The Explorers

Works are artistic investigations and exercises in imagination involving vessels and structures that inhabit this contradictory and complex world, in which humans are simultaneously alienated from nature and entirely dependent upon it. Some works address the relentless exploitation of natural resources and its consequences, while others explore adaptation, survival, and the possibility of escape in the face of change.

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The works make room for play, imagination, utopia, and impossible ideas. Scientific premises are transformed into structures and fictional technologies that allow reality to be viewed from a slight distance—and perhaps seen differently. By pushing scientific and technological ideas beyond their practical limits, the works reveal contradictions embedded in the way humans inhabit and transform the natural world.

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In Orbit Shifter, for example, an imaginary facility is capable of generating enough thrust to move the entire planet farther away from the Sun, towards a cooler climate. In this scenario, indifferent to its collateral consequences, humanity could become less dependent on carbon-sequestering natural ecosystems and continue burning all the coal, oil, and gas found on Earth.

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The idea is absurd, yet it brings a real problem into focus: at current levels of fossil-fuel use, human emissions of carbon dioxide are accumulating in the atmosphere faster than the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems can absorb them. The impossible machine thus exposes a very real tension between economical ambitions and ecological limits.

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Ground Water Harvester 2026 is designed to pump groundwater from ever greater depths under increasingly dry conditions. It can be read as a visual metaphor for a situation in which technology does not resolve resource scarcity but instead enables the continued exploitation of a resource as it becomes depleted.

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Pond Plutter 2018 (Hunt for the Last Living Frog) explores the relationship between an endangered species and the human ape who hunts it, driven by a price established through market trade. The work explores a situation in which the value of increasingly rare nature rises at the same time as the conditions necessary for its survival deteriorate.

 

When reality is too complex, contradictory, or vast to grasp directly, sculpture can transform an abstract problem into something with form, scale, and physical presence. Construction itself becomes a way of thinking: each work is an attempt to explore what happens when an idea or thought is given physical form.

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Alongside destruction and survival, the Explorers’ works therefore also contain curiosity and the imagining of possibilities. Although the works deal with serious and, at times, dark subjects, their making is grounded in play, the pleasure of building by hand, and the freedom to imagine worlds. Art may not solve the ecological crisis, but it can help us look at the world from a new perspective, ask different questions, and imagine alternatives—even when bringing them into reality seems difficult.