Two North East artists are among a group of international creatives exploring the mysteries of the ocean in a new exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
00:00The first of the two brand new exhibitions at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead is called For All at Last Return.
00:08The immersive show takes visitors on a journey through underwater worlds, examining humanity's shared relationship with fragile marine environments and the communities that depend on them.
00:19Artists Michelle Allen and Rob Smith, both based in the North East, joined 10 others from around the world in blending art and science to highlight the impacts of climate change and human activity on marine ecosystems.
00:33Working with photography, sound and archival research, Michelle Allen's contribution focuses on the North East coastline, documenting efforts to restore lost habitats and the recent die-off of marine species.
00:47Rob Smith's work, meanwhile, dives into the deep ocean, exploring newly discovered dark oxygen produced by deep-sea nodules in a multimedia installation that uses real-time data.
01:00I'm very local to Baltic, I live out in Whitley Bay on the coast and yeah, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the sea and what lies beneath the surface in my work for the last five years or so, probably, no, maybe longer.
01:19And in this project, I've been thinking about deep-sea mining and yeah, these rocks called polymetallic nodules that are under the sea and mining companies are wanting to mine these nodules for the metals that are in them.
01:40And these are metals that are very good for making batteries and useful for technologies like computers and telephones and the things that are sort of powering the green revolution, but they're taking them from an environment that we know very little about.
01:58And the impacts of what that mining would be are widely unknown because it's never happened before and so through this work, I'm trying to open up a conversation where we can imagine or think about what these nodules are doing under the surface of the Pacific Ocean, so they're four and a half kilometres deep, you know, no one's ever been down into that sort of depth.
02:26And so it's like through these technologies that we build an understanding of these deep sea environments.
02:33I've created this digital artwork and sort of working with technologies like 3D modelling and live data to create this animated site of what a deep sea mining location might be like.
02:51So we can sort of open up those conversations around deep sea mining in a way that people can understand and engage with.
Be the first to comment