Carbon Synthesis: Spatial Dissonance @TheBirleyStudios

“First came the Wind, then Reindeer, then Humans” Leena Valkeapää (2024)

I am delighted to have just curated and installed a new exhibition of works at The Birley Artist Studios in Preston.

The Carbon Synthesis project evolved during 2020, I was honoured to be working with two artists Dr Donna Franklin (AU) and Dr Sarah Robinson (AU). Together we shared collaborative conversations exploring how creative arts practice can reveal invisible narratives and innovative ways of witnessing climate change. 

In September 2024 we were lucky enough to join the International Ars Bioarctica artist residency programme in northern Finland, a long-term art-science initiative hosted by Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki. 

Ars BioArctica blog

The sub-arctic Kilpisjärvi region is a litmus paper for highlighting impacts of global disturbances on northern and southern ecosystems. Carbon Synthesis: Spatial Dissonance explores and reveals invisible narratives and micro-environments, requiring us to feel and see in new ways. Specifically, this joint project explored a sub-arctic landscape which resisted being fully understood and challenged our usual perceptions, imagination and human timescales. Likewise, by its very nature bioarts contests anthropocentricity and generates ecological empathy. Through nuanced encounters with other beings, provocation and questioning, it refuses to reduce life to a capitalist bioresource.

Informed by ecology, geology, culture, and politics, this exhibition brings together new artworks and installations created through entangled approaches to research undertaken on Sáná Fell, Malla nature reserve, Kilpisjärvi Lake and surrounding birch forests. Gilbbesjávri/Kilpisjärvi in Sápmi is the cultural region of the Sámi people, stretching across the state borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. A site of intense observation and international attention, it is perceived as a landscape which holds both clues and answers for our most pressing global environmental questions. 

As part of the new works I created for this project I have worked with LuminXR to develop a new installation activated by AR. Valuable R&D time with Tor and Diego has enabled the AR software to be developed to activate my print installation. Using unique software the resonance image is animated using a Cymatics image from the sound of wind captured in Kilpisjarvi during my residency.

Carbon Synthesis : Spatial Dissonance runs until 12th April.