Organic cotton, upcycled deckchairs, riso-print on recycled paper
Space for Solastalgia, 2024
Solastalgia is a concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress. Whilst nostalgia is the melancholia or homesickness experienced by people when separated from a loved home, Solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people and their places. It is a homesickness you feel when you are still at home.
The work features a logbook, a drawing and a garden. Using the drawing plan as a cue, visitors are encouraged to contribute a personal reflection of a place that is missing or has experienced change in the visitors’ book, before leaving the gallery through the backdoor to the carpark. An allotted parking space has been permanently reclaimed into a space for Solastalgia, a temporary fabric facade nested between three trees.
In the urgency of our time, this is the kind of space we need and will need, a space for complicated feelings, an intimate space, a safe space, a space to find solace, a den, a recluse, to heal, to mourn and to help us move forward. Sounds of lost species sing out in a gesture of acoustic enrichment (the ecological technique of playing healthy environments to bring back lost creatures).
Informed by the memorial culture of Tartu and Estonia, specifically the forest cemeteries, the installation provides physical and phycological space to process what has been lost.
In collaboration with Samuel Collins.
Sound piece produced w/ Shō Murayama.
‘Missing’ exhibition, Kunstimaja, Tartu EE.
Featured on Estonian news channel: https://kultuur.err.ee/1609434565/tartu-kunstimaja-naitusel-kohtuvad-kunst-ja-teadus
The work features a logbook, a drawing and a garden. Using the drawing plan as a cue, visitors are encouraged to contribute a personal reflection of a place that is missing or has experienced change in the visitors’ book, before leaving the gallery through the backdoor to the carpark. An allotted parking space has been permanently reclaimed into a space for Solastalgia, a temporary fabric facade nested between three trees.
In the urgency of our time, this is the kind of space we need and will need, a space for complicated feelings, an intimate space, a safe space, a space to find solace, a den, a recluse, to heal, to mourn and to help us move forward. Sounds of lost species sing out in a gesture of acoustic enrichment (the ecological technique of playing healthy environments to bring back lost creatures).
Informed by the memorial culture of Tartu and Estonia, specifically the forest cemeteries, the installation provides physical and phycological space to process what has been lost.
In collaboration with Samuel Collins.
Sound piece produced w/ Shō Murayama.
‘Missing’ exhibition, Kunstimaja, Tartu EE.
Featured on Estonian news channel: https://kultuur.err.ee/1609434565/tartu-kunstimaja-naitusel-kohtuvad-kunst-ja-teadus
