Biotopes/Air Diving Flashcards
What are Biotopes?
So this is documentation of my first proper biotope, which built on the work I made for Growth. I wanted Biotopes to offer organisms real estate and a window into the terrestrial realm and question if an enclosure could benefit the animals within it more than the spectator. Aquariums began as an attempt to tame and commodify natural aquatic environments. With these sculptures, im trying invert this relationship, creating extensions out of natural bodies of water and recalibrating our assumed sense of ownership over the natural environment. I was researching Phillip Henry Gosse at the time, he is a co-founder of the aquarium from Victorian England and as an evangelical christian He believed that taming and capturing aquatic life was a service to God, and that humans had righteous dominion over non-human organisms and nature. This work was very much reactionary to that philosophy.
These are some pictures taken by my friend and fellow artist Finn Rabbit Dove in Pollock Park. It was the first time installing the work outdoors since having the idea and was in preparation for my exhibition at 16 Nicholson street
What are you doing in this picture?
This is me installing a biotope in Whiting Bay on the Isle of Arran. I am sucking air out of the container while the open end is submerged, and this creates a vaccum that pulls water into it and keeps it there. Its quite a magical process that i dont fullly understand but you can try it yourself by filling a cup underwater and slowly pulling it out, keeping the open end submerged.
we went to Arran to scout out a location for a large scale biotope i was building, which we hoped to have installed there for the duration of my exhibition, live-streaming it to the gallery. We settled on Glenashdale Waterfall but couldnt follow through with this in the end because of travel restrictions, so instead decided on Greenock Cut Waterfall which was a little closer to home
Outline the video
Now im going to show you a video made in collaboration with Finn of the large scale biotope installed at Greenock Cut waterall.
This waterfall is part of irrigation system for the Greenock cut reservoir, and is therefor completely artificial. This wasn’t the natural ecosystem i had in mind when first imagining biotopes but i really loved that the falls kind of looked like a water feature. It sort of of ended up looking like one of my simplified drawings of waterfalls, which ill show you later.
It was pretty treacherous wading through the water in mid January but also really fun!
I remember feeling like the work had failed after filming this considering that the biotope had capsized and the raft had broken, at the time I kept telling my partner and friends that it was an epic fail! but in reality i think it just changed what the video was about and turned it into a kind of performance art piece, like artist makes work for nature but elements arent having it!
what happened at kibble palace?
This is the same Biotope from the video i just showed you, but installed in Kibble Palace pond at Glasgow botanic gardens. We had permission to leave it installed there for the duration of the exhibition, and were able to set up a 24hr live stream. I remember the first time i saw fish swimming in there, it was like 11pm and i was sitting with my partner watching the stream on my phone and all of a sudden this little fishy quickly darted up and back out and it was the first time i had seen anything engage with the Biotope without me putting it there, and was a really emotional moment!
Over the next few weeks the goldfish all grew accustom to it, as you can see in this video where they happily swim around, exploring their new real estate. There’s something about how the fish were animating the Biotope that made me feel so complete, especially cus I’d had the idea almost 3 years before this, and i was so grateful to have had the opportunity to follow it through. The Biotope idea has by no means finished, and there’s a lot of things ill change for next time. I think id like to leave it somewhere for a long period of time to observe how a habitat might use it, im speculating that plants would take advantage of it pretty quickly, given the increased acess to sunlight, but who knows, maybe some fish might even make it into a home, or a shelter from predators!
Air Diving
Accompanying the biotopes were a series of aquarium based sculptures as well as some drawings and paintings displayed in the 16 Nicholson street gallery space. It was a unique experience installing a show in the middle of a pandemic, and we had no choice but to showcase it completely virtually (this is still accessible via my website btw). This was of course disappointing as i wanted all my friends to come to the opening, but it did teach me alot about the crucial differences to seeing work in the flesh vs a reproduction. there were works i felt couldnt be quite captured by a camera, and others that looked better in photos than in real life. Also, health and safety regulations have been a massive headache for me in the past as someone who makes mechanical aquatic sculptures for galleries with precious old floorboards, like water and plug sockets - I need both!! but i didn’t have to think about it much with this exhibition because there was no in person viewing. Funnily enough there were works that i hadn’t quite dialed in in time that were spraying water and creating massive puddles, so we wouldn’t have been able to open to the public anyway!
