Sustained Investigation #5/ Tidal Shift

Artist's Statement:

I wanted to represent the slow submersion of a beautiful, historical city like venice, and how all this can be lost due to climate change, global warming and sea level rising. I did this by dipping prints of the same building into different levels of water, to make it so that the building is slowly submerged. As the water slowly creeps over the building, the ink on the paper blurs more and more, showing how more and more of our cultures and history are lost as sea levels rise.

Material-wise I wanted to incorporate water in some way, because the whole premise is sea level rising. I chose the dip the prints in actual water, to make the water line rise more and more. This way, more and more of the art gets lost to the water. At first I thought that I might use colored water, but in the end I decided against that.

My process started with carving the lino in the shape of a famous building in venice. I knew I wanted to do something with sea level rising, but I didn't know what yet. I then had the idea to dip the prints in colored water to make it so that the building would be slowly obscured. I then learned that the ink of the prints themselves would bleed, so I decided to just use that instead. I had gotten the idea to do something about sea level rising for the videos we watched in art history about how climate change affects art.