Emily Parsons-Lord

Every Essence of Your Beloved One Is Captured Forever 2021

Video

The cyclic conversion of carbon is evident in the Bundanon landscape, from the trees to the coal-rich layers beneath the earth. This is referenced in Parsons-Lord's materials: dry ice, carbon dioxide’s solid form; charcoal, from bushfire-affected trees; and diamonds, manufactured using techniques that accelerate the combination of geological force and heat that would typically take between 1 billion and 3.3 billion years.

The environmental themes of the work are made complex by Parsons-Lord’s memories of the site, which she visited as a child with her mother, who has since passed away. The video captures fragments of the landscape, interspersed with documentation of her dry-ice sculpture transitioning from solid to gaseous. What remains are raw materials, including a diamond created from her mother’s ashes. This precious residue collapses the artist’s personal history with Bundanon’s geological history, exploring the potential for memory to reside in objects of carbon.

I have been to Bundanon exactly once. It was an unremarkable occasion, except that we were there. It was with my mum when I was 8.

Mum worked for the Department of Education. We moved around a lot as a family, my mum, sister and I. It was common to be invited to get-to-know-you social occasions when we were new to a town. It gave the local people a chance to decide whether or not we would be compatible. It was unlikely that we would ever see those people again.

I can remember the day. I have a feeling of safety, knowing that mum is nearby and distracted with new adults, so I have the freedom to explore. I am alone, but that is comfortable. I play invisible, quiet games; merging people with place, visually lining up the perm of a stranger with the cliffs in the distance. An absurd hat.

It’s a crisp day, the later end of winter. The sky is blue and the air tingles. The Sun threatens to become hot, but it never quite does. I’m standing on clover. There is a smell, or maybe it’s an atmosphere, that is perfectly preserved but impossible to describe. There has been dew on the grass in the early morning but has now mostly dried.

This memory is crystal clear to me.

Diamonds are made under intense heat and pressure. They are carbon, the same material as trees, charcoal, and ashes. Most diamonds started forming around the time that life on Earth began.

My sister’s not here. I’m not sure why. There are some other kids around, but they all seem to know each other. Mum has told me I can visit the artist studio behind the homestead, but I haven’t yet. I feel too shy and obvious. What if I’m not actually meant to be there? The lawn slopes away from the homestead and I shut my eyes and pretend I am living in the non-specific era of the olden days.

The trees and the coal are connected. 350 million years ago, trees invent their own trunks. Lignin evolves as a hard cell wall, allowing trees to grow to enormous heights for the first time. When they fall they pile up, the bacteria that would eat fallen trees will not evolve for many more millions of years. So the trees fall into layers, uninterrupted by bacteria and slowly, over time, compress into coal. It was a moment of novelty in history.

I only have one recollection of Bundanon, and that’s how this memory can remain so pristine. The memory is unencumbered by visiting the place again, unadulterated by subsequent memories. It exists as a bubble, unconnected to geography. I have no sense of the roads in or out of the site, or how it is orientated to river, except that there was a windy dirt road and I’m slumped low in my seat watching the light flicker through the dust on the window as we drive under the canopy of trees.

Trees are made from air, this is unbelievable to me. The actual hard body of a tree is made from carbon dioxide in the air. The carbon is sunk into the biomass of the tree, and the oxygen (di-oxide) is released. I was thinking about this when the great bushfires passed through the area in 2020. Millenia of carbon returned to the air by the fires.

My mother passed away recently. The sum total of her; thought, laughter, breath, gesture exists as pristine memory now, unable to be altered or extended through further shared experience. Quantifiable. My memories of her are compressing under great heat and weight, collapsing time into a diamond. Perfect and strong, that will persist for millions of years. Humans have learnt how to mimic the forces of geology to grow diamonds in a lab. All you need is a source of carbon and the machinery to apply 330,000kg of pressure.

I am floating in the intersection of these ideas: my mother as compressed memory; trees compacted into coal; the invention of the infrastructure to make diamonds; the charred trees of recent bushfires provoked by climate crisis; and the scales of time that carbon can slide so easily between, and Bundanon is at the meridian.

These extraordinary times evoke a rumbling underfoot.

Groundlessness is a material reality in a time of global heating and environmental collapse. Compounding years of heat stress buckles infrastructures that support normal techno and social functioning.

It also shapes an internal experience of instability.

This work explores climate cleaving/crumbling and its residue as a site of extreme physical and emotional destruction, unmasking the tenuousness of our foundations (physical, social, political) and the affecting experience of onlooking.

The effects of climate heating are exponential with each half degree increase: highways buckle, power stations short circuit, cities are submerged, arid zones expand, airborne illnesses spread, and ecosystems burn. The effects of heating have been known since at least the 1950s.

The spectacle of climate breakdown (horrific excitement of flood fire drought) is replaced by a lingering aftermath, textured by still disquiet, apprehension, and helpless short-term memory. The scale of the emergency retracts and cools until the next display.

The cause of this upset (heat held in greenhouse gasses suspended in air), is unseen, invisible, and plays out across parallel timespans: the geologic and the immediate. A collision of fossilised energy with human invention.

Commissioned for Liveworks 2017, Things Fall Apart is a column of mist mixed with a plant distress pheromone (methyl jasmonate) falling into a vast circular void – viewers could step beneath the vapour column using a viewing platform, soaking in the splendour of the work while simultaneously inhaling its disaster.

Falling to Pieces is a propositional work (so far) that erases architectural icons by enveloping them in a dense cloud of mist and plant distress pheromone, methyl jasmonate.

Drawing attention to the sometimes invisible infrastructures that underscores the climate crisis, Falling to Pieces transforms these buildings into plant warning beacons.

A fuse runs through the architecture of Carriageworks, building tension as it edges towards the explosion.

This new commission by Emily Parsons-Lord explored the elemental connections between earth and the air in this pyrotechnic performance. Fireworks are coloured by minerals; copper burns blue, strontium is red, and calcium is orange. These ores are derived from the land and in a brief volatile moment, become air.

Timescales sit side by side in this performance. Geological time; cosmic time; and the immediate explosive present.

A great shock of brilliant hairs thrilled the sky lingers on the experience of witnessing an extraordinary event; of the dazzling sensation that resonates somewhere between awe and terror. Using the explosion as a material, this work questions what it means to be a witness to the spectacular collapse that is scripted on to the planet: great melting, bushfires, floods, drought, the awe-filled aesthetics of the climate crisis.

The spectacle of the firework celebrates and commemorates, marking time and occasion. They explode with dazzling colour. Each colour is the fiery transformation of an element from solid into air, the shifting from cosmic to human time in a rapid fire crack. Remixing eyewitness accounts of explosions throughout history, including atomic bombs, meteorite impacts, supernovas and the first fireworks from China, A great shock of brilliant hairs thrilled the sky maps the volatile elemental connection between the earth and the sky, and the stories of human wonder that exist at the surface.

This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

300-350 million years ago oxygen levels were nearly double what they are today, supporting mega flora and fauna. 252.5 million years ago, the Earth experienced the greatest extinction event with 93-97% of species on land dying out and a simultaneous spike in carbon dioxide levels. The history of the atmosphere on Earth is inexorably linked to the history of life.

“Different Kinds of Air, a Plant’s Diary” offers the audience the opportunity to taste the air from some of these different eras in Earth's evolution. The gaseous composition, temperature, taste, and smell of air has changed drastically over the course of geological history, these differences affect human physiology, emotional states, and consciousness.

What do these air taste like? How do they make you feel? How do they affect your body, your consciousness and your memory?

a raging event of continual noise (the Sun)     2018

In response to Mr Lee Kun-Yong's work as part of "Equal Area" at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, I made two performance works.

The colour signature of the sun made out of potassium powder and burnt in the gallery under a sheet of suspended paper. They residue of the smoke bombs on the paper remain in the space as a star chart.

An explosive artistic diagram of my interpretation of fusion in the Sun is set to burn. A long burning fuse describes the intensifying pressure on hydrogen atoms until the fuse to make hydrogen and eject a large amount of energy and electrons (illustrated as a spectacular explosion).

Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

The explosion is a site of extreme emotional volatility, capable of eliciting fear, terror, awe and wonder. It is a site of natural, astronomical and chemical wonder –– an expression of the elements that exist in the sky above and that dwell deep beneath our feet.

We Live In Explosive Times is a 25 minute performance that explores the paradoxical tension of the explosion, that can elicit both fear and spectacle in the spectator, in our current time of cataclysm.

{the empty set} is a collaborative partnership between Sara Morawetz and Emily Parsons-Lord investigating the performative potential of fireworks and pyrotechnical displays.

This metal becomes liquid at 29 degrees celsius. On a warm day, it will sweat and pool, or melt down the wall. It is gallium, an element that doesn’t exist, it can only be made.

We live in a human-made environment with a human-made climate. If you cut in to the present the future leaks out considers how infrastructure is effected by heating.

As it warms the gallium leaks through the wall and settles in to the sand, casting, melting, and recasting the void: an unknown melted future.

To imagine the future of climate change is to engage in a dream, a speculative world-building. It is not a passive act.

A popular proposal to halt or reverse climate change is “high stratosphere aerosol dispersion”, where a substance (sulphur, or even diamonds!) is released in the upper atmosphere to deflect solar radiation and reduce temperatures. The aesthetic consequence of this idea is the permanent removal of the blue from the sky. Instead, a murky grey/white/green will take its place.

It is cheap, easy to engineer, permanent, and short sighted.

Then Let Us Run (the sky is falling) is a new project to determine the colour of the sky were this geoengineering idea to take effect and to offer an aesthetic and tactile experience of this.

Every year List í Ljósi festival celebrates the return of the sun to a remote, East Iceland fjord. During the final two days of darkness, the town of Seyðisfjörður turns off all of its lights and welcomes a selection of international and national artists to illuminate the wild landscape with contemporary artworks, on a thrilling scale.

This iteration of “A raging event of continual noise (the Sun)” recreates the colour of the Sun, the Sun that we can’t see because it’s too bright to look at directly.

To breed pigs, farmers use HogMate; a synthesised pheromone that makes pigs uncontrollably horny (get out of the pen, it’ll have your leg). In 2016, I experienced for the first time the intoxicating impulse to sleep with men (it coincides with my ovulation), and then Trump became president. To join us you must lose yourself (a beastly itching) explores the artists sense of losing control of her desires through her chemical biology; of perverse salacious obsession; of becoming beast on breeding day.

The air of each exhaled word from a politician talking about climate change is about 100 times richer in carbon dioxide.

Roughly 21 shallow breaths a minute – depending on the politician – over 100 minutes uses about 5,250 litres of air.

Dank air.

Our Fetid Rank responds to the aesthetics of anthropogenic climate change. Alongside the tropes of retreating glaciers and melting icebergs is always a politician talking.

Captured is the air used to physically shape the words that constitute cyclical discourses, futile dialogues and fervent denials of climate change. They reveal publicly canvassed suspended private moments of cognition/reflection, glimpses of emotion, unconscious ticks, and dubious authenticity.

Dank, humid, moist. Foul, fetid, rank.

The subconscious tendency to mirror breathing patterns has physiological effects on the viewer, inducing a hyperventilated claustrophobia and involuntary proximity to the mouths of our elected rank.

Our eyes were of no use to us  2016

Compressed re-created air of the Great Dying, copper vents, cylinder, regulator, timer solenoid valve, piping

dimensions variable  

Our eyes were of no use to us is an installation that recreates the air from a period known as ‘The Great Dying’ and periodically releases it into the gallery space, from copper vents at the threshold of the exhibition. The Great Dying is a significant period in the history of the air as it has the lowest density of oxygen and the highest density of carbon dioxide. These conditions acidified the oceans and depleted the ready oxygen in the air contributing to the greatest extinction event in the history of life on Earth when 93-97% of species died out, 252.5 million years ago. This air is relevant today, as the rate of carbon emissions are steeper than at the time of The Great Dying; this air is the past, but also a possible future.

Air records invisible traces.

The Confounding Leaving is a minimal installation. A small button that, when pressed, releases "future air" over your hand, and down your arm. Or you may choose to breathe it: a visceral connection with the future of air.

Future air is not about a speculative future. It is literal. This air is a stable compound molecule that will exist in our air for the next 12-16 generations before being broken down. It does not occur naturally, but is human synthesised, made in a lab for application in industry.

Future air is sensual; it’s about six times heavier than the air that we’re used to breathing. So heavy that were you to breathe it in, your words are literally heavy as well, they dribble down your chin and drop to the floor. When inhaled, it lowers the voice.

The air is also the most potent greenhouse gas that has yet been tested. It has the warming potential of 24,000 times that of carbon dioxide.

The immediacy of this air in the gallery presents a real choice between desire, curiosity, and play, and the sensation of responsibility and connection to the future of air.

A human-made future.

Atmosphere of Venus and Mars recreated in a bag with air plant. 

Under pressure, gas becomes light and heat is a constellation of Suns. 74.9% hydrogen, 25.1% helium, the gaseous composition of our star, the Sun, recreated in a bag, with pressure applied. 

This metal becomes liquid at 29 degrees Celsius. On a warm day, it will sweat and pool, or melt down the wall. It is gallium, an element that doesn’t exist, it can only be made.

We live in a human-made environment with a human-made climate. I’ve always had hot hands considers how infrastructure is effected by heating. As it warms the gallium leaks, casting, melting, and recasting the void: a malleable future.

To imagine the future of climate change is to engage in a dream, a speculative world-building. It is not a passive act.

Of the 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy, only 9096 are visible to us at night.

In the depths of a vault in a mountainside in Switzerland lays a cosmos of coordinates for billions of as yet unnamed, invisible stars.

The International Star Registry offers a naming service for the invisible bulk of stars that constitute our galaxy. Most of them are small burning ember Red Dwarf stars, unremarkable to science and unseen by most. Red Dwarfs are slow burning, likely the last beacons left in the universe after around 10 trillion years.

I lost about two weeks of my life trawling this archive for the names of stars that may yield a glimpse of a narrative, a hyperbolic hollering into space, or reveal a sense of the suburban sublime: an attempt to connect with the magnitude of space and the unfathomable depth of tangled emotions- longing, love, regret. The names aren’t used by astronomers, who mostly use a bland formula of letters and numbers that parsimoniously describe the physical attributes and relative location of the star, but they do exist in the vault, and in the hands of the purchaser.

Over the last nine months I’ve been looking closer that some of these stars, to see them as both a lover and astronomer. Performing poetry and spectral analysis to know them, to recreate their colour signature in smoke, and gaze at them again.

My interests are in both the fruits of knowledge that spectral analysis can deliver, such as the elemental composition of the star, but also the modes of finding a sense of ownership in the vastness of space and comfort with our place in it; via the internet; via the experience of emotion; via a naming certificate sent express from the International Star Registry (they have offices throughout the world).

The romance of naming a star exists partly in the universe, partly in a vault in Switzerland, but mostly in the imagination.

Let’s gaze at them. 

You will always be wanted by me is a one-to-one performance to be exhibited at the Proximity Festival, 2015, and The MCA Art Bar "Golden Hour" Curated by Kate Scardifield, April 2016, and exists as a video series.

The sensor sits on the table in my studio. It flashes 20.4 for about 20 minutes, and I check it compulsively.

The time between each flash holds my expectation that it will alter. Everything feels the same, but it changes to 20.3 for no perceivable reason. I’m frustrated that I can only see numbers, and not the subtleties in the air that they speak for.

All the research says that it should be at 20.9 - that it’s dangerous for oxygen levels to fall below 19.5 and lethal to fall to 15 over prolonged breathing.

The thing that altered the numbers is unseen to me. Of course, I am breathing and that could change it. But I’ve been breathing from the beginning. I move the sensor to the open door. It’s the third floor and the view is almost shamefully expansive for an inner-city apartment. It feels as though the air should be fresher here; cleaner or purer perhaps. But no, the numbers remain unchanged.

Without the numbers, it is easy to forget about the air. 

DESCRIPTION

The Great Dying is a minimalist installation located in the site of the worst air pollution in the UK. 

The sound of the overhead motorway mixes with the roundabout traffic.

Under the overpass is a structure, a rough white cube, about the size of a domestic garage.

There is a door on the left of the front face of the structure through which you’re invited to enter. The internal walls are perfect white with diffuse white lighting, 3.5 metres in each direction, and the space appears empty. There is a perceptible increase in temperature. Mounted in the middle of the wall on the right hand side, is a small prosaic electronic device that disrupts the minimal interior. It’s about the size of an apple. Digital numbers flash on its small face, three seconds on, three seconds off. On: 20.4; off; on: 20.3.

The device is monitoring the levels of oxygen in the room.

Though it’s invisible, into the space the air of The Great Dying is being released. It is being released because you are there.

The period known as “The Great Dying” occurred about 252.5 million years ago, and was the biggest extinction event in Earth’s history with as many as 90% of all species on land, and in the oceans dying out. The era coincides with radical changes to the air. It has low levels of oxygen, around half what we have today, and high levels of carbon dioxide. This air is unable to sustain the aerobic life that is familiar to us today.

The air has a subtle flavour of soda water, and a calming effect on the breath. The effects are subtle.

The sensor continues to announce the oxygen density, vacillating between normal levels of 20.9, and levels that reflect those of the Great Dying, about 10. Tension mounts with each flash as the number declines and builds towards the tipping point, set to 18. Should the oxygen level reach this tipping point, the sensor alarm will sound, the small digital face will flash red, and the space is evacuated and reset.

Presented at Underbelly Arts 2015 on Cockatoo Island, The Airrarium presents the audience with the opportunity to taste the air from different eras in Earth's evolution. 

The history of air and the history of life are entangled.

300-350 million years ago oxygen levels were nearly twice what they are today, and could support megafauna and flora.

Then, 252.5 million years ago, the greatest extinction in Earth’s history killed 93% of all species and coincided with some of the highest levels of carbon dioxide, leaving only half the oxygen that we have today.

How might these airs make you feel? What do they taste like, or smell like? How might they affect your body and your consciousness?

Taste some of these air at The Airarrium with Emily Parsons-Lord.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

This project was assisted by a grant from Arts NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government and supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian State and Territory Governments. The program is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).

There is Nothing Accidental or Surprising About This is a long term artwork that uses tree rings to record the human activity and changes to climate as a living memento mori, a memorial, a monument to this radical and rapacious Anthropocene.

Over the course of three years the artist will consciously falsify the records of tree ring growth in young pine trees, including one Wollemi Pine, by manipulating their climatic and environmental conditions to reflect those of the Great Dying - the greatest extinction event in Earth's history. The pine will also be symbolically exposed to spoken discourses about climate change.

Wollemi Pine is a native pine that was thought extinct until 1994 when they were discovered in a National Park in NSW. There are only one hundred pines left in natural habitats. They are living fossils. Teetering on the brink of extinction, these trees have borne witness to the changes in climate for two hundred million years.

Over the first three years of this project Emily will live with the pines in a simulacrum of the Great Dying era, whilst engaging with the climate debate. A series of works document the pines: video, image, performance and talks, are created, before the trees are permanently planted and left to record the actual climate conditions of Adelainde. As an out-of-place species in South Australia, these pines will track the passage of time by their growth rings and form part of a century/millennia long performance... or succumb to the heat.

This work is in development for presentation at Vitalstatistix's "Climate Century".