‘Carbon-borders-voices’

It´s been a gray January briightened by the Zoom opening and online launch of ‘Carbon.Borders.Voices’ created by a collective of generously minded curators, artists and academics based in Hull. I am enjoying the evocative artwork they have selected, very diverse in outcome but all linked to what is an essential conversation. They are releasing images via Instagram weekly and its great to be listed alongside many other creatives in the index section of their website https://www.carbon-borders-voices.com/

In the Atelier I have been thinking about magma, rocks and hot air….I have been working on a contribution to the first collaborative show of the WTFCollective, planned for Newcastle later in the year entitled ‘Fault Lines’. My current thread of enquiry has been to do with the extraordinary and continually unfolding events in La Palma and Tonga, spectacular eruptions are threatening whole communities . It must be horrific to see a tongue of molten lava head directly for your home, just a matter of time before it is incinerated, to be blanketed with enormous dust and smoke clouds and witness the majesty and power of the earth’s vibrant entrails just moving on, regardless of any other living thing. Meantime the Omicron variant seems to be working its way through more families and every social arena….so I have made a series of multiple Omicrons. There are parallels, maybe it’s the drive of mutation which just does not stop with the Coronavirus, finding new ways to adapt and attach. Each of my Omicrons is painted with more than a puff of CO2, I hope to find a way for them to be airborne echoing the slope of a volcano somehow, in the gallery space when we install. This develops a link with some of the iconography and my Etna in the Collective Memory show, I also think I must be channelling Werner Herzog’s extraordinary movie Into the Inferno which I saw just before Christmas. An artwork in itself which just about makes my Omicrons dust.