TY - ADVS

T1 - Emergency: Drawn out of Ice

A2 - Casey, Sarah

PY - 2022/11/12

Y1 - 2022/11/12

N2 - Emergency! is an exhibition of new work developed in response to the precarity of glacial archaeology. In 2018, at the Musée d’histoire du Valais in Switzerland, she began drawing artefacts that have emerged from alpine glaciers as the ice in which they have been preserved for 50, 500 or 5000 years melts at unprecedented rates. These rare and valuable finds preserve important knowledge about the past, yet insight comes at the cost of environmental change and threatened futures. Moreover, the artefacts themselves, once released from their frozen slumber, will rapidly decay and disintegrate when exposed. The work aims to explore this precarity asking how might processes of drawing – with its use of marking and erasure, presence and absence – negotiate these tensions and find new ways of thinking through loss and change? The drawings in the exhibition are made by trapping dust in wax and so, like the archaeology they depict, are contingent on their environmental conditions to survive – if they get exposed to heat, they will melt away. This research was supported by Lancaster University, and developed through a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship 2021. The exhibition is featured part of the programme of events in the Being Human Festival 2022.The exhibition is supported with a project grant from Arts Council England.

AB - Emergency! is an exhibition of new work developed in response to the precarity of glacial archaeology. In 2018, at the Musée d’histoire du Valais in Switzerland, she began drawing artefacts that have emerged from alpine glaciers as the ice in which they have been preserved for 50, 500 or 5000 years melts at unprecedented rates. These rare and valuable finds preserve important knowledge about the past, yet insight comes at the cost of environmental change and threatened futures. Moreover, the artefacts themselves, once released from their frozen slumber, will rapidly decay and disintegrate when exposed. The work aims to explore this precarity asking how might processes of drawing – with its use of marking and erasure, presence and absence – negotiate these tensions and find new ways of thinking through loss and change? The drawings in the exhibition are made by trapping dust in wax and so, like the archaeology they depict, are contingent on their environmental conditions to survive – if they get exposed to heat, they will melt away. This research was supported by Lancaster University, and developed through a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship 2021. The exhibition is featured part of the programme of events in the Being Human Festival 2022.The exhibition is supported with a project grant from Arts Council England.

M3 - Exhibition

PB - Drawing Projects UK

ER -