Exhibitions
CAROLINE HATFIELD: EPIGRAPH
Neue Welt / 507 Hagan St. April 5 - 27th
Caroline Hatfield
Neue Welt is pleased to present the work of Starkville, MS-based artist Caroline Hatfield.
We often view natural history as separate from human activity; something adjacent to our lives. The immaterial distinctions we associate with our humanity – language, thought, storytelling – have material origins. Writing began in stone and later found form in graphite, plant fibers, sulphates, tannins, pigments, plastics, minerals, metals, wires, and routers. EPIGRAPH seeks to recenter the significance and agency of non-human actors by considering geology as text and threading together material influences, continuities, and coincidences
Accumulating lime, rhythms of cast plaster shells and fossils, meteorite-like-forms, blue light cast by a marine spotlight, layers of maps, and a display case housing scientific and speculative ephemera comprise a story of water and dust.
There is a widely accepted scientific theory that at least some of earth’s water was deposited by asteroids. In the millions of years since, the phenomenon of life has evolved with varying tensions of time and process: a river courses over centuries, while an engineered water system, like the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway, takes twelve years to complete. Likewise, there are similarities between an impact crater and a limestone quarry – both are massive disturbances in the earth. What can we interpret by considering these chapters comparatively?
In the context of this work, limestone is a geological text. The Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee region’s fossil-rich landscape contains ancient marine organisms like brachiopods, cretaceous oysters, crinoids, and trilobites. These beings made their shells and carapaces by extracting calcium and carbonate ions from seawater to form calcium carbonate. Today, their remains are a primary constituent of limestone. Each stratum is a record, a succession of life that frames potential climate engineering methods like stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). Conducted to cool the global temperature, this process would involve injecting large quantities of a substance (such as calcium carbonate) into the upper atmosphere. SAI could turn our blue sky white and change our world in irrevocable and unforeseen ways.
Does the course of history flow full circle to meet itself? Or does it spiral, like a shell? Curving in the same direction, parallel to its past point, but never meeting? Is it moving infinitely outward or finitely in?
