Saturday, January 18, 2014

Sink or Swim - U.K. Screenings





If you're passing through the U.K. on your winter travels please drop by the Furtherfield Gallery in London on January 25th, Bloc Projects in Sheffield, February 14-16, or the Plymouth Arts Centre in early March for a look at my latest video contribution to the One Minute Volume 7 series curated by Kerry Baldry.

Sink or Swim is from a series of videos called Hunt & Gather, which examines the real and imagined behaviours of human and animal populations as they both struggle to survive in an increasingly challenging and competitive global environment. In the video, the ominous pulse of medical technology monitors the laboured breathing of an obscure biomass, suggesting the symptomatic effects of rapid climate change on an increasingly compromised planet. Sink or Swim wonders what the prognosis is for human survival, if we continue to ignore the conditions that link the fate of our species with the fate of others.

The video came about on one of my walks when I found a dried up ditch filled with stranded fish. It had been an unnaturally wet spring followed closely by an unexpected heat wave and schools of the tiny Stickleback had been left high and dry. I had nothing with me but a hat, so I scooped up as many living fish as I could and ran back and forth to the nearest canal, about a 1/4 mile away, until I'd saved all that I could. This happened a few years ago before 'extreme weather' situations became seemingly commonplace.

Sink or swim: to fail or succeed, to survive or become extinct. 

For more info please visit:  http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/one-minute-volume-7  
or http://www.blocprojects.co.uk

If you have a chance to catch the video sometime, let me know what you think, I'd love to hear from you. xs