Back to the City
Installation
Newcastle, New South Wales
Complete
A temporary public artwork conceived and executed in collaboration with renowned Australian artist Michael Zavros as part of the event Back to the City in Newcastle between 24 January and 17 February 08. An excerpt from our statement about the work follows:
"The title of the work Carbon Footprint – In the End the Rain Comes Down, alludes rather directly to both the place-specific issues we engaged with and the execution of the work itself.
"It is a well-known fact that Newcastle is the largest coal port in the world, with the exported coal producing around 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions around the world every year. The carbon footprint of this city is immense indeed.
"Our proposal envisages a "footprint generating" device, applied directly to the ground using sticks of charcoal, which, like coal, is almost entirely composed of carbon. "In the end the rain comes down" is a line from the lyrics of the Midnight Oil song Blue Sky Mine, and we find that the true poetry of this lyric lies in its long view of history, hinting at a future on a geological time-scale when the excesses of human greed will simply have been washed away by the natural forces of a planet which has long since shrugged off the very existence of our species.
"Lastly, this lyric is also a simple description of the process by which the carbon marks left on the pavement surrounding our artwork will vanish with the first shower."
