ABOUT THE WORK
Making New Land, 2021
Mixed media installation: Glass, Sandblasted Wood, Sand, Cement, Found images.
70 % of Sandy beaches are undergoing some form of erosion resulting from human activity. The project Making New Land addresses this contemporary context through the lens of a fiction set in a dystopian future without coasts or oceans as we know them. The nostalgic longing for peaceful coasts and beaches is used as a medium to reflect on the conditions that might preserve them today. The growth and fragile architecture of dunes and coastal plants is rendered through artefacts and models, contrasting with the predominant politics of hard landscaping of shores and seawalls. In Making New Land the qualities and complex interactions between plants, minerals and human activity on the shorelines are translated through poetic artefacts. The presence of sand in its various states, both industrial and natural creates an anthropogenic landscape, inhabited by plant architectures and future life forms. Viscous Glass Ventifacts, only temporary solidified by human efforts echo the liquid ontology of the sea and the constant transformation of coastlines and continents; The installation mirrors the essay Making New Land, and Intertidal Aesthetics written by Pausz to be published in 2021 in the collective publication Swamps and the New Imagination.