"Oh, Columbia" (overview and detail). 24’x 24’x12’, installation with hand-laminated and stitched household wax paper, sea salt, 2019, Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC, Canada.
MARY BABCOCK
My work addresses the spiritual, psychological, socio-ecological issues surrounding climate change. Living in Oceania, I think about myself - all of us - as water, with our shared resiliencies and vulnerabilities. I explore notions of preservation and dissolution, and question the ways in which we import and impose terrocentric and static understanding of boundaries on cultures and ecosystems more naturally accustomed to fluidity. I seek materials that enable me to probe complexity: abandoned fishing nets and lines gathered across the Pacific, my body (via performance), and household wax paper (designed to protect, yet fragile and ephemeral). My work is best informed through immersion and embodiment - through experiencing and absorbing directly the entangled energies of a space and sifting that knowledge through my hands. My goal is to gain a greater understanding of empathy and compassion, as well as of our proclivity towards destruction: our enduring entanglement.
BIO
Mary Babcock is a visual and performance artist deeply interested in the intersection of art, contemplation and socio-environmental activism. She is currently Professor in Sculpture and Expanded Practices in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona, BFA from University of Oregon, Ph. D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and B.A in Psychology from Cornell University. Her installation and mixed media work have been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally.
See more at marybabcock.com
1° 55’ 30” N (Self Portrait as Atoll). 68”x96”x3”, salvaged fishing nets and lines collected across the Pacific, deep sea leader line, and terrestrial, celestial and aquatic maps, 2015. On loan to the US Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus. Part of Hydrophilia, a 13-year series of tapestries woven from refuse that explores the qualities of water - its potentialities, its vulnerabilities, its resiliencies. Contemplations on the intersection of our bodies and pelagic bodies, they focus on the currents between land masses, those unpossessed passages that challenge our contemporary conceptions of ownership and control. Recent works are titled after latitudes - geographical lines of connection - traveling through and beyond sites of particular ecological vulnerability. 1° 55’ 30” N references the Maldives, a country facing the threat of re-submergence back into the waters within our children’s lifetimes. The piece explores our interconnection and was inspired by my newborn’s swimming lesson in which she was taught that if she simply leaned back, the water support her. Its the ineffective struggling against ourselves that leads to our drowning.
1° 55' 30 N (self portrait as atoll)
"Lotic Sea" 14’x14’x14’, installation with hand-laminated and stitched household wax paper, sea salt, 2019, University of Hawaii at Manoa Art Gallery, Honolulu, HI. “Lotic”: a term referencing rapidly moving fresh water. The work questions our understanding of borders in light of the rapidly changing topographies presented by glacial melts and sea level rise, and challenges discourses that prioritize economies over communities and ecologies.
Lotic Sea (detail) Details show needle-pricked Pacific islands and hand-stitched articulation of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) that overshadow them.
Lotic Sea (detail) Details show needle-pricked Pacific islands and hand-stitched articulation of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) that overshadow them.