ON REFLECTION: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF LIGHT ON A WARMING WORLD. 

A practice-based investigation in the expanded photography field.

This project investigates how a photographic contemporary art practice can respond critically and imaginatively to the climate crisis, specifically to the global ice melt. It considers how the camera could be utilised not only as a representational tool to document the landscape in crisis, but performatively, to foreground questions of ontology, materiality and agency. It draws on philosophical-contextual analysis of New Materialist philosophy and contemporary and historical photographic discourse – to articulate some of the material entanglements of photography and the climate crisis, foregrounding the interplay of light and matter on a variety of scales.

Temporal Positioning

I started this research in 2017, one year after the landmark United Nations Paris Agreement (a legally binding treaty on climate change signed by 196 parties) came into force. I was three months pregnant. I gave birth to my daughter in February 2018 and took a years maternity leave. During that year I took approximately 2700 images of my daughter’s first year on earth, which equated to about 30gb of data stored in the cloud. 

I returned to my research in 2019, the year that it was announced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the ice collapse was irreversible and by the UN that the number of animal and plant species facing extinction within the decades to come was unprecedented.

In March 2020 the covid pandemic caused the activities of our species to slow and localise. Amidst that ‘pause’ there was some speculation about the positive impact lockdown restrictions (such as vastly reduced car and air travel) might have on global carbon emissions. However, just as these restrictions came to an end in 2021, it was announced by the IPCC that predictions suggest the world will warm by 1.5C by 2040 (much earlier than previous warnings), a global tipping point that will lead to increased extreme weather conditions – heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods.  At this point in the research my daughter is three and I have over 12,000 photos and videos (94gb of data) of our lives together stored in the cloud.

The 2020s thus far have heralded a number of traumatic weather events across the globe. In December 2021 the WMO (World Meteorological Organisation) recorded a new arctic temperature high (World Meteorological Organization, 2021), and in April 2023 an international team of scientists working with satellite data announced that the acceleration of the Arctic melt was now unmistakeable. My daughter is now five years old. I have 15,000 photos and 3,600 video clips in the cloud, equating to 111gb of data relating to this formative period of her life.

I share this information, not only to provide an overview of the research project’s timeline, but specifically to define my temporal position as a researcher and how that specific temporality has shaped aspects of my methodology as the research has progressed. My practice operates as a processing tool, drawing out a series of conceptual relations within a material-technological framework that is temporally bound in the ever-shifting present. I input environmental news articles, physics factoids and technological concepts while engaging elements of autotheory and I output aesthetic responses which operate through material and poetic connections formed by the interference the practical activity provides.