Chelsea Bostock
STRATA: Tempered Elements and other Truths
To fully understand the effects of mining, one must first understand the Earth’s strata – both natural and produced. I investigated two components: Earth’s masked geology and the pattern of human inhabitancy. The Earth’s crust works as a veil hiding the depletion of its resources; the stacked columns remove this veil to expose the true extent of the exhaustion consumerism has caused. Capitalism has exhausted the majority of the shallow and affordable mining deposits, forcing miners to drill to great depths below the water table in order to retrieve Earth’s precious commodities. The scaling height of these columns emphasise the depth humanity is being forced to reach to gain these resources; this fuels society’s satisfaction to consume.
“We inhabit the Biogea, valley of labors and joys, but also frequent a place that we need in order to relativise our passions for procession, our stupidities of control, our cruel decision to objectivise the beings and things of the world, in short, our libido for belonging, and to detach ourselves from that will to appropriation that, already soiling the habitat of our children, is destroying their lives even before they are born.”
Within each cube form, one finds cavities and ruptures, similar to unexpected blockages and voids when excavating in the unknown depths below. Each individual form aims to capture the occurrences and happenings of Earth’s layers right down to the core. Some showcase the actions of spillage, oozing, spreading, liquefying, pressure build up, absence and voids.
