It’s time for me to dig deep into understanding what it is I want to say with my graduating exhibit. I have a vision of what I’d like it to be, as I summarized in my previous post which I’ll paste this paragraph here for quick reference:

I am considering my final exhibition, and the vision I have involves covering the entire gallery floor in super-fragile cups and bowls of bright orange ceramic made from local clay. Viewers will need to enter into the space, crushing these forms as they go, to read my statement and (possibly) see videos that are projected onto the walls. Ideally, I’d also have very large rocks for people to sit on and contemplate the installation (though this may prove financially impossible). I’m curious to see who will decide to enter the show and who will turn away. I’m considering videoing the exhibit, informing people that by entering the space they are agreeing to being videoed. Were I to do this, it would be suggesting accountability: that we are being seen as we destroy the planet for future generations; that there will be a record. On the other hand, I don’t know if I want to bring that thread into the discussion. The main point is to provoke a private contemplation of the situation we’re in (with climate change) and of how it impacts us emotionally. I’d like the installation to be an acknowledgement of eco-anxiety/solastalgia. This is core. This can’t happen while we’re knowingly being surveilled. So, this videoing aspect is one of many decisions I have to make very carefully. Whatever I choose will change the conversation that this show sparks, the dialogue between between me and the viewer, and between my work and others’.

For someone as indecisive as I’ve been lately, how have I settled on this project for my final show? What am I trying to convey? I’ll need to spend a lot of time figuring this out, as for now all I have are many unanswered questions, such as:

• What do I want people to experience when they see my show?
• What is the narrative of this show?
• Why have I chosen to create an installation? Why should the pieces I make cover the entire gallery floor?
• Why would I use ceramic tableware (cups, bowls, plates)?
• What is the purpose of having people step of these objects and break them?
• Why would I use fired objects? Why not raw?
• Should I include anything else besides covering the floor? (At what point would this be a show and not an installation?)
• What would video bring to the installation? Which video(s) would I show?
• Should I include my “life pots,” the cups and bowls that have plants growing out of them?
• Should I include “Solastones”?
• What would be the purpose of the rocks? If rocks are impractical, what could be a good substitute? What would be lost?
• Should I video the entire duration of the show? What would this do to it in terms of how being surveilled may effect their experience?

I’ll take a stab at answering one of these, the first and most important of all — what do I want people to experience when they see my show?

I have to smile because David asked me this question back last winter when I was so thickly depressed that I was incapable of imagining having a show, never mind imagining what it would comprise or how I’d want my viewer to feel upon seeing it. All I could respond with was, “I don’t know.” Seven months later, as I’m out of the worst of it, I’m just so grateful to be here, to have an idea. Now, it’s a matter of articulating what this idea means, or at least what I want it to mean. I think this is an example of what it’s like to be an artist: knowing what you need to do before you necessarily understand why you need to do it.

I want my show to have people consider the psychological weight of the moment we’re in. Catastrophic climate change, the insect apocalypse, and the sixth mass extinction event, all caused by us, are on people’s minds, as can be seen by the increasing numbers of people suffering from eco-anxiety and grief. As we go about our busy days, we may not often stop to think about how uncertain our future is, with extreme weather events, drought, rising sea levels, food and water shortages, and mass migrations to name just a few of the issues we face. Yet we are aware of the situation, and many feel consciously anxious or hopeless, or both, about it. Even for those who aren’t consciously concerned about environmental crises, the knowledge is pretty much inescapable, and I suspect that everyone has some amount of tension in their lives as they witness the current catastrophic weather event and wait for the next. Who will it hit?

My show is meant to bring this tension to the fore. Cups and bowls are normally harmless objects we store in our cupboards. We take them, like so much, for granted. Here, they become embedded in violence. Walking into the show means destroying them, yet that’s what’s expected of viewers to do. Within the paradigm of the gallery system, we are invited to enter this space. In this case, to read about the show (via my statement on the wall), people would need to get to it, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. Or will they tentatively step only where others have stepped, attempting to do as little damage as possible? What does that imply? Is it okay to benefit from the damage done by others before us? When people get to the wall with my statement and read what I say, will they regret walking in? Will they experience momentary solastalgia? Will they feel guilty, or will they feel my show is full of shit, that they are so not implicated in the catastrophes I’ll describe on the wall? I think this show will open up various questions such as these. It’s not that I want people to walk away feeling culpable, but that I want them to feel the personal as well as collective consequences of our actions on the planet, and to recognize that having anxiety and despair about the state of the environment makes complete sense.