Our collaboration combines our respective backgrounds in visual art, sound studies, geology and paleontology and investigates the ways in which art and science communicate. We are fascinated by the challenge of locating ourselves within the vastness of geologic time and the ways in which our human experiences are intertwined with the earth's cycles of growth and decay. Reflecting on environmental issues and human dislocation of space, we build sensory channels between the personal, the human, and the metaphorical with the othered, the terrestrial, and the scientific.
Our process begins as an intimate and private journey and evolves into a more holistic approach incorporating scientific research and crafting in situ. Using electricity, magnetism, and sound to activate images, forms, and found objects, we create visual and aural assemblages using materials both foraged from nature and from our daily surroundings. By working in situ in places undergoing transformative yet under-recognized forces, our collaboration proposes an alternative mode of relations, one that does not consider Landscape as a static subject but as an active agent representing the constant flux between human and natural histories.
As a team of artists and researchers from diverse backgrounds, we would like to explore the question of how time on Rabbit Island moves on a different scale from the one we experience in our daily lives. We are drawn to the ways in which geologic traces are preserved and changed by the island's ecosystem. By studying, documenting, and recording the biota of Rabbit Island as well as our interactions with it, we hope to uncover memories of non-anthropocentric records of time.
We view geology as a subject that studies both relics and contemporary material evidence to speculate and construct narratives about the history of our surroundings. By approaching Rabbit Island as a parallel universe, an alternative shelter that enables us to view our world from a different perspective, we hope to gain a new understanding of our place within the earth’s cycle. Through activities such as sound recording, 3D scanning and photogrammetry, drawing, and documenting our encounters and studies of the island's geology and ecology — from the Jacobsville sandstone to the red-back vole — we will be working to gain insights into our role as artists, humans, and coexisting entities in relation to the island.
Our interdisciplinary approach, combining visual art, sound studies, and scientific research, offers a unique perspective on the natural world. Through our activities on Rabbit Island, we aim to provide a window through which we can understand where humanity stands in the vastness of the time of the earth.
