Weaving Our Planetary Futures through Art Catherine Sarah Young
As an artist, it is impossible to decouple my practice from the planetary crisis of climate change and its entanglements. My experiences living around the world thanks to residencies and fellowships have allowed not just a knowledge exchange with local communities but also a personal immersion into the diversity of climate impacts. I firmly believe that the years ahead of us are years of repair for the catastrophes that we have wrought, from fossil fuel emissions that lead to the climate emergency, to habitat destruction that leads to disease, to rising inequality worldwide that leads to social unrest. I believe that the arts — and all other fields — have a critical role to play in planetary repair. We need all hands on deck to save us from ourselves. As an artist, I like working with what I can gather. This could mean the physical material I acquire, such as bushfire ash in Australia or raw sewage in the Philippines, or stories I collect, such as the memories of scents of the Amazon or thoughts of climate change deniers directed at me. From these concrete and abstract materials, I work out why these are important and how we might care about them even though we tend to overlook these materials in the busyness of our lives. The general sense of overwhelm that we feel living in the tumultuous times of 2022 can make the world seem like a tangled ball of yarn, and as an artist I like to help to detangle this by taking a thread and pulling it out of the snarl so that we can see a story coming out of it.
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