Across the top
panel of the veils, Helios, drives his horses, dragging the sun behind him. In
these works, the charioteer is replaced by an astronaut, a hybrid machine-man.
In these
daylight hours, machines dominate the landscape both above and below the sea.
In the sky aeroplanes take-off and land at port cities. On the ocean, transport and dredging vessels
float as riser and return pipes below them delve from the Sunlight zone (
Epipelagic zone) through the Twilight and Midnight zones and into the Abyss (
Abyssopelagic zone). Far below on the Abyssal plains of the seafloor, ocean
ridges echo the mountains above. Across this deep-sea mountain scape crawl
collector, tracked mining vehicles and bottom crawlers. These machines can
generate large sediment plumes, often laced with toxins and the reverberating
sound impacts marine life. They are there to gather up gold, platinum, titanium,
copper, cobalt, and manganese , ironically needed for many ‘green’ forms of
energy including solar panels, wind turbines and electric-vehicle batteries.
This noisy, technologically driven world in which fish and machines occupy the same space sits in contrast to the four veils that compromise Nyx. However, Helios, moving across space each day is also the god of creativity and sight, and that impetus, in the face of witnessing the destruction of the natural world, is something that can metaphorically feed our lives.
This project is funded by Eco-Imagining, part of the Water, Energy, Food nexus.
