Evolutionary Arms Race

‘I do not have time for this: the man with the movie camera lied. Mechanisation of respiration has not given us leave to breathe freely. Instead, it has devalued and made less intimate the craft with which we fill our lungs. I have time for this: inhalation and meditation upon the fragrances that hang as a heady perfume in the frenetic city. The grease, the oil, the fumes that toxify cut through by a lightness that demands to be waited upon. It is [is it?] telling that the opposite to this idiom is expressed through inhalation: stop and smell the flowers. I demand that time.’ 

 

An excerpt from 'On the location of breath' inspired by my work in pollution absorbing NOXORB by writer and curator Richard Hore

A multi -award winning London-based British artist, scientist, speaker, and environmentalist with a Ph.D. in physics from UC, I  have studied art at Goldsmith’s and London Met. A polymath, my critical practice spans painting, sculpture, and technology and I am  the only artist in the world licensed to use NOXORBTM, a newly developed ceramic material that absorbs nitrogen dioxide (NOx) pollution from the air. My work based on innovation inspired by the natural world and biomimicry, is increasingly less about the narrative of our past planetary ingressions, and more about our adaptation to a post-industrial, anthropogenic world. Inspired by Darwin’s 1862 ‘evolutionary arms race’ theory between an unusual orchid and moth, through my works I seek  a new era: the ‘Symbiocene’ a time during which we realise that one species can only survive because of the existence of the other.

 

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