intertidal ecographies, 2023
Our oceans are crucially vital for a healthy planet and yet so vastly damaged and savaged as we speak. This blue space also increasingly proves significant for our wellbeing—human and more-than-human. The coast, as the place where we and the sea meet, is filled with an abundance of artistic potential, which, however, appears underrepresented in contemporary critical and conceptual art practice. How can we raise awareness and care through the creation of aesthetic immersions of sea ecologies? Rising sea levels, shorelines as borders, intertidal spaces as liminal meeting points of human and nature, rethinking local and global mindsets on art, environment, and society—water as a political body is an integral aspect of my artistic in-situ research by archiving moments when the sea water writes itself into the cyanotype prints.
The series of intertidal ecographies is a steadily growing archive of the individual and yet so similar fingerprints of the encounter between land and sea. My work is currently developing into a confrontation with the coastal areas. Understanding the environment as a habitat in constant change, I relocate the artistic working process through cyanotopy, film and photography into the space of the tides - as an "ecographic" search for traces in-situ. The project thus transfers the productive artistic activity from the studio to the immaterial space between ebb and flow. The recontextualization of artistic activity creates new processes that help our usual view of the critical meeting places of climate change to new attention. The artistic work and production with and about the sea, the salty and all-connecting element that encloses every continent, becomes a lever for me to reconsider the perception of borders and border shifts. This current conceptual, technical and methodological development builds, connects two significant examinations of my artistic development: the examination of borders and their overcoming, as well as the work with inconspicuous and invisible processes.
Fundet with the Stipend of Stiftung Kunstfond.
