and Hope Scott Trust.

PERCEIVING…:Kaixin Li

 

ASN MA DEGREE SHOWS

 

Growing up in China, and spending most of my academic career studying and working with architecture in Shanghai, where is known as a ‘concrete forest’ city. The fast-growing urbanization and civilization changes in China and Chinese ancient philosophy has established my original perspective of the world. As a trained architect in China, my main focus is the intermedia to technology, society influence and globality.

Since arriving in Scotland, my perspective has been changed by the landscape and cultural of this society compared to what it is like in China. I explored new methodology and ontological reflection from observation of the foreign Scotland landscape and ­research of nature. The conflict between man-made world and natural world underlies my practice.

 

Zi Ran (Nature)

 

Lao zi: Reversion is the action of Tao. Reversion of what? Civilization. Then Zi Ran develops into an iconoclastic social idea called Wu Wei: non-action. The term non-action does not mean inactivity but rather ‘taking no action that is contrary to nature. [1]

Living in the concrete forest for 6 years, I’m familiar with how fast humans use concrete to civilise the man-made land. The philosophy of Taoism and the reality forms a significant distinction. According to Tao, any slight accumulation of man-made civilization constitutes a serious encumbrance to the freedom of spirit. The philosophy of life always exists in micro things. You can see the whole world from a flower. [2] The secret of the universe exists in a normal flower. Time and space can be eternity and infinity when you started to slow down and value a grain of sand or a wild flower. To us, a flower is normal, however, it can be the heaven for bees. Different creatures seem to have different scale of life in terms of life expectancy. While considering of the cycle of life and death, all the lives are infinite cycle. The scale of world and the time are always involved in ancient Chinese philosophy.

In Zi Ran, further research suggest of human’s influence on the earth has affected nature over time. Having worked with architecture previously, I discovered the importance of concrete is to building our human empire. Concrete makes our structure of buildings fundamental. The globalized urbanization made concrete a worldwide material, however with this comes its drawbacks due to the proven fact of producing large amount of carbon emission. We took actions to the nature and we can’t stop it now. ‘Human enterprises’ is the main cause that has driven ‘dramatic acceleration’ along with social, economic, and environmental factors over the past two centuries. The work is keen to present another perspective to see the world, slowing down in this accelerating urbanized world and finding the answer from the normal element around you.

 

Zi Ran creates a dialogue between Man-made world to natural world. The poetic sentence ‘You can see the whole world from a flower’ was exhibited by letter press, which is a process of slowing down, getting along with yourself, that requires practicing and attention to details. Along with it, a cracked concrete slab with flowers growing in between it. The cracked concrete is based on the reality of the abandoned city of Pripyat. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against wildlife it has also turned them against the earth. [3] The contrast between the fragility of flower and fractured concrete shows the current reality. Whether the flower will survive from the tough condition, left by humans, is unpredictable.

 

The delicate letter press of Chinese ancient saying and the cracked concrete slab are exhibited together on the wall, expressing how humans ideology towards nature shifted through time. Exhibiting concrete slab on the wall as a canvas painting, it also provides audience a different way to see this commonly-used material as well as our current world.

What will the future be? The work left an open ending to all these questions.

There is room to argue about the relative importance of contingency in the history of life, which remains a controversial subject today. However, Gould’s insight that we can hardly foreshadow the success of modern lineages beyond a future extinction is a humbling reminder of the complexity of evolutionary transitions. [4]

 

BLACKHOUSE BY CODING

The first research field trip was to the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, where locates in the northwest of Scotland, the main island in the Outer Hebrides. Isle of Lewis has the ancient Scottish landscape, architecture, language and culture. While those are facing extinction meanwhile because of the cultural assimilation and urbanization, this is an issue all over the world due to globalization. Time is a creator. It created the man-made world after human. Creating a dialogue to the past with the modern technology becomes the intention to response to the traditional Scottish island.

Blackhouse [tigh Dubh], double thickness walls and thatched roof, was the main architectural style in Scotland before 1850. The traditional thatched houses once sheltered families and their animals under the same roof. It’s a record of a unique insight into island life. While blackhouse are abandoned after people started using single thickness wall whitehouse [tigh geal], which is more modern and separate the livestock in in separate dwellings.

 

To develop a further understanding of the place identity and history, I picked blackhouse as a message showing the influence of modern technology to the past tradition. I still remember my passion after hearing my architecture tutor told us ‘Architects shapes the world’ in the first lesson. Seeing the disappearing and abandoned blackhouse in the isle of Lewis, as well as human losing their traditions, I start to rethink about the ’shape the world’. With the help of technology, we easily build our man-made world. I wonder how man-made production changes the world and if the world after shaping with technologies only adds convenience and efficiency compared to the natural world.

I used the Arduino drawing machines to draw the element of blackhouse. Driven by the code, the machine can draw the lines accurate and fast.

In doing this, there are limitations. The machine cannot lift the pen so it has to connect two singular lines when it’s not continuous. This is an interaction between technological innovation and historical domain. The present implicates past and future. The symbol of aging building and the speeding machine are put together, exhibiting the drawings of blackhouse and the codes that drives the machine, it forms a dialogue between the past and the future. Will the retelling of the blackhouse by Arduino evoke your nostalgia?

‘When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image.’— Berger J(2008)

The reproduction by machines make all fast wide spread, however, it is destroying the unique identity.

 

Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing shares how our perspectives towards nature has changed in regards to different position.

The use of Sphagnum moss, has its significance in history as a reminder that it healed the wounds of thousands in World War I. More importantly, the plant itself growing and decaying at the same time, are key species on peatlands as their unique properties actually drive the formation of peat. Peatlands are a type of wetlands which are among the most valuable ecosystems on Earth, as well as the largest natural terrestrial carbon store.[5] If the peatlands are damaged, they will become a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

I was inspired by the different views of moss when exploring the Blackwood forest. During daylight, moss appeared especially fresh and bright with the reflection of sunshine that drew most of my attention. When I walked closer, I found that the root were rotting and turned dark red. It forms a huge contract with my first observation. I became particularly interested in that what we see from the appearance is not everything behind it. Our perspectives can be influenced by the ways of seeing it.

Ways of Seeing is the work combined with Arduino and processing coding technology, when people walking slowly towards the screen, the image gets blurred/ unblurred and the image changing as well. Audience can see different views when they change their position.

Showing the nature fragility and impermanence, the blurring is changed in response to viewers’ bodily presence. The interaction offers a reminder that the seemingly intangible digital world is anchored in the earthly realm. It leads us to think about how human beings should see the world and the relationship between us and nature.

 

Virtual Future

Virtual Future was exhibited in Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation. I was driven by the different perspective to climate change as a Chinese individual. In China, most social media are talking about economic growth rather than the environmental issue and carbon emission problems. Seeing the trash classification and all the environmental protest for the first time here in Edinburgh, I was impressed by people’s concern of protecting the environment. After dozens of interviews with Chinese people on their recognition of the current situation regarding to the planet environmental safety, I realized they are still quite optimistic about the climate change and more concerned about luxury product than environment.

Human plays an intelligent role during the earth evolution; we invent and create technology, machines and new materials to make our lives easier and solve problems. I designed a product for future, Eco Dome, which can solve our future problems caused by carbon emission. Furthermore, it offers different luxury brand options for people preference.

Research on the consequence of excessive carbon emission is made to response the function of Eco Dome- the fictitious product for the imagination of human’s evolution after we destroyed the earth. The bilingual poster of the advertising is designed with different options of brand. It is a speculation on how climate change will affect product design, as well as a virtual future after the result of human shaping the world without a restriction.

 

 

References

1. Tazi N. Keywords: Nature[J]. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005.
2. Buddhist scriptures[M]. Penguin, 1959.
3. Carson R. Silent spring[M]. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.
4. Gould S J. Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history[M]. WW Norton & Company, 1990.
5. IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) (2017). Peatlands and climate change https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/peatlands-and-climate-change

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME: Kharis Leggate

ASN MA DEGREE SHOWS

 

The strands which have developed through my work are, the value of personal experience, and the importance of developing an intimate relationship with the natural environment.

Working with intuition and quiet, a deep sense of place, learning to move with the rhythms of nature, are my ways of exploring connection within the natural world. These ways are echoed by Country et al in Working with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Author-ity, in developing a “methodology of attending” which includes “[considering] what it mean[s] to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it.”¹

Through feeling my way into the atmosphere of a place, being with it, noticing evidence of the passage of time and how it is cyclical, my process requires slowing down. It cannot be forced. I cannot control it. Places in the landscape, objects, living things, the elements speak to me, when I let go of logic and listen. They direct me where to walk, my pace. My breathing changes and slows, I drop into surrender. 

The energies of emotions and memories can linger in places, in bodies. Sometimes we need help to release them, often we hold them because we are afraid of not knowing who we will be without them. The ground we walk on, the earth, the rocks, offer security, comfort in their supportiveness; the water provides a constant reminder to let go.

“Be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are. You have been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender” – Rumi²

 

My earlier works have connected to a sense of place through intimacy and openness, almost like a call to interpret the essence of a place with awareness that, whatever form the end result takes, it will also contain traces of myself and my personal experience in that moment. 

Sinking in to the presence I felt whilst on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, the history and layers of time, cycles of death and growth, held in the area of a ruined croft house resulted in the creation of an atmospheric handwoven installation IN EACH MOMENT…, at An Lanntair Gallery, Lewis. The piece was a call to consider the shifting of time and the ways we are interconnected not only in the present but generationally with what has already been and what is yet to come. 

 

IN EACH MOMENT THERE IS
A VEIL, A WINDOW
A MIRROR.
OURSELVES, OUR ANCESTORS
PRESENT, PAST
ALL AT ONCE SHIFTING AND FAMILIAR
 2019 images ©Claire Burnett

 

My background in weaving came into play again after exploring the Black Wood of Rannoch in the Highlands of Scotland. Handwoven fabric acted as a visible and scented record of intuited communication between Scots pine and tree moss lichen, by absorbing the soaking liquid of these two found materials. I let myself be guided totally by messages received from gathered bark and lichen in a meditative way. Rather than use an analytical or research-based approach to learn about the plants properties or historical use, I chose to ‘listen’ by being in the presence of the gathered pieces and remembering my time in the forest.

 

WHISPERINGS, 2019

 

Textiles took the lead in both IN EACH MOMENT… and WHISPERINGS , although initial ideas always begin with writing and photography. As well as a means of development, text has more recently become a significant part of my final work. 

 

In WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME both text and photography become equal focal points. Showing the work on long narrow space beneath tall windows allows the viewer to follow the route of my observances as I explored a coastal landscape. With an undulating placement of words and images reminiscent of the movement of the sea.

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME, 2019

 

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME developed from a process of wandering. I use the word wandering in preference to walking here as the former suggests to me fluidity, curiosity and openness. As Thomas Clark writes in In Praise of Walking, “What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way”³, so the simple act of wandering is akin to exploration, of place and of self.

 

The place was the coast of St Monans, a small fishing village on the south coast of Fife, Scotland. As an islander (from Shetland, an archipelago in the North Sea, 120 miles north of the most northerly point of mainland Scotland), the sea is in my blood, in my bones. It’s movement, sound, and shifting colours are familiar to me, the sensations they create in my body feel like home. 

To me, the sea is comfort, familiarity, spaciousness, openness – a connection which is all at once intimate and expansive. Standing on a small section of coast that is also global, this great body of water can create distance while simultaneously being the connecting point between so many shores.

 

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME (detail) 2019

 

For several weeks I took the chance every day I could to wander the coast of St Monans. I saw how it left it’s trace along rocks and sand, uneven lines of seaweed, driftwood and other debris, as it moved back into itself. How limpets followed it’s trail as far as they could before settling immobile awaiting the returning tide.

Reacquainting myself with the sea, after living in the busyness of Edinburgh for six months, I began to crave it’s motion, it’s touch. As I sat with feet bare, waiting for the moment when low tide would turn and the water begin it’s choppy rise, first splashing my soles, then sometimes there sometimes not, until the sides of my feet were constantly immersed, and I stayed until it crept higher, until I felt, like the limpets, ready to move off again.

 

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME (detail) 2019

 

The shore has two different lives, it is dry land and it is the sea floor, it is an in-between place. In his book, Common Ground,⁴ which is part nature-writing part memoir about a square mile of rough wood, meadow and river on the edge of town, Rob Cowen is similarly drawn to a place of in-between.

Paralleling Cowen, my observances overlap and resonate with the personal. What I notice and pay attention to changes with my mood, and my mood changes as I drop into a state of being which author and speaker Martha Beck calls “wordlessness”.⁵ Overwhelm can dissipate, from confusion and struggle comes clarity. More than anything though, there is a sense of being part of it all, a reminder that separateness is an illusion. In Working with Time: Rivers & Tides, sculptor and photographer Andy Goldsworthy recognises this shared spirit and emphasises a desire to connect with it when he says, “I want to understand that state and that energy that I have in me that I also feel in the plants and in the land.”⁶

 

I gave myself time to be with the tides, and so we got to know each other. It wasn’t just me and the sea, but stones, sea glass, pottery (or laem as we say in Shetland) were intermediaries, they helped us (the sea and I) communicate. Especially the stones. They acted as messengers, taking what was not words and holding that so as to free up space for me to understand. And, they knew the time to let go. Along with the sea, they knew so much more than I did. 

 

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME (detail), 2019

 

 

WHAT THE TIDES TAUGHT ME (details), 2019

 

It’s important to know that, the simple truth is, I just went for a wander. I just did what felt good, on a deep, soul level. I gave up logic, goals, planning and control. Instinctively I felt my way along this path. I knew when there was nothing more to learn because I sensed it, the tides and the stones quietened, they didn’t lead me anymore. So, then I knew the writing was done. What began on a full moon, was complete on a full moon.

 

I believe it’s important to find experience in a personal way, before learning too much about the experience of others, so that it comes from a place that is purely our own. In an interview on the subject of Joseph Beuys performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, the artist emphasises that “… the person should rather understand by completely placing himself into the object…”⁷ rather than approaching knowing through intellect or logic.

Only then can we go on to share and learn from each other with a sense of authenticity and true understanding. Developing a personal relationship with nature accordingly encourages feelings of respect, responsibility and an awareness of our dependence on the natural world.

Learning to let the work unfold and follow direction from place is the basis of my creative practice. The weeks I spent with the tides, that particular experience, was for that particular time. Landscape will continue to teach me at other times in the future, to point out what I need to notice, to discover and know. 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Clark, T. A. (2007) In Praise of Walking. Kirkcaldy: Fife Council Central Area Libraries

Country, B. et al (2015) ‘Working with and learning from Country: decentring human author-ity’, Cultural Geographies. SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England, 22(2), pp. 269-283. doi: 10.117/1474474014539248.

Beck, M. (2012) Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. London: Hachette Digital

mishiko1824 (2014) Joseph Beuys – English Subtitles – How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 1/2. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo47lqk_QH0&list=PLWQht4ATSrAL2HKdZl7yeizaMa-1Hujbo&index=2&t=0s

Silver, T. (2019) It’s Not Your Money. London: Hay House UK, Ltd

Kumar, S. (2013) Soil · Soul · Society – A New Trinity for Our Time. East Sussex: Leaping Hare Press

Watt, R. (2019) Moder Dy. Mother Wave. Edinburgh: Polygon

Di Sapia, I. (2018) The Selkie. Weaving & The Wild Feminine. UK: Magpie Magazine

Rising Paradigm dot TV (2018) Rivers And Tides Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time 2001 720p BluRay x264 YTS AM. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP2AfqyOsI

 

References

[1] Clark, T. A. (2007) In Praise of Walking. Kirkcaldy: Fife Council Central Area Libraries

[2] Silver, T. (2019) It’s Not Your Money. London: Hay House UK, Ltd, p137

[3] Country, B. et al (2015) ‘Working with and learning from Country: decentring human author-ity’, Cultural Geographies. SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England, 22(2), pp. 269-283. doi: 10.117/1474474014539248.

[4] Cowen, R. (2015) Common Ground. London: Penguin Random House

[5] Beck, M. (2012) Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. London: Hachette Digital, pp. 24-25

[6] Rising Paradigm dot TV (2018) Rivers And Tides Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time 2001 720p BluRay x264 YTS AM. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP2AfqyOsI (Accessed: 24 June 2019)

[7] mishiko1824 (2014) Joseph Beuys – English Subtitles – How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 1/2. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo47lqk_QH0&list=PLWQht4ATSrAL2HKdZl7yeizaMa-1Hujbo&index=2&t=0s (Accessed: 20 July 2019)

WHEN CONTEXT LASTS: Lilien Li

ASN MA DEGREE SHOWS

 

We see

We see different colours

We think

We think of the difference between what we perceived

We imagine

We imagine what we are not able to perceive

We doubt

We doubt our perception

We discuss

We discuss if we are all having the same doubt

We return

We return to where we were at the beginning and see

 

I return

I return to a place where I cannot see, think, imagine, doubt and discuss

 

Language & Visibility

Birds cannot see glass.

Cats and dogs cannot see all colours.

Human see limited spectrum, especially in the dark.

 

Flickering rainbows in Luskentyre Beach, west coast of Harris, and lively air travelled from the Atlantic Ocean surrounded us. We are climbing boundless rocks and mountains. A beautiful primary layer of colours is in presence.

When I was taking a minute breath on a minivan, an exotic road sign yells. Indeed, road sign speaks in native language and my eyes are the only exotic. The layer perceived is flipping.

In the book ‘Reading the Gaelic Landscape: Leughadh Aghaidh Na Tire’ _[i], John Murray uncovers another layer through the lens of language, which embedded multiple implicit layers entangled with lives and minds.

It is the process to embrace the horizon with sensibility and notice the visible clue from intertwined context, which involves play and debate between surrounding environment and ‘the flesh of perception’ _[ii]. Finally, the layers overlapped and united in aesthetic.

Witnessing my first language of Cantonese has been weakening dramatically in my hometown Hong Kong during the last decade, I recognised the importance to preserve traditional languages in front of dominant powers. What Gaelic has encountered resonates with the situation of Cantonese.

There is no way to recover an extinct language and its connections with culture, mentality and value of ethnicity over time. As a multilingual, I identify flaws in translation and represent them through visuals. Not all Gaelic words could be translated into English, and not all colours could be translated into language.

The work title GLAS is a colour name in Gaelic. In one of the Gaelic-English dictionary, it is translated as ‘Become grey, pale or green. Make grey, make pale. Dawn.’, which has become the statement of the work.

 

GLAS, 2019

 

Visibility & Vision

May our vision be cured, while context of contemporary world is obscure.

 

In response to climate change, I wonder how human being sees that foreseeable but unseeable layer of emergency and how our difference in vision and perception creates distance and conflict.

Where I inhabit, social movements prevails, observed distinctive and divergent points of view reflects the significance of vision, as well as how difference could people access to context and ponder the issue. Hence, my practice is a reflection of relevant observation.

 

between cognition and consciousness

between you and where you are

between today and too late

BETWEEN, 2018.

BETWEEN, 2018

 

Visible & Invisible

Some distances extend beyond physical.

Some existences stay beyond material.

 

My memory has sealed the last rotten glimpse of your shadow in an envelope. Perhaps when the chandelier falls, you may still find me alive, yet shattered in its aftermath, a remnant of a former existence remains with the archived phantom.

It is my sentiment of an intimate relationship in the past, and a narration of a post-colony.

Dreaded by the book-burning history of China and concerning the absence of archival law in Hong Kong _[iii], archive is a universal concept along with my practice. As an archival material, paper is a strand linking up my works.

Instead of mark-making, I cut poems out of paper to echo grief entailed with ‘absence’, ‘missing’ and ‘disappear’. It represents material interruption, which metaphorically embodies radical but quiet vanishment of culture.

‘absence’, ‘missing’ and ‘disappear’ is a family of ‘books’. Each of them consists of 10 pages, and each page is a line of poems, which would never be integrated as a typical book form but alternately with a hope to travel in different directions and dimensions beyond time and space.

ABSENCE (page 3), 2019

 

Space & Being

‘The perception of the world is formed in the world, the test for truth takes place in Being.’ ― (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1968) _[iv]

 

With consciousness on context, space is no longer perceived as space itself. When an artist as a container of memory collides with context of space, works of art emerge and evident in that intersection. As long as our consciousness and perception connected with space, the world is subjectively vivid in our eyes.

Journeys to Scottish landscapes Lewis and Harris, the Flow Country and the Blackwood of Rannoch, are emphasising the time immersed in nature and in time itself, and are depicted in forms of art and symbolised life and practice as a process until a day we would be in situ under the soil.

 

In the forest

In tranquility

I observe subtlety

In situ

 

In the gallery

In tranquility

I observe subtlety

In situ

TRANQUILITY, 2019

 

Within & Beyond

color (n.)

from Latin color “color of the skin; color in general, hue; appearance,” from Old Latin colos, originally “a covering” (akin to celare “to hide, conceal”), from PIE root *kel- (1) “to cover, conceal, save.” _[v]

If colour is a physically attractive skin of the world, what does it conceal? ‘Colour is the worldly correlate of visibility._[vi] When human being situates ourselves at the centre of the world, how well we understand our capability of seeing?

While Hong Kong protests symbolized in black and yellow, there are some people against the protests wearing blue and white. When society is divided into colours, how much context do we see under the colours? Difference colours not only refer to different opinions and generations but also reflect how desperate the citizens feel. As of July 2019, four people have given up their lives for the issue. _[vii]

space (n.)

1300, “extent or area; room” (to do something), a shortening of Old French espace “period of time, distance, interval” (12c.), from Latin spatium “room, area, distance, stretch of time,” a word of unknown origin (also source of Spanish espacio, Italian spazio). _[viii]

 

Raised in complex cultures and context, I am inescapably attentive to context in every landscape. Context reflects the process of how entangled layers of the space evolved. Context takes over context over time. Behind colour, both context and time are inexplicable concepts existing in abstract and intangible form. Language, as a standard tool of archive, alone seems incapable.

To understand the long and complex history is to grasp the essence of the space. To admit our inadequate sight is the beginning to free our imagination on text recording the context and on numbers carrying the meaning of time.

While modern science tends to pursue rational investigation by standing outside of the story, staying within context and time allow you to crystallise its substance. ‘People are immersed in a world of places which the geographical imagination aims to understand and recover – places as contexts for human experience, constructed in movement, memory, encounter and association.’ ― (Christopher Tilley, 1994) _[ix] This experiential element could never be replaced.

SKETCH OF GREY, 2019

Space is simultaneously existential and nothingness. Dwell in the ambience of greyness and stillness, the shadow of the material change I archived is visible. When you are moving apart and seeing at some distance, you might discover yourself was once a part of that grey space in the certain pause of time. You are actually part of the work while you think you are looking at the work. I am creating an architectural space or space is always there without my interference.

The figure-ground and the subject-object relationship depends on the way of seeing. Some physical spaces, like natural landscape, widen space for thinking. Experiencing space is a process. After all, every process is organic. The process when what visible turns to invisible or when a place transforms.

The more the process is concerned, neither material nor non-material would stay permanent, the more I could realise myself as a tiny part of the process. When taking protests as a process of the city dying, my generation is born to witness and experience this process. Under this natural life cycle, what should I sorrow for?

 

GREY, 2019

Of a colour having little or no positive colour;

Of a colour of dark hair turning to white,

As seen at some distance.

 

Become grey, wither.

 

Perhaps, it is not about seeing through colour in the colourful material world. It is about seeing through the universal process by objectifying life. ‘Being-in-the-world resides in a process of objectification in which people objectify the world by setting themselves apart from it. This results in the creation of a gap, a distance in space. To be human is both to create this distance between the self and that which is beyond’ ― (Christopher Tilley, 1994) _[x]

 

I dress in black and face grey.

There is tear gas.

There is uncertainty.

There seems no light ahead.

Guns are pointing to our heads.

 

I return.

I return to my city, except my physical body.

The city is heading to an enduring winter.

I am just one of the fallen leaves,

Following the flow of freezing water.

 

When I am within a piece of greyness,

I imagine myself stepping out and looking back in a distance,

I realise myself being within a stage,

A stage of a process.

A process is towards where I cannot see, think, imagine, doubt and discuss.

 

 

References

[i] Murray, J. (2014). Reading the Gaelic Landscape: Leughadh Aghaidh Na Tire. Whittles Publishing.

[ii] [iv]Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: followed by working notes / edited by Claude Lefort ; translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

[iii] South China Morning Post. (2019). Time to press ahead with archive law. [online] Available at: https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3008341/time-press-ahead-archive-law [Accessed 7 July 2019]

[v] Etymonline. color (n.). [online] Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/color [Accessed 7 July 2019]

[vi] Fóti, V.M. (2000). Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting. Amherst, N.Y., Humanity Books. pp. 170.

[vii] Hollingsworth, J. Shelly, J. (2019). How four deaths turned Hong Kong’s protest movement dark. [online] Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/21/asia/hong-kong-deaths-suicide-dark-intl-hnk/index.html [Accessed 24 July 2019]

[viii] Etymonline. Space (n.). [online] Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/space#etymonline_v_23940 [Accessed 7 July 2019]

[ix] [x] Tilley, C. (1994). A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments. Oxford, Berg. pp.7-34

[xi] Brady, E. (2003). Aesthetics of the natural environment. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press.

[xii] Saito, Y. (2007). Everyday aesthetics. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

REMNANTS: Claire Burnett

 

ASN MA DEGREE SHOWS

 

My mind was being drawn down two separate paths of thought, which I was hoping would re-join and lead to the same destination. Overwhelmed by researching depleting carbon storage and damage to the atmosphere, I felt the weight of responsibility growing heavier on my shoulders and found it hard to understand why it is overlooked. The information was out there, growing ever more accessible and shocking, but the reaction never balanced. As I lived with these feelings, they started to make themselves comfortable in my chest. Slowly developing from guilt into frustration into anger. Reflecting on my own emotions and how they relate to the wider world. I used to believe that some of us simply care more than others due to varying degrees of comprehension, many simply blissfully unaware. I no longer find excuses to be acceptable. For those who are aware, the turning of blind eyes makes this burden heavier. My work processes hard truths in order to make them loud and visible, then goes on to try and understand how it all feels. Also looking into the developing, worsening phenomenon of ecological grief, I felt the need to try and digest this as a genuine concern for my generations’ ever-darkening relationship with mental health. On this issue, Ashlee Cunsolo’s essay describes this feeling as “homesickness while still at home[1].” I think that in a situation where words aren’t enough, these come the closest, and my work visualises them.

 

 

EVERY 30 HOURS, 2018. 

 

EVERY 30 HOURS

Forests are carriers of energy, their depths supporting a diverse, endless number of life forms. They protect the land, anchor the soil, and calm the winds. As well as a home, they are also our collective lungs. Uniting all species in our reliance. The rapid removal of the planet’s trees strikes me as violent, the most blunt and physical form of destruction contributing to the current climate emergency. Nearly half of all trees on the planet have been lost since human civilisation began[2]. Active deforestation is instant and the brutality is obvious. What may be considered as more abstract is their important role as carbon stores, guarding the dangerous supply that we have hoarded, and the consequential release of this upon destruction. For the series EVERY 30 HOURS, it is asked whether we would continue to be so careless in our tree massacre if the sequestration of their carbon was visible? The title of this work refers to the alarming regularity in which each person living in Scotland would be required to plant a tree in order to compensate for their own carbon footprint in real time[3]. Highlighting personal responsibility to, again, address the seemingly abstruse concept, which is that we must all play our part in this game that we are currently losing. The print displayed for Shift at Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation shows a lone tree. Appreciating it as an individual. The bar protruding from its trunk embodies the volume of carbon it is protecting, equal to half of its dry mass. A thin layer of carbon coats the protruding shape, giving a shiny surface and allowing it to appear even more striking. The bluntness of the image reflects the subject matter. Viewers are guided into imagining the store of a whole forest.

EVERY 30 HOURS, detail

 

LISTEN TO THE WATER, DON’T INTERRUPT THE TIDE

Luskentyre Beach is known to be Scotland’s most beautiful stretch of coastline, situated on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Even when in a place of such calming beauty it is impossible to ignore the disruption by the human hand, which has left nowhere untouched. Walking along the shores of this location, an initial feeling of relaxation did wash over me with the soft sound of the tide. However, this was soon interrupted by the unmissable marks left behind by people. The pair of images shown at Testimony from the Rocks at An Lanntair sit side by side, connected but not quite touching. Intricate detail of sand patterns are sculpted by the tide, which reflects the glow from above. But something is in the way. On the surface, these images visually represent the overall sense of denial and lack of reaction that comes from the general population, when faced with many devastating environmental issues. The blocks in the images are noisy, distracting, and express the buzz of modern society that stops us from facing the truth. However, the abstract colours and patterns within these blocks, as well as the shape of them, are altered natural forms: as everything is at its root. On a more personal level, LISTEN TO THE WATER, DON’T INTERRUPT THE TIDE embodies my emotions when submerged in a landscape. As someone with environmental awareness, it has become impossible to enjoy ‘untouched’ space, I know it doesn’t exist. I feel the guilt for what we’ve done. The harsh bars embody the emotional block that most people manage to duck under.

LISTEN TO THE WATER, DON’T INTERRUPT THE TIDE, 2019

 

CONTROL

The themes within my practice connect strongly to my emotions, even when I’m not working. CONTROL came to exist after a supposed afternoon off, visiting a glasshouse. Even in a biodiverse space of positivity, where plants are conserved and studied, I am reminded of our domination. Visually speaking, within a glasshouse there is an interesting juxtaposition between the fluidic, sweeping greenery in contrast with rigid lines of construction, which I found impossible to ignore. Giving me a physical metaphor for some of the issues I deal with in my practice. CONTROL is a book that tries to encapsulate these comparisons. Printed photography of the space sits on delicate transparent pages, allowing the images beneath to be seen. This layering adds an illusion of depth to the photographs while showing an intricate web of fading lines, both harsh and gentle.

CONTROL, 2019

 

MANMADE LANDSCAPE

I reflect on my process while creating, which often involves de-constructing parts of imagery and playing with composition within a frame. Inspired by these experimental notions and my interest in Pieter Laurens Mol’s “photo sculptures”[4] I began to consider other forms that these actions may more relevantly manifest in. An underlying theme, which relates to all environmental issues explored so far, is the human ego. The reason we have climbed to these heights of disaster in the first place. Our generally ignorant attitude and confidence as a species that our wants and needs come before those of all other life. Even fellow sentient beings. It was this that drove me to give my work physical movement, to explore this feeling of power that we are accustomed and numbed to. Lifting the landscape off of the paper and interacting with it. These two pieces were made in line with one another, the first consisting of moveable pieces in a landscape puzzle, and the second a kaleidoscope using my own nature photography. Allowing new landscape compositions to be formed and destroyed in an instant. Both of these hold a playful edge, like children’s toys, reflecting our carefree attitude towards the dwindling environment. They represent our god-like mentality, where every piece of earth is ours to manipulate for personal gain. The shifting scenes within the kaleidoscope embody, in the words of Anna Tsing, “our society’s ecological amnesia”[5], as soon as the next pattern forms, the previous is instantly forgotten, just like our lack of interest in how landscapes looked before we were introduced. The kaleidoscope was invented in 1816 by a Scottish scientist by the name of Sir David Brewster[6]. Now most commonly treated as a toy, it was originally intended to be used by artists and designers, as a means of providing endless combinations of colours and patterns in order to inspire. For this reason, I like to think that Brewster would approve of my alternative use for his invention. Tsing discusses how the Anthropocene carries ghosts, forgotten pieces of haunted ecological history. To represent this, the puzzle holds a piece which is completely blank, showing no texture or biodiversity whatsoever.

MANMADE LANDSCAPE, 2019

 

DISILLUSION

 Scotland has a reputation globally for its beautiful landscapes, however, less than 5% of our ancient forest remains[7]. Bare mountain sides and rolling fields are classed as a natural landscape, when in fact they are often scars of what should be. Ecologist and founder of Scottish conservation charity Trees For Life, Alan Watson-Featherstone has described our country’s landscape as “shattered fragments of old forest”[8]. I felt the need to express this damaging disconnection between reputation and reality, which hides the issue from the public eye. ‘Kaleidoscope’ roughly translates as ‘beautiful form watcher’, I wanted to expand the use of this tool in a new way, while still retaining the original purpose of observing something beautiful. An alternative view of a landscape through an illusion, representing the reality that we cannot see with our own eyes. Using the Caledonian Forest as a case study to explore this further, the set of work entitled DISILLUSION began with in-landscape photography, taking inspiration from the roots of how the kaleidoscope was invented. Using mirrors to see an alternative view within nature. Also inspired by Robert Smithson’s early use of mirrors in a natural setting, a pair of images sit side by side. Each using the careful placement of the reflective surfaces to focus on a small area of land, while simultaneously making the space appear large; as if standing in a room with mirrored walls. In front of the prints sits what appears to be a kaleidoscope, but when looked through reveals a surrounding world that is literally shattered. On an adjacent plinth is a Scott’s Pine, a descendant of the original Pines to arrive in Scotland around 7000BC following the ice age, and still a keystone species in the ancient wilderness[9]. A backbone to the forest on which many other species depend. The placement of the young tree encourages it to be viewed through the kaleidoscope as it speaks for its ancestors, showing a lens of reality and visual representation of the current state of the land.

 

DISILLUSION, 2019.

DISILLUSION, detail.

 

 

REMNANTS

The missing piece to my continued practice was the immersive sense of isolation that is felt when standing in the Caledonian Forest. I visited, absorbed, and documented both the Blackwood of Rannoch and Rothiemurchus remnants of the ancient land, while also having many insightful conversations about my work and the themes of acceptance. I came to a conclusion around one of the central reasons for difficulty in considering Scotland as a ruined landscape; what’s left is still genuinely captivating. When surrounded by the remaining pieces of forest it is easy to be absorbed by this and overlook the problems it faces. It is also normal within society to see stretches of pasture as areas of beauty, however, after learning about the impact that animal agriculture has had on the loss of wild forest, I can only see them as wounds. Inspired by the large-scale, kaleidoscope-style installation Your Spiral View[10] by Olafur Eliasson, I built my own immersive space. Replicating the feeling of being engrossed within nature, the space replicates movement through the wilderness. However, using mirror fragments, the image is again shattered to represent the reality of the situation of the last remaining genuine wilderness in Scotland. The decision to create an immersive space is supported by Yuriko Saito in the essay The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature where it is said that “experiencing nature as a static, two-dimensional scene unduly limits our appreciation, it also misleads it”[11]. This made me think once more about the way nature is seen as idyllic and an ‘escape’, especially from the viewpoint of city residents, when really we should have a much deeper level of respect and understanding. I wanted to build a space that overcomes the flat and pictorial level of gratitude, breaking through into understanding.

REMNANTS, 2019. 

Projection experimentation

 

 

EDIT AND CENSOR, 2019

Four wall prints sit side by side, succeeding LISTEN TO THE WATER, DON’T INTERRUPT THE TIDE they are also connected. EDIT AND CENSOR encompasses the discussion so far. The core images in these prints were all taken in the Rothiemurchus shred of Caledonian Forest, highlighting the diverse beauty that does in fact dwell in these small areas. Cementing the idea that there may be beauty here, from the light reflecting through the tree branches and bouncing along the surface of the loch, to the vast range of flora to be admired, but it is not a constant and it is not as common as generally assumed. Mental blocks are represented, bright, garish and unavoidable. I had the most beautiful trip in this part of the world, the weather was unusually warm and the surroundings blissful. Many would describe this as escapism. I worried about the reasons behind this exceptionally hot summer, I yearned for the parts of Scotland that should be equally as dense with life but have had it taken away. The blocks mirror shapes found within nature and within the images themselves, but are stiff and severe, mimicking the way modern society has become in the developed world. We came from nature but have evolved our way of thinking into widely believing that we are superior. They obnoxiously interrupt the main images in the way humanity interrupts nature. Lost in the loud patterns and colours within these blocks is edited destruction. They represent the damaged land that replaces the beauty they are disrupting. Images of devastated land, rings of trees that once were, fur from the wolves that should still roam, all hidden within the shapes. Mainly focussing on the damaging results of animal agriculture, deforestation extending from the industrial revolution, and the impact on new sapling growth as a consequence of overhunting predators of deer and sheep to local extinction[12]. These issues are represented yet buried within the images, the only quiet thing about them. Akin to the way they are concealed to the public eye. When first viewed, this set could be seen as bright and overpowering, with clashes of colour and pattern. However, I feel that this aesthetic suits them. These issues do overwhelm me, they do pile on top of each other and it is difficult to contemplate one environmental issue without a flood of connected others

pouring into mind. As a species we edit nature. Information against the egotistical battle of progress for humanity is censored. Often blocked is the part of our minds that admits the full extent of the environmental crisis, and allows us to accept that we must become ecologically responsible.

 

EDIT AND CENSOR, 2019

 

Claire Burnett is a Scottish artist with a Bachelor’s Degree(Honours) in Contemporary Art Practice and is graduating from a Master’s in Art, Space and Nature. Working largely with photography and installation, her work stems from an interest in humanity’s relationship with the environment, believing that art can be a strong tool for communication, bridging the gap between research and the wider audience. With a background in public and interactive art, she has fulfilled commissions for festivals such as SPECTRA Festival of Light and Look Again Festival. She has exhibited her personal practice all over the UK, as well as internationally, including in Finland, the US, Denmark, and Mexico.

 

www.claireburnett.co.uk

 

 

References

 

[1] Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Karen Landman, editors. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.

 

[2] Howell, Elizabeth. Earth Lost Half Its Trees to Humans. https://www.livescience.com/52070-global-tree-census-human-impacts.html, 2015.

 

[3] Based on figures from 2014, 6.5 metric tonnes of carbon per capita, per year, 6500kg of C per year. Average tree, 22kg per year of C absorbed, 295 trees per year, 1 year 8760 hours, 1 tree per 31 hours.

 

[4] Laurens Mol, Pieter. Website. Available: https://pieterlaurensmol.com/, 2019.

 

[5] Tsing, A.L. et al., Arts of living on a damaged planet : Ghosts of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

 

[6] Brewster, D., The kaleidoscope : its history, theory, and construction; with its application to the fine and useful arts, London: J. Murray, 1858.

 

[7] Trees for Life. The Caledonian Forest. Available: https://treesforlife.org.uk/into-the-forest/the-caledonian-forest/, 2019.

 

[8] Watson-Featherstone, Alan. Restoring the ancient Caledonian Forest. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDtsExXe93Q, 2016.

 

[9] Trees for Life. Scots Pine. Available: https://treesforlife.org.uk/into-the-forest/trees-plants-animals/trees/scots-pine/, 2019.

 

[10] Tate. Olafur Eliasson In Real Life. Available: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/olafur-eliasson, 2019.

 

[11] Saito, Yuriko. “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 2, 1998, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/432249.

 

[12] Smout, T.C. & University of St. Andrews. Institute for Environmental History, 1997. Scottish woodland history, Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press.

AGGREGATE: Kaitlin Ferguson

ASN MA DEGREE SHOWS

Granton Harbour

On an overcast afternoon, I walked along the coastline of Granton, an industrial district on the outskirts of Edinburgh, on the banks of the Firth of Forth on Eastern edge of Scotland. Getting down to the beach involved stepping through overgrown bushes, thick with layers of discarded litter, likely from the road nearby. Eventually the coastline came into view, a partially sandy expanse interrupted by geologic formations which are only revealed when the tide recedes. Adjacent to the beach was a wall of stacked boulders forming a coastal defence, covered with the discarded remnants of the area’s industrial past. Stepping over broken piles of rubble and bricks smoothed by countless waves, I spotted a tangled mass of discarded waste. A strange hybrid, a dark amorphous entangled cluster of melted plastic, discarded tar, broken glass and rusted wires mixed together with sand and rocks. It was a piece of nature which had been formed by the glue of melted plastic: a ‘plastiglomerate’. They are categorised as:

”an indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten plastic. This material is subdivided into an in-situ type, in which plastic is adhered to rock outcrops, and a clastic type, in which combinations of basalt, coral, shells, and local woody debris are cemented with grains of sand in a plastic matrix’’ (1) 

These simultaneously disturbing and enchanting rocks are becoming common around the world, revealing how vast our increasing species footprint is becoming in relation to the planet’s geological strata. They are a startling manifestation of the earth finally hitting its limit.

The planet has gone through billions of years-worth of cycles of renewal and reformation, yet our species is the first in history to become the overarching dominant force in environment, climate, and the geological makeup of the planet – the era of the Anthropocene. Plastiglomerates represent an ominous new marker of the arrival of this epoch, bringing forth the consequences of the human species to be recorded in the strata of the planet forever. 

They signify a turning point in our relationship to the earth. As Kirsty Robertson describes:

‘‘In the past, it might have been assumed that “nature” was the one thing that could never be made from plastic. Plastiglomerate suggests that this is no longer the case. It is an ecological paradox such that the mind struggles to separate its plasticity from its telluric oily past. ‘’ (2)

These stones are both global and local, operating on universal and microscopic scales simultaneously. Plastiglomerates are complex assemblages which connect time, space, violence, empathy, and the worlds of humans and more-than-humans. 

It is within this framework my practice sits; exploring the ontological inseparability of all matter, between life and the planet, during a time where our existence resides on the precarious verge of environmental collapse.

 

Bedrock 

My practice is an aggregate, a combination of several process-based ontological investigations and individual elements which sit densely packed together to form a whole. These fragments represent intertwined research-based lines of enquiry through deep time, planetary shaping processes and exploring where the Anthropocene sits within this discourse. My approach is formed through interdisciplinary methodologies, all united in working in a site-responsive way.

It is through these applications that I seek to disrupt human centric perspectives of the Anthropocene, by taking its anthropocentric constructs and dismantling them via their limitations. To reveal new readings of the planet, ones that seek to deconstruct the deeply embedded nature/culture divides. 

My processes are governed by key phases of research and analysis of theoretical and cultural complexities across boundaries of science, culture, and the humanities, an exploration in order to lead to the genesis of interdisciplinary results. It is what Robert Smithson defined as ‘abstract geology’ tracing connections between the geological, the body and mental processes. (3)

Whether investigating the planet as a whole, a specific geomorphological process, a locality or a single physical fragment, I examine through enquires across temporal and spatial scales – these create the foundation of my process. 

 

Stratum of Time 

The methodologies which I adopt in my work are cited in the writings of James Hutton (1726-1797), the Scottish geologist; his understanding of time was not as a unidirectional linear course, but instead as a continuous process of cyclical deep time, which sees the planet in constant dynamic flux. Through this conceptual aperture the earth can be viewed in terms of dynamic geomorphological cycles: phases of sedimentary ocean deposits accumulating and being compressed over vast time scales, eventually resurfacing only to be eroded again. When discussing Hutton’s pivotal work, ‘Theory of the Earth,’ Tom Furniss states:

‘‘the Earth begins to sound more and more like a complex living organism and nature emerges as a sentient agent with its own creative powers….the materials of the Earth are not inert but in continuous vital motion’’ (4)

 

Through the application of deep time as a framing device, the geology of the planet transforms from inactive to alive. All environments are coated in time; a mountain is not motionless, but instead seen in constant dynamism, simultaneously building and eroding, in motion constantly, even on a molecular level, as atoms move in constant in flux. The strata around us provides a window into the history of the earth and its limits. 

When working directly with geological matter and its localities, I present this material in frameworks which symbolize the deep history of the planet and bring into question what the deep future may be. 

‘‘Deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy’’ (5)

Human agency is so often the central voice in the planetary narrative but listening to an alternative voice is now more importance than ever. Approaching the timescales of our species from the perspective of planetary time emphasises our insignificance but also reframes the scale and impact of our destruction to the earth. It is a call to action to tackle the overwhelming tide of the Anthropocene.

This approach to time has formed linking trajectories across a series of works.

ISOLATION (2018)
The Lewisian Complex – Collaboration with Cody Lukas
Exhibited at ‘Umwelt’, Group Show, Tent Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

ISOLATION (2018) is a response to the vigorous shaping of geological processes, specifically those which have shaped the Isles of Lewis and Harris (Leòdhas agus na Hearadh), Outer Hebrides, on the most westerly edge of Scotland. Lewisian Gneiss is one of the most striking core components of this landscape, a metamorphic rock dated as the second oldest on earth, nearly three billion years old. It appears visibly crushed, contorted, and twisted, in arresting configurations reformed over the history of the planet.

Butt of Lewis – Lewisian Gneiss which has been twisted and contorted from billions of years of renewal.

ISOLATION (2018) was produced from the analysis of a geologic specimen which was extracted from this landscape. The work exists within virtual reality, in tandem with the physical void in the gallery. Scanning the marker with a smart device reveals the spinning form in space. Through technological constructs, geological boundaries of form and materiality are called into question. The compositional footprint of the rock is reimagined, its cycles of transformation across deep time are paused, now existing within an anthropocentric construct. References of scale and time are removed, abstracted and placed within a technological and environmental entanglement. What does this give to the rock?  Perhaps nothing. The process calls into question futility of technology itself.

ONE DAY | ONE BILLION (2019)
The Lewisian Complex – Collaboration with Cody Lukas
              Exhibited at ‘Testimony from the Rocks’, Group Show, An Lanntair Gallery, Stornaway, Scotland

A re-composition of geological matter from Mangersta Cliffs, (Mangurstadh) Uig on the southwest side Lewis. ONE DAY | ONE BILLION (2019) brings into question, through materiality, what constitutes the essence of a rock.

When a rock is sliced open a world is revealed for the first time – a fragment of the universe sees the light of day. The work consists of two separate structures: one a piece of pegmatite (a composition of feldspar, granite and quartz) and the specimens subsequent half replicated in cast glass. The forms are united by their silica compositional components and also both experiencing processes of renewal by fire, one from the depths of the earth the other through anthropocentric processes. Here time is paused, and the life cycles of a new “rock” begin. 

The complex exchange between these two forms represent tensions on a planetary scale, they call into question the convoluted relationship of our species with the earth. Mineral Evolution theory states we have been entangled in the geology of the planet since the beginning of life. Life and minerals have co-evolved simultaneously, indexically linking us to the planet. (6) This represents the visualisation of the turning point in this complex relationship.

 

Stratum of Scale

In my ongoing environmental research, I use the application of scale as a conceptual and analytical tool. In order to comprehend the vast complexities of the planet, scale is used to conceptually travel across boundaries, from the infinite through to the intimate, temporal and spatial. The paradoxical nature of scale is that the largest become accessible through the smallest (7) Scale when in relation to geological applications, is traditionally centred around size and level, Richard Howitt argued a third aspect for consideration: relation. As scale, relation addresses the connections between selected elements in their totality. (8) I use scale to disorient the viewer, to encourage them to rethink the physical threads which connect our planet and the cosmos. This approach can be seen in the following explorations. 

A MOUNTAIN IN A GRAIN OF SAND (2019) 
GLASS 
Exhibited at Bookmarks – Artist Book Fair, Edinburgh College of Art

A MOUNTAIN IN A GRAIN OF SAND (2019) is an on-going line of enquiry which takes a poetic approach to disseminating the vast complexities of the rock cycle and the dynamic processes which shape the earth. The history of the planet is stored within a minuscule geological fragment.  

In the form of an artist book, A MOUNTAIN IN A GRAIN OF SAND (2019) GLASS expresses this theoretical standpoint directly through the choice of materiality. Glass represents an anthropocentric intervention – the product of sand being treated by industrial processes. Here the entire stored history of a mountain rests in the hands of the viewer. This conceptual framework draws into question the vast temporal and spatial processes of the planet. It invites reconfiguration into different combinations, drawing parallels with the cyclical nature of geologic processes.

A MOUNTAIN IN A GRAIN OF SAND (2019)
Artist Book – Zine Edition

The zine edition of this work focuses on geological material in direct conversation with the poetic sentiment. It provides a framework which subverts the scale of the geological form, leading the viewer to question whether it is a fragment, an island, or even perhaps an entire continent. The format of a zine disseminates the concept in an accessible and democratic way. These works continue the ongoing trajectory of dematerialising the physical component of the landscape in the work. 

THE ATTRACTION OF A MOUNTAIN (2019)
Exhibited at Remnants, Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland 

THE ATTRACTION OF A MOUNTAIN (2019) is a response to the mountain Schielhallion (Sìdh Chailleann) in Highland Perthshire, Scotland. This is the site of an experiment in 1774 which measured the gravitational pull on pendulums as part of research to determine the mass of the earth itself. In the piece the mountain is represented by a fragment of its composition material: ground quartzite taken from the summit. It forms a highly concentrated version of the locality within the gallery. Magnetism is used as a tool to visualize the tensions between nature and the search for scientific knowledge – human advancements which unlocked new readings not only of the mountain but of the universe itself. 

 

Crystallisation 

The refinement of my approach to materiality has led to the creation of frameworks which expose the power of the object in its purest form. The agglomeration of these temporal and spatial strategies has been distilled in a pair of recent pieces: 

A RESTLESS EARTH (2019)
Exhibited at MA Degree Show, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland

‘‘Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene’’ (9)

A RESTLESS EARTH (2019) features poetic texts which sit as counterparts to rock and mineral samples that span the deep history of the planet through to the present day. Curatorial ontologies are applied then consequently unravelled, the anticipated relationship between text and object is subverted through poetry. 

Gneiss specimen – A RESTLESS EARTH (2019)

The framework of the museum aesthetic represents a visual language of ordering and control over the natural world, that of an anthropocentric hieratical construction. Instead these pieces of text pose more questions then they answer; they act as windows into deep time, portals into understanding the complex geomorphological processes which have formed them.

Plastiglomerate specimen – A RESTLESS EARTH (2019)

Thirteen samples sit in the cases, twelve rocks and minerals. The thirteenth is a new type of stone, one formed through human actions – the plastiglomerate. This ominous and disturbing plastic rock represents the deep future of the planet, a hint of what the trajectory of the planet could look like. Plastiglomerates are hybrids that have been conceptualised as ‘technofossils,’ or waste materials made by humans, which are likely to provide materials for geological dating in the future (10). A RESTLESS EARTH (2019) forces the viewer to reflect and to visualise what the planet will look like through the actions of one species – our own. How will we be represented in the strata in millennia to come?

DISINTEGRATION | ACCUMULATION (2019)
Exhibited at MA Degree Show, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland

Through research of microscopic imagery gleaned from the thin slice sections of rocks and minerals DISINTEGRATION | ACCUMULATION (2019) has been created as a series of three large scale unique screen prints which re-compose the visual language of microscopy to offer new perspectives on geology. References to scale are removed, the barely-visible-to-the-human-eye is brought into sharp focus, allowing new relationships between components to form. Here time loses its significance – the microscopic represents the boundless cosmos.

Detail from DISINTEGRATION | ACCUMULATION (2019) Three

DISINTEGRATION | ACCUMULATION (2019) sees the geological phenomena the ‘Law of Superposition’ expressed through materiality and process. The theory states that in an undisturbed sequence of layers of rocks, the youngest layers lie on top of the older layers (11) The process of screen printing reflects geologic parallels; it’s a practice which involves slowing down, the accumulation of layers and building depth. The viewer is rewarded for investing time in looking at the work as subtle translucent layers slowly come into view. The curatorial composition reflects the format of scientific slide, whilst the visual language presents science entangled with the artists hand. 

The microscopic language of DISINTEGRATION | ACCUMULATION 2019) opens a thematic portal to the geological material of A RESTLESS EARTH (2019). Both pieces take the constructs of time and scale and twist and distort them. They disorient and realign narratives. They are the culmination of the thematic aggerate of my practice – an approach to the entanglement of the Anthropocene. 

 

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Born in California, USA, Kaitlin lives and works in Norwich, UK. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from Norwich University of the Arts, graduating with a First Class Degree and later received her Masters from the University of Edinburgh after being awarded the Andrew Grant Scholarship. Career Highlights include: co-directing the short environmental film ‘Living in the Ruins’ which screened at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (Scotland, UK), exhibiting at the Edinburgh Arts Festival (Scotland, UK), An Lanntair Gallery (Outer Hebrides, Scotland, UK), Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation and being commissioned to create the public sculpture ‘Wave Maker’ (Norfolk, UK).

www.kaitlinferguson.com 

 

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Bibliography

 

• The classification of plastiglomerates as a type of stone was proposed in 2014 by an interdisciplinary team, after surveying Kamilo Beach in Hawaii (Artist Kelly Jazvac and Geologist Patricia L. Corcoran and Oceanographer Charles J. Moore)

 

 

Corcoran, P. M. C. &. J. K., 2014. An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record. GSA Today, Volume 24(6), pp. 4-8. 

1. Robertson, K., 2016. Plastiglomerate. [Online]
   Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82878/plastiglomerate/ [Accessed 23 January 2019]. 
2. Smithson, R. & Flam, J.D., 1996. Robert Smithson, the collected writings, Berkeley; London: University of California Press.
3. Furniss, T., 2010. A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth.’ Romanticism, 16(3),
4. Macfarlane, R., 2019  Underland : a deep time journey, UK: Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books.
5. Gillen, P., 2016. Notes on Mineral Evolution: Life, Sentience, and the Anthropocene. Environmental Humanities, 8(2), 
6. Howitt, R. (1998) Scale as relation: musical metaphors of geographical scale Area Royal Geographical Society 30.1
7. Howitt, R. (2002) Scale and the other: Levinas and geography Geoforum 33 
8. Macfarlane, R., 2019 . 
9. Zalasiewicz, J. M. W. C. N. W. A. D. B. a. P. H., 2014. The technofossil record of humans. The Anthropocene Review , 1(1)
10. Rieppel, O., 2011. The “Law of Superposition.” In Evolutionary Theory and the Creation Controversy. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg