Degrees of Concern

Hannah Brontë Alexander Boynes Ngaio Fitzpatrick Mandy Martin Rebecca McEwan Michaela McHugh Thomas O’Hara Anna Raupach Adam Sébire Jasmine Targett Yandell Walton 8 February – 18 March 2022

ANU School of Art & Design Gallery

Degrees of Concern Recently I watched the star-studded satire Don’t Look Up. Broadly praised by scientists, activists, and audiences, if not by movie critics, the film uses a huge asteroid heading directly towards earth as a metaphor to critique climate change inaction. It made me laugh. But, as the satire sinks in, my heart also sinks in contemplation of the tough reality that to keep global temperatures below a 1.5 or even 2-degree rise requires global cooperation and abandoning business as usual.

Degrees of Concern is part of the ACT-wide program Aquifer: Art + Climate + Water and coincides with the Australian National University Climate Update 2022. Curated by Megan Hinton and Irina Agaronyan it presents varied conceptual and material approaches to climate change by contemporary Australian artists. For decades science has shown that global warming is real and upon us. Yet urgency for climate action, communicated by scholars, citizens and activists is at an impasse. What then is the contribution of artistic practice and research in shifting this inaction?

The works here use different scales, positions and approaches to data and space, which when installed together will open fruitful conversations amongst them. Nightingale et al argue that, ‘[o]ur collective failure to implement urgent action on the basis of knowing and predicting climate change outcomes warrants our conviction that profound changes are needed in how we imagine “the climate problem”’1. They propose that to engender action we need to activate our imaginations through an ‘ontological plurality’, where different scales can be comprehended together and where research begins from different prompts or socio-political and cultural positions.2 Rather than striving to gather more data, they suggest the gaps and multiple perspectives in our understanding make space in which imagination can flourish, assumptions can be questioned, and hegemonies can be challenged. In the wake of COP26 commentators have articulated a mix of hope, despair, and horror at the limited outcomes. These artists draw scientific, socio-political and cultural positions close, believing change is still possible.

1 Nightingale, Andrea Joslyn, Siri Eriksen, Marcus Taylor, Timothy Forsyth, Mark Pelling, Andrew Newsham, Emily Boyd, et al. “Beyond Technical Fixes: Climate Solutions and the Great Derangement.” Climate and Development 12, no. 4 (April 20, 2020): p348. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17565529.2019.1624495.

2 ibid.

Yandell Walton’s Deadline takes no prisoners. Its LED clock counts down in real time to 2030, the D-day named by UN negotiators. Walton’s ticking time bomb is an urgent focal point amongst intimate and sited works. Anna Madeleine Raupach and Thomas O’Hara use burnt wood as material and metaphor. Raupach illustrates summer temperature data as graphs formed from burned matches, and O’Hara re-uses burnt eucalyptus, sourced from the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires whose smoke shrouded Canberra, to create wearable art: keeping the forest close.

In anthropoScene IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice) (2019) Adam Sebire’s three channel video cuts together an aeroplane’s jetstream, a plane taxiing down a runway and a person (the artist) setting himself adrift from the Arctic sea-ice by sawing through the ice. By calculating how much sea-ice would melt as a result of his flight from Australia to Greenland to make this work, he shows how our actions (in this instance his art practice and travel) contribute to global warming.3 Watching the handsaw carve easily through the ice, a deliberate act which set the ice adrift and, one assumes, resulted in it melting even more quickly than if it had remained intact, left me feeling a sense of foreboding and anguish. What is our next move when the freedoms and privilege of global mobility, the desire to see the world, are so frighteningly selfish.

The view in Jasmine Targett’s Noctilucent Canary is that of the all-seeing satellite. Through a series of still images, printed on silk, she uses different lenses and filters to obstruct the view of Noctilucent clouds, which some scientists consider to be Earth’s atmospheric climate canary. This god-like perspective balances the short human lifespan and the extraordinary environmental changes since the industrial revolution against the longer, more intangible timeframes to which other climatic and geological systems adhere.

Hannah Bronte’s Umma’s Tongue - molten at 6000˚ connects the narrative of Climate Change and care to non-linear time. Bronte’s hip-hop video loops between contemporary and timeless imagery: of celebratory, empowered First Nation women and the gouged landscapes of open-cut mines. She reminds us to heed First Nation Knowledges, as a way of listening, to attend to peoples most affected by Climate Change and to position Mother Earth as part of ourselves and something to nurture with rather than extract from.

3

https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/us-and-german-researchers-calculate-individual-contribution-climate-change

As a collection of works, Degrees of Concern poses different ontologies. None claim to ‘have the answer’ but each cries for a deeper engagement with our collective plight. As the stymied negotiations of COP26 show, we need more than science to shift our ways. We must elevate these challenges to ‘matters of concern’. In addition to putting public pressure on governments and corporations to implement change, artistic practices are a fertile space in which to test ideas and ask questions. As Nightingale et al suggest, surrounding climate knowledge with ‘values, normative commitments, experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world’ insists that we face climate change with more than data. Artists understand Climate Change as a cultural problem, requiring more than science to solve.

Degrees of Concern holds space for the complexity of contested politics and social action and is a vital contributor to the ANU Climate Update. It speculatively and collectively poses new ontologies and approaches which can unfurl our imaginations to find real ways of effecting climate action.

Dr Rebecca Mayo Lecturer, ANU School of Art & Design Nature X Culture and Art, Politics and Social Engagement Research Hubs

Brontë is an Artist/Creatrix living and working on Yugambeh country . Brontë’s body of works explores the feminine experience, young women’s and mother’s journeys and spiritual connections. Much of her work correlates the treatment of the earth to the treatment of our bodies. Her journey of self discovery and the tangled layers of walking this life drive her to create dreamscapes exploring what could be . Hannah embraces multiple mediums including video, textiles, and soundscapes, and combines these to create visually distinctive works with a kaleidoscopic lense.

Recently Brontë has included holistic, spiritual and physical healers as consultants for much of her work. Aiming to ground audiences through the experiences depicted in her pieces. Learning that in vulnerability lies strength. Brontë’s work has begun unpacking intergenerational spiritual knowledge, which she feels is just the beginning of a new direction within her work. Her work deeply centres on exploring healing practices within art making and the expansion of communities through mark making. Much of this chapter is influenced by her trainee practice as a birthing Doula and Djing .

Brontë has participated in exhibitions both locally and internationally most recently including, The View From There (2021), Sadie Cole London, Making Ground (2021), Constance ARI Hobart, Making Art Work (2021), IMA Brisbane, The Triennial (2020), Bleed Festival (2020) Campbelltown Sydney, NGV Melbourne, The National (2019) , MCA Sydney, The Commute (2018), IMA Brisbane, WISHWITCH (2018), Live works Festival – Performance Space, Carriage Works , Cairns regional Art Gallery, Pataka (2018)- revolutionary women, Porirua, NZ, Perilous Bodies (2019), Ford Foundation Gallery, New York and Transits and Returns, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2019) .

Hannah Brontë is also a DJ and the Creatrix of Fempress – immersive club nights which have also toured both locally and internationally. These nights were birthed from her deep love of Hip Hop and hot mouth Femcees on mics.

Fempress operates as an alternate universe using the power of music, the magic of the club and uplifting the power of QTIPOC communities. This is the beginning of her exploration immersing audiences into her imagined futures one dance floor at a time.

Umma’s Tongue–molten at 6000° “Her core is molten at 6000 degrees, the same temperature as walking on the sun. She has been dormant for thousands of years but now wakes to her womb being fracked, poisoned, and mined. Her broad frame unfurls from the earth, the future ancient is awake. Umma’s tongue is sharp as she slices through the polluted air, rapping 200,000 years of human debris.”

—Hannah Brontë Hannah Brontë’s video work Umma’s Tongue–molten at 6000°, commissioned by Channels Festival, pairs the female body with panoramic images of mining and natural destruction. As the artist describes it: “If mother earth were a rapper then this is her new music video”. The word umma, or mother, repeated by a cast of fierce female rappers calls up the matriarchal figure of nature in resistance to a dystopian landscape of human industry. Brontë see’s the treatment of the female body in reference to the treatment of our planet.

Entwining the women’s words with Mother Nature’s tongue, Brontë voices her warning— ‘don’t make umma have to clap back’.

Image: Hannah Brontë, Umma’s Tongue–molten at 6000°, 2017, high definition video, sound, 4min 48sec. Commissioned by Channels Festival.

Alexander Boynes is an Artist, Curator, and Program Manager at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. He received his Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at the ANU in Gold and Silversmithing; however, his practice has evolved to include painting, photography, printmedia, light-based work and video installation. He is represented in the collections of theCenter for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art (USA), Artbank Australia (VIC),the ACT Legislative Assembly (ACT), the University of Canberra (ACT), the Macquarie Group Collection (NSW) as well as numerous private collections throughout Australia and in London.

His recent curatorial projects include Straight Outta Canberra (MAYSPACE, Sydney, 2018), Blaze Fourteen (CCAS 2020) and Carbon Neutral (CCAS 2022). Previous exhibitions at CCAS include 2°— Art and Climate Change, 2016; Footy Fever, 2015, Blaze Nine, 2015, Action Stations—Peter Maloney and Louise Paramor, 2014, and The Triangle – Political Art in Canberra, 2013 in addition to co-curating numerous projects. In 2013 Boynes established PRAXIS, a multidisciplinary artcollective with choreographer/dancer Laura Boynes, and cellist/composer Tristen Parr to explore the link between visual art, performance, and sound. Alexander Boynes is represented by Beaver Galleries, Canberra

“My artworks tackle the complex issues; political, environmental and fundamentally social, that are occurring right now and for the visible future in Australia. I depict dramas of an epic scale and fatal consequence. I seek to engender empathy with the people playing out the dramas of the industrial work force that is usually FIFO and highly disposable and questions the industries which are so destructive of regional landscapes and economies”

—Alexander Boynes

Image: Alexander Boynes, Inertia, 2019, ink and enamel on aluminium composite, 240 x 240cm

Image: Alexander Boynes, Faith and Fear, 2019, ink and enamel on aluminium composite, 240 x 240cm

Ngaio Fitzpatrick is an interdisciplinary artist, Honorary Lecturer with the ANU Institute of Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions and recipient of both a 2018 Australia Awards Endeavour Fellowship in Berlin and a 2016 ANU Vice Chancellors College of the Arts Fellowship. In 2020 she became an Affiliate with the ANU History and Legacies of Environmental Violence cross-campus network. Ngaio works to bring science and scientists into arts environments and art into science and industry with a focus on the power and value artists bring in raising awareness of the critical political and social issues of a rapidly changing climate.

Aniara, a 1955 poem by Swedish Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson relays a tragic journey through space escaping an Earth which has been catastrophically destroyed. The Moon, a numinous presence throughout history is now a contested territory in the race for valuable minerals. A burning tree from the catastrophic 2020 bushfires representing the 3,000,000 wild lives lost and an archaic fossil fuelled power station are juxtaposed with the symbolic and controversial wind turbine. Our hyper-commercial presence on Earth has been brief yet our environmental legacy will be ingrained in the atmosphere for centuries. If we act as a global community and acknowledge responsibility for the crisis, we can take the necessary steps to fix it, all we need is political will.

Image: Ngaio Fitzpatrick, ‘Aniara, Burn, Remnant, Hope,’ 2021. Glass, mirror, digital print, etched, 42 x 29.7cm each

Mandy Martin (1952 - 2021) was a practising artist with a national and international reputation for conservation and landscape. She was born in Adelaide and studied at the South Australian School of Art from 1972-75. Martin has held numerous exhibitions in Australia, Mexico and the USA. She has also been exhibited in, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Italy. Her works are in many public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of South Australia and other state collections and regional galleries. In the USA she is represented in the Guggenheim Museum New York; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno and many private collections. Martin was a lecturer at the School of Art, Australian National University between 1978 – 2003 and then a fellow there between 2003-06. She is an Adjunct Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University Canberra.

Mandy Martin is represented by Beaver Galleries, Canberra and Australian Galleries, Melbourne & Sydney

“Resource extraction has occurred in front of our eyes right across Australian landscapes with such rapidity and has been accompanied by the unfolding tragedy of unchecked climate change, that we as a community are left stunned and disempowered.

My paintings are a humanist critique of the “quarry vision” afflicting our country and at the root of the environmental collapses we are currently living.”

—Mandy Martin

Image: Mandy Martin, Vivitur Ex Rapto (for Clive), 2014, pigment and oil on linen, 200 x 200cm

Image: Mandy Martin, Vivitur Ex R apto (for Gina), 2013, pigment and oil on linen, 200 x 200cm

Rebecca McEwan is an multidisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on the intrinsic connections between humans and the natural world. Exploring ancient wisdoms, stories and folklore Rebecca works to reawaken awe and reinstate our lost reverence with the environment in which we live.

Welcome Home An old memory restlessly shifts its feet, one foot to the other. impatient. unsure Landmarks feel faintly familiar You have been here before Sometime, not that long ago Yes. yes. you know this place

Image: Rebecca McEwan, ‘Welcome Home,’ 2020. Coir doormats, wax, native grasses, dimensions variable

Image: Rebecca McEwan, ‘Water and Words,’ 2020. Laboratory glass, water collected from Lake Burley Griffin, dimensions variable

Water and Words The ability of water to perform dramatic acts of change plays on my mind. Water into ice, water into gas, water into wine, water holding memory, water holding secrets.

Masaru Emoto’s water experiments of the 90s revealed an ability to influence and change water by the words we used around it. Discredited for his lack of true scientific approach, his 20 year Magnus opus was solidly placed on the pseudo science shelf.

With every biological system requiring water to function, how much power does this give us to change what exists around us?

We inhale water, we exhale water, we carry and relocate it. Water is a constant, maybe we just need to trust in the magic of water and our words.

Michaela McHugh is a free-roaming multi media artist who practises in the mediums of; object making, installation, sculpture, land art, printmaking, weaving/textile/craft techniques, drawing, photography and wordsmithing. Michaela holds a BFA from Monash University, Caulfield, Victoria and is currently practicing art alongside applying Permaculture as a designer, grower and farmer.

Investing in materials sourced from the waste stream and from nature, most of her work connects to topics related to landscape and earth. Digging deeper into these topics Michaela generally explores ideas around landscape connection, retrofitting, waste, knowledge, lost skills, self and community sufficiency, sustainability, regeneration, custodianship, ecology, nature, climate, agriculture, and farming practices. It is through a lens of permaculture values and principles that she is fully equipped to express these.

Navigating connections of landscape, Michaela explores the intersection of the natural and unnatural, to observe how they have become conditioned to each other and their moments of contrast.

Human objects, developed into “natural objects” becoming the access point to reinterpret the landscape and understand retrofitting potential. The action of noticing and picking is a large component of this exploration, where recovering evolves into redeveloping found and foraged objects through material interaction. Revealing the potential resources available within each piece of landscape Michaela aims to value wastes possibility of total lifespan use.

Presenting a perspective of the current environment altered through human interaction and decisions, allows us to recognize the familiar in each hand-crafted piece, to be sensitive to their qualities, and value their potential practical uses in conjuring thoughts of environmental sustainability.

Image: Michaela McHugh, Land Fragments, 2018. Found and foraged materials of waste and nature, dimensions variable

Image: Thomas O’Hara, Fault Line, 2017.

Eucalyptus, 21 x 21 x 19cm

Thomas O’Hara began his working career as an electrician, using his hands to build, repair and maintain electrical systems. Having always had an interest in working with his hands but wanting to extend into a more creative sphere, Thomas took time out from being an electrician to undertake a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Studying in the ANU School of Art & Design Jewellery & Object Workshop, Thomas learnt to work with a wide range of material in jewellery and small object. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University where he continues to explore the handmade object.

Wood is a material that is an essential part of both the natural and human environments. Humans have used wood for tens of thousands of years to make shelter, tools, and to make fire, that emblematic skill that separates us from the other animals in nature. Before coming to me the wood I use has gone through many changes, from seed to tree as part of a forest, then felled and turned into timber and used in construction, then finally its use over it is demolished and salvaged. I then take this wood and change it again, but I do so in a way that resonates with wood as a living material, part of the natural environment as well as a material for human use.

In my studio I use a set of rules to assemble hundreds of wooden segments, each segment joining onto another, one at a time, growing the work in size and complexity. The rules are simple and each time I make a new object I find new ways to make more interesting forms within the rules, evolving the complexity from object to object. Once complete the work is then repeatedly burnt in the final transformation. Burning removes the mark of the machine, smoothing edges, and bringing out the grain unique to each individual tree.

The assembling process is generative echoing the growth of simple life forms, while the burning process connects the wood that has been cut, sanded, and glued, back to its origin as organic matter. The life of wood and the impact that humans have along the way, from tree to material, is complex, but our impact on the things around us is also inevitable.

My objects led me to reconsider my inevitable impact by working with the wood in a considered cooperation, giving the wood a new life as an object, and restating its importance and beauty from a new perspective.

Anna Madeleine Raupach is a multidisciplinary artist who explores expressive interpretations of scientific concepts.

Her current practice focuses on alternative forms of temporality related to climate change. Anna is a Lecturer at ANU School of Art & Design and has a PhD in Media Arts from UNSW Art & Design (2014).

Controlled Burn (Canberra, Adelaide, Alice Springs) uses burnt matchsticks to mark the maximum daily temperatures for the summer months over the previous six leap years in Canberra, Alice Springs and Adelaide.

Exploring how standard forms of measurement are recalibrated to adapt to climate change, the matchsticks slowly progress closer to breaking point as our summer months become hotter. The work contrasts daily detail to yearly trends, aligning single days within the cumulative effect of rising temperatures on drought, increased bushfire risk, and loss of trees and habitat. The title, method, and symbolism expresses climate change as something that humans have control over but continue to ignore.

Image: Anna Madeleine Raupach, Controlled Burn (Canberra, Adelaide, Alice Springs: leap years since 1999), 2020, burnt matches and pencil on paper, 59.5 x 42cm each.

Installation view, Watch this Space, Alice Springs, 2021.

ANNA MADELEINE RAUPACH

Image: Adam Sèbire, anthropoScene IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice), 2019, video, 7 minutes 55 seconds

Adam Sébire is an Australian artist-filmmaker whose works have been seen from Sydney Film Festival to the Deutsches Museum in Munich; from ABC TV to Al Jazeera International to the United Nations in New York.

He is engaged in doctoral research at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Art & Design exploring visual approaches to the vast spatiotemporal dimensions of climate change.

What if we could witness our own contribution to climate change?

Citizens of developed countries are increasingly aware of correlations between carbon-intensive lifestyles and the climate crisis. Borrowing a groundbreaking scientific formula1 Australian artist Adam Sébire calculates and saws off the exact amount of Arctic sea-ice destroyed by his carbon emissions flying, 1 economy-class seat, return, Sydney to Greenland to film it. The full equation is

This states that the total area of sea-ice lost equals a constant — derived from research into energy flux at the ice edge — of 3.0 ± 0.3 square metres per metric tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, multiplied by the sum of emissions.

Inserting the artist’s own 5.23 tonnes of CO2 into the equation, this works out at 15.69 ± 1.57 m² of sea-ice that will not regenerate naturally in northwest Greenland come winter. With less sea-ice to reflect sunlight back into space the ocean absorbs more heat, contributing to even faster warming in the Arctic.

The soundtrack comprises æolian sounds from an empty water tank at the artist’s house in northwest Greenland that ‘sang’ when it was windy.

1

Notz, D., & Stroeve, J. (2016): Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO2 emission. Science, 354, 747–750

As a techno – romanticist my arts practice focuses on understanding our intimate relationship to nature and universal connection to the cosmos. Working with Glass the celebrated material hero of the scientific world, my work interrogates a view through the darker-side of the lens into Anthropocentrism and its environmental impacts. This subversive undertone is explored through a select range of mediums and techniques incorporating NASA - made glass, hand blown glass, recycled materials, silk, aluminium, steel, porcelain, watercolour, photography, painting and installation.

My practice often involves collaborating with scientists from NASA and Antarctica, Melbourne University and the Earth Satellite Observing Centre (EOS) to create artworks that universally educate on weather, astronomy, the universe, climate change and existence.

In 2018 my work As Above, So Below, on anthropogenic (environmental pollution caused by human activity) ozone eating clouds was profiled by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization for COP24 Climate Change Conference. The work draws attention to the invisible aspects that impact our existence and unite us and the themes we struggle with in our humanity. I am currently working with the UN on artwork for the 2019 Global Climate Change Summit.

Over the past five years my practice has expanded including commissioned artworks for international festivals, art fairs, public sculptures and site-specific works for public and private art collections. I have worked on commissioned works for the Australia Council for the Arts, the City of Melbourne, Creative Spaces Linden Centre for Contemporary Art and Incinerator Art Gallery.

In Australia my work has been presented by West Space, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Craft Victoria, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Cairns Regional Gallery. My work has been awarded the LaTrobe Regional Gallery Acquisitive Art Prize and Senini Prize from McClelland Gallery.

The series Noctilucent Canary explores the edges of vision. Employing the idea of a satellite as ‘an all seeing eye in the sky’, telemetry, data and images of Noctilucent phenomena are filtered through a series of lenses and prisms to explore the transitory process through which super-ecological[i] phenomena become visible.

Visible only in Earth’s shadow at deep twilight, Noctilucent clouds[ii] are visual signifiers of climate change in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Increasing in frequency, brightness and extent, Noctilucent clouds are being flagged by scientists as Earth’s ‘atmospheric climate canary’ heralding the visible beginning of the anthropogenic era. [i] Super Ecology – The concept that the natural and artificial have become inextricably bound within one greater super ecological system. [ii] Noctilucent (night shining) clouds exist in the upper atmosphere at an altitude of 76,000 – 85,000 meters. There is no record of them existing before 1885.

Image: Jasmine Targett, Noctilucent Canary, 2017, Series of three prints on silk, 62 x 67cm each

Yandell Walton is a contemporary artist whose work encompasses projection, installation, and interactive digital media. Through work that melds architectural space with the projected image, Yandell has become recognised for her immersive projection works that merge the actual and the virtual to investigate notions of impermanence in relation to environmental, social and political issues.

Yandell’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and non-traditional public spaces including Dark Mofo (2018), Light City Festival Baltimore (2016), Digital Graffiti Florida (2015), Experimenta Speak to Me (Melbourne & Brisbane 2012-14), PUBLIC Festival Perth (2014), Melbourne Festival (2012), VIVID Festival Sydney (2013), ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Art 2013) and White Night Festival Melbourne (2013/15). She was the recipient of the Australian Network for Art and Technology IDEATE funding and the Philip Hunter Fellowship (2020/21) Driven by emotional responses to our increasingly damaged planet her recent research investigates ecological shifts in landscape due to human impact. This ongoing research interrogates technological processes to enable volumetric scans to be animated, introducing human-like movement with plant life creating cross species forms.

Image: Yandell Walton, ‘Deadline,’ 2019. LED countdown clock, 98 x 25 x 10cm

A countdown tells us something is coming, arousing tension and nervous excitement. In The Deadline the countdown is literally alarming: it shows us the seconds, minutes and hours remaining until the year 2030—the earliest date predicted by the IPCC when our planet could reach 1.5ºC of global warming above pre–industrial levels. 2030 is not far away, eleven years, just over a decade.

For Australia, scientific predictions for global warming include rising sea levels, hotter temperatures, decreased rainfall (in southern Australia), and greater frequency and severity for events including, floods, droughts, and bushfires.

As a result, we will see increasing reduction in biodiversity across the land and in the oceans, changes to ecosystems including species loss and extinction, and our access to food, water and energy will be affected. The IPCC report also states that ‘there is no single 1.5°C warmer world,’ but rather multiple possible warmer worlds depending on how soon and for how long we live at 1.5ºC of global warming.

The Deadline’s measured countdown has a slightly hypnotic effect that makes us acutely aware of the passing of time.

To experience eleven years as a short duration requires an expansive understanding of time that makes individual actions seem almost insignificant; yet in the present, time speeds up and we can easily forget to look further ahead.

Confronted with this countdown, whether we focus on the big picture or on the second–by–second present, what becomes clear is that time is running out—both for us as individuals and for the planet. As a silent witness to global action (and inaction) on climate change, The Deadline encourages us to be aware that we are looking towards an unknown future.