Emotional Climate
2024, site-specific, participatory, video, audio, community collaborations
Emotional Climate is a site-specific, participatory artwork that has at its center short statements from a wide variety of people in Queensland, Australia, expressing the emotions they are experiencing in response to climate change and its impacts. The project explores the intimate connection between ourselves and the changing environment that we inhabit and share with other beings. Queensland, Australia was chosen due to the unique constellation of environmental and economic factors the state encompasses, as home to unique and vulnerable ecosystems in its tropical rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef, as well as hosting industries that contribute to climate change impacts and yet are integral to its economy, such as coal extraction and beef production. The final form of the project is variable, taking shape as animated text displayed on screens, as projections, through audio, and virtually, and is intended to be disseminated in public facing spaces. Starting during the week of May 20, 2024, Emotional Climate will be displayed in several locations throughout Queensland simultaneously. These displays include: on screens at the regional CQU campuses in Brisbane, Bundaberg, Cairns, Emerald, Gladstone, Mackay, Melbourne, Rockhampton, Sydney, and Townsville, on CQU social media accounts, at Queensland College of Art and Design in Brisbane, on several screens at the Gladstone airport, and in an exhibition at Gallery 31 on the CQU Mackay City campus. The project also includes two community activations prompting creative responses to the topics raised by the project, conducted with students at St. Mary’s Catholic Primary School and with residents at Benevolent Living Aged Care in Rockhampton. These community activations were made in collaboration with Tammy Dorsett, teacher at St. Mary’s Catholic Primary School and Eleanor Thompson, Arts Director at Benevolent Living. An exhibition of the project with these creative responses will be on view at the Long Gallery at Benevolent Living Aged Care in Rockhampton, May 18 - June 16, 2024. Emotional Climate was made possible through a 2024 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and with additional support from Central Queensland University.
