Your cart is currently empty!
Full Menu
Jordan Schwab: The Tip of the Iceberg Top 5
Our current exhibition The Tip of the Iceberg visualises issues related to global climate change, featuring work by artists from across BC. We’ve invited three artists: David Ellingsen, Jordan Schwab and Desirée Patterson to share resources that they find inspiring as they create artwork addressing climate change and its impacts.
1. Article – The Globe and Mail
I came across this article when I was trying to figure out a way to translate an invisible presence (carbon gas) into a physical, sculptural representation. It is not long, almost a throw away article for the day, but the numbers stuck with me, and I used them to calculate measurements for a variety of projects.
Canadians produce three times more greenhouse gas emissions than G20 average – The Globe and Mail
2. My Own Eyes
My second resource, and maybe my most important, have been my own eyes. I have spent time in Jasper National Park almost every year of my life, usually around the townsite, or heading east towards Edmonton. It had been almost 30 years since I drove south through the Icefields, having fond memories of stopping to see the glaciers. Driving that way over the past few years, I was shocked to see where the glaciers were, my brain having trouble correlating my memory with the drastic change laid before me.
3. Mountain Legacy Project
If you would like to see changes in glaciers for yourself, but do not have access to a time machine, check out Mountain Legacy Project. This was started by researchers at the University of Victoria, the site includes hundreds of time-lapse photos from Rocky Mountain National Parks over the last hundred years, as well as articles and academic papers discussing the rapid change in the landscape.
4. The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard
My last resources are two books I read in the past few years. Although neither is specifically about climate change, in The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard, through nearly poetic scientific research, she investigates how humans exist not only as individuals, but as a species that must coexist with other living things and the environment.
5. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller
Finally, in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller, our planet is presented as a huge spaceship that we are riding through this vast universe, and as the drivers, humans must take care of this ship, or risk destroying the only ride we have.
