“Humans have wandered the Earth for thousands of years but never has our capacity to alter the Earth’s ecosystem … been more prominent than it is today.” – Kat Lahr, Parallelism of Cyclicality
My photographs investigate the Anthropocene, or rather, My Anthropocene, since it is my investigation using my own resources and perceptions. The word was coined in 2000 by atmospheric scientists to indicate the overwhelming changes brought about by humans over the last 200 years, and especially in the last 70 years. The word combines the root “anthropo”, meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geological time. The diverse landscapes I investigate – from the Arctic Circle, North America and Europe – are places where human activity is pressing hard against ecological boundaries. If the Anthropocene is a new, planet-scale concept, I show that its precise form alters in severity and impact from place to place. We see that we do not, in fact, have far to go: we see it around us anywhere and everywhere; if we care to look.
This work carries with it my own biographical underpinnings. I was brought up during the Cold War. Then the atomic bomb was the cause of all our fears; now, as a grandmother, the risks to our planet due to human industrial activity and consumer waste have shifted my concerns to the environment – land, seas, air and biology – prompting me, through my photography, to document scientifically assessed factors of risk and to argue for a more caring and intelligent stewardship of the natural world.
These landscape photographs all relate to places of metabolic distress. These include settings which produce CO2 emissions alongside the scarring of the earth through opencast mining, or the drilling into the earth, in the case of hydraulic fracturing; depleted forests, thereby reducing biological space for creatures other than ourselves; polluted environments caused by the explosion of consumer waste; the compromising of the planet’s proportionally tiny freshwater resources through the cultivation of deserts for settlement or agriculture; all of which causes act together to progressively strip the planet of its inherited biodiversity.
Over all of these harmful consequences, the planet is shown by science, if more difficult to witness, to have a change in its climate, and to potentially massive effect. In these photographs I attempt to visualise the continuity between causation – our relentless search for sources of energy – and consequence, ranging from the melting of polar ice, to air pollution and the rise in sea level.
My Anthropocene draws upon Gina Glover’s exhibition and book The Metabolic Landscape, co-authored with Gina’s partner, Dr Geof Rayner, and daughter Jessica Rayner, published by Black Dog publishing, 2015.
Selected images from Glover’s My Anthropocene series are shown below
ABOUT GINA GLOVER
Gina Glover trained in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art and in Photography at the University of Westminster. She co-founded Photo Co-Op in 1979 in Wandsworth, which in 1991 became Photofusion Photography Centre, based in Brixton.
Glover is recipient of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal, the Medical Research Council’s Visions of Science Award (twice) and funding from Arts Council England (on three occasions.) She has been interviewed for the British Library SOUNDS archive and in 2016 received Wellcome Foundation funding for her project Life In Glass, using the scientific IVF photography of the Nobel Prize winning biologist Sir Robert Edwards.
Glover’s work ranges from playful explorations of the biomedical sciences, usually as an artist-in-residence, psychological studies of human perception, and long-term studies of environments altered by human conflict and economic development. She employs varied photographic techniques from lensless photography, to conventional and alternative processing, through to photography incorporating digital design.
Website: ginaglover.com
Instagram: @ginaglover
Twitter: @GinaGl0ver
EVENTS
Glover’s series The Entangled Bank (portraits of plastic bottles) will be shown as part of TrashArt at GroundwWorks Gallery, PV 9 March.
Her series Poisoned Water Runs Deep on Hydraulic Fracking in the US will be shown as part of WaterWeek at Gallery North, Hailsham, East Sussex March/April, PV 11 March 4-6pm.
Also, Glover’s series Symbolic Reproduction, an exhibition based on the archive of Nobel prize winner, Sir Robert Edwards (pioneer in reproductive medicine, and in-vitro fertilisation) and the Nobel Prize winner Barbara McCintock “for her discovery of mobile genetic elements” will opening in June at Murrey Edwards College, Cambridge.
CREDITS
Unless otherwise stated, all words and images in this article are © Gina Glover
