Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Carbon Footprint and the Lovely Weather Artist Residency


The Lovely Weather Project is a thematic residency sponsored by Donegal County Council Public Art Office along with Leonardo/OLATS. The purpose of the residency is to explore how art can address issues around global warming and climate change, specifically in County Donegal.

Carbon Footprint is a multi-disciplinary project devised by the Artist in Residence for the Inishowen area, Seema Goel.

Seema’s project, Carbon Footprint, uses wool and spinning as the primary metaphor to articulate the intrinsic relationship between climate change and economics. Locally, sheep wool has become valueless and is a zero profit material for the farming community. Yet this material has incredible versatility, history, and worth if explored. This project works to rejuvenate the use of local wool framing it as a political act that separates the green house gas emissions graph from the GDP graph.

Seema’s piece for this residency depends on the help of local residents in the Inishowen area. We will be putting on a series of workshops in Buncrana, Moville and Carndonagh next week to teach people how to spin the wool on simple drop spindles. This skill will then be used on August 28th from 3-5 p.m. as part of a concurrent public performance in each community where people will be spinning in front of empty storefronts.

All the wool will later be knit into socks that will be part of the gallery show in Letterkenny in November.

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