Thursday, August 6, 2020
Making something concrete (or in this case, rammed earth) can be a function of art. With students, I transformed the SEV LTER’s ecological question around the predicted increase of variance of rainfall, the falling mean and plant life changes, extruding the stark imagery of the graph into five plinths, 20 years of data each, and a steel sculpture of the variance line. The labor mimics the public’s experience of climate change. What seemed a nebulous threat for most of the decades of my adult life, has become concrete and specific, like ramming earth and welding steel for months.