Wading Into Collapse
Publication and Exhibition Design, 2023
A collaborative project with Jack Tufts, Wading Into Collapse became a publication and installation shown in the RISD Design Commons in 2022. Using the personal as a way to bring others in to the experience, we created an installation to tell the stories of our homes, Iceland and Louisiana, to show the ways the climate is already dramatically shifting in each place.
We took this concept, climate change, this term that feel so vast, a hyper-object that seems difficult to grasp, and showed the ways in which the climate is already being impacted in our homes with personal stories: mine of seeing a glacier declared “dead-ice,” in Iceland and Jack’s of his evacuation during hurricane Ida.
When people think of climate change, they often imagine some sort of dystopic futuristic scene, or something that will only become serious in the year 2100. We find comfort in thinking of the immediate, planning out of lives in hours, days, weeks, and months. To imagine what the world will look like in 78 years is intimidating, the image is so far in the future that it is blurred, too slippery to grasp. But ecological collapse doesn’t exist in sci-fi futures, it is happening now.