Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark, 2018-2025

This body of drawings uses pigments made with found carbon-based materials—coal, graphite, ash and wildfire-derived charcoal—collected in the East and West Kootenays where coal and graphite mining take place and climate-induced wildfires are increasing in severity. Gathered during walks to mine and forest fire sites, some of these materials are elementally linked to flora and fauna from the primordial past: both coal and graphite are produced from ancient living matter that has undergone immense transformation over millennia and are remnants of once-thriving ecosystems. This project records a sustained effort to capture an elemental and animate quality embedded in these materials and is meant to evoke carbon’s duality as a life-bearing element and the effects of its accelerated use as a synthetic hydrocarbon. Innitially produced during a residency at Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC) in 2019, the exhibition text by curator Katie Belcher can be found here.

These drawings explore carbon as a pigment, an element, the basis of all living beings and life-processes through deep time, and the combusted substance which is central to climate change. An essay about this work titled And Even Dust Can Burst Into Flames, written by Caitlin Chaisson, was published in Ecocene, an online environmental humanities journal. Here is a direct link. The project was also featured in Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada (Wilfrid-Laurier University Press).