Title: Sink
Artist(s): Julian Priest
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): co2 pollution, ocean acidification
This piece is a sculptural work from 2012 that stands ‘as a model of anthropogenic ocean acidification’.1 Priest placed a scallop shell in brine, and attached a small combustion motor to the installation, and into the brine pumps the exhaust gases. This ‘killing environment’ 2 thus simulates the contemporary environment of ocean acidification and pollution. Over time, the carbon dioxide released from the combustion engine, reacts with the brine, making it more acidic and eroding the scallop shell. This is a representation of the damage created by carbon, and at once it reveals the usually hidden ‘mechanics of operation and the connections with the world’ (ibid.), especially those of contemporary technologies. For Priest, ‘even when the workings are exposed, most of the time the environmental impact of a technology is not explicitly stated, but treated as an externality’ (ibid.).
For the purposes of this project, this piece is interesting in how it visibilises the process of environmental degradation, through the erosion of the scallop shell, while visibly connecting the cause – the combustion engine and carbon – into the installation. This removes the conceptual distance between what society does in its carbon-intensive practices, and the destruction that may be spatially distant from that society. By juxtaposing these two elements together in a ‘killing environment’, Priest removes that conceptual distance.