hanging in the balance
Ekserserhus, Kristiansand, Norway, 2019The work shows the phrase ‘hanging in the balance’ made from salt on the floor, sheets of paper listing mammals that became extinct between 1990 and 2019, the course of my lifetime, and a speaker playing recordings of these now-extinct animals’ calls.
The work draws attention to what has been lost through listening. These sounds once belonged to living animals and would have been part of the environments they inhabited, but can now only be encountered through recordings. Played back in the gallery, they become a kind of memorialisation. The list gives this loss another form, recording the names of species that disappeared within a period of time that corresponds to my own life. The salt phrase sits between these two elements, with salt being a material that is both life giving and life destroying.
