Contact information
hollybirtles@hotmail.co.ukThe average life expectancy of the human body is 72 years.
The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years.
Seismic Mother is an exhibition that captures the work of 20 artists whose work attempts to communicate the seemingly incomprehensible nature of the earth’s magnitude and magnificence, temerity and resilience as it endures, regenerates and struggles to survive through the slow violence of ecological catastrophe.
The artists involved expose and narrate the experience of what it means to be alive in the 21st century through the materiality of matter; drawing on experience, manipulating mineral and metal and making works that are contemplative and meditative. The work places the extraordinary alongside the everyday, harnessing chemical reactions and volcanic ecologies exploring environmental exploitation and the ingestion of raw materials, exposing and creating unseen or new worlds. Their methodologies and mediums are wide-ranging and diverse, encompassing film, performance, ceramics, photography and interactive sculpture. They invite the audience into a world that is texturally and visually tactile, recalling landscapes, objects and ways of living that are precarious and endangered, creating works of art that transgress boundaries and borders.
In an attempt to regain and rebalance ourselves in a time of flux, these art works and performances address the paradox of natural beauty associated with geology as a reaction and resistance to the barbarism and potency of human disruption and destruction of our planet.
Seismic Mother asks the audience to heed its call, to immerse in the aesthetic, while responding to the pragmatic; how do we move beyond catastrophe, how do we steady ourselves and what do we hold onto?
Artists in the show
- Miriam Austin
- Nikolai Azariah
- Holly Birtles
- Charly Blackburn
- Alfonso Borragan
- Johanna Bramli
- Ed Chivers
- Stephen Cornford
- Josie Maprayil
- Rosaleen Maprayil
- Hollie Miller
- Cameron Naylor
- Gareth Phillips
- Phillip Reeves
- Véronique Rolland
- Xavier Ribas
- Himali Singh Soin
- Lara Smithson
- Samuel Zealey
