Dwelling in a Climate Crisis

Exhibited at Shell House Arts, 2019
Text, photographs, and installations

An attempt to live sustainably within the Antrhopocene, the Sixth Mass Extinction, and impending eco-crisis. Throughout a one month residency at Shell House, I explored ways to more poetically engage with our environment, using multi-sensory and embodied forms of knowing to attempt to grasp my complicity within ecosystems and my role within large environmental systems. This included foraging for oyster mushrooms and re-culturing mushrooms into a mycelium slurry to be returned to the forest ("A recipe for mushrooms for mushrooms"); foraging for edible, underutilized plants on the property, including clover, wood sorrel, and thyme; collecting rainwater from various external surfaces on the shell house structure. The work also included a rendering for "A Room for Plants for Plants"—a thought experiment to design spaces explicitly for nonhumans. In all of these applications, nonhuman collaborations are given priority, but questions of agency and anthropocentrism evolve as continually inherent in the experiments.

A Recipe for Mushrooms for Mushrooms
Take foraged mushrooms and chop roughly. Place into a large (at least 24 in wide) bowl.
Add one cup of sugar and a pinch of salt to a bowl of warm water.
Cover and soak mushrooms for three days.
Deposit mixture near a dead tree or dead leaf pile,,
returning the cultured mycelium to fungal network

Above: Rendering for "A Room for Plants for Plants"—An application of a thought experiment to design spaces explicitly for nonhumans.

Installations pictured above:
Rainwater
found glass vessels, rain water, preserved thyme, 2019

Water Capture
wood, vinyl architectural construction siding, metal, tubing, 2019

We exist now in an unforgiving era—one defined by the amplification of our actions, radiated through scales of time and space beyond an individual human's perception, and beyond any past generations' experience. We are uniquely able to see the vast impact of even our smallest gestures, the unlikelihood that our unfolding of saran wrap would be linked to the melting of the Jakobshavn Glacier. How are we to reconcile the each movement necessitated by our existence with the destruction our species has wrought? Can our bodies learn to live, to dwell, in a climate crisis?

Dwelling in a Climate Crisis

Above: Rendering for "A Room for Plants for Plants"—An application of a thought experiment to design spaces explicitly for nonhumans.

Installations pictured above: Rainwater found glass vessels, rain water, preserved thyme, 2019 Water Capture wood, vinyl architectural construction siding, metal, tubing, 2019

Installations pictured above:
Rainwater
found glass vessels, rain water, preserved thyme, 2019

Water Capture
wood, vinyl architectural construction siding, metal, tubing, 2019