What art have I seen? Katie Paterson’s Requiem
At the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.
Brilliant evocation of time and existence. If as David Antin said,
The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world.
ANTIN, D., 1970. Art + Ecology. ArtNews.
This is surely a genuinely ecological work, drawn out beautifully in Zalazewisz’s accompanying notes.
It also speaks to changes of state – each small vessel is only able to represent a facet of the materiality of time because of the technoscientific processes of isolation, but what is fragmented must eventually come back together, and so it does. Robert Smithson would have told the story of this work through the idea of entropy. The end result, much like the final end of the solar system in billions of years is a bowl of mixed up dust, all the energy dissapated.
What art have I seen? Marie Velardi
‘Lost Islands and other Works’ by Marie Velardi at Peacock Visual Arts including the timeline of human development according to Sci-fi literature.
I was invited to respond to the work as part of a Creative Carbon Scotland Green Tease. Anne Douglas and published an essay in the Elemental: Art and Ecology Reader earlier this year talking about the way that the Harrisons use inconsistency and contradiction in their works. This seemed relevant in relation to Velardi’s works, perhaps most obviously the timeline but also the works about islands and coastlines. Keeping contradictory truths in tension is an important skill and capacity that artists use in their works. Having just been at Tim Ingold’s lecture on the Sustainability of Everything this point is relevant to how we conceptualise living and carrying on.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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