The new body of work presented at GBK will consist of a series of tapestries depicting disasters that have manifested from the use of petroleum products. There will also be a number of sculptural wall works that conflagrate the unique geometry of snowflakes with the variety of motor vehicle design.

Cross-stitching- a time intensive process, is used to represent a number of historically significant yet fleeting moments. The small details depicted within each piece are taken from iconic images that have been imprinted within our collective psyche.

The genesis of the wall sculptures is the snowflake photography of Wilson Bentley. Through his photographic study of snowflakes carried out at the end of the nineteenth century, Bentley originally posited that no two snowflakes are alike. We have combined this mind-bending natural phenomenon with man’s manifold nature of motor vehicle design.

There is a common misconception that Eskimos have two hundred words for our word ‘snow’; born from the fact that Inuit languages add suffixes to words to describe ideas that would need a compound word or even an entire sentence in English. But the misconception does evoke a sense of oneness with the environment. The idea of being so mentally and spiritually attuned to an outside world, in which two hundred different words are used to describe a phenomenon which we bluntly use one word, is alluring. But could we possibly live in such a world? Would we actually get bored senseless?

We live in a created world of novelty and sensation. A world that constantly offers new experiences and visions. It is an age that will never again be repeated in history. It is an age that is literally fuelled by the remains of a bygone era: fossil fuel. We are the inheritors of a power that has taken millions of years to produce, a power that we have the pleasure of exhausting within several generations. But the power that drives our age is so ubiquitous, it almost becomes invisible, it is almost impossible to imagine a world without it.

Our exhibition at GBK focuses upon the aesthetics of fossil fuel consumption. We will apply the same intensity of gaze on this subject as Wilson Bently did in his study of the individual geometry of snowflakes.