Jemma Mckenzie

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

The Weight of Air

It becomes all too easy to lose sight of the horizon in a landscape where the soil has begun a journey to the sky.

This body of work is a way for me to depict the”‘weight of air” in a landscape where the very act of breathing enacts a “slow violence”. Life begins and ends with breath: the first inhalation, the last exhale, and the immeasurable murmurings of life in between. Breathing is a marksman for the passing of our time. What does it mean when breath cannot be taken for granted?

This project is a quest for me to come to terms with a changing world and to re-imagine how I relate to the environment. It is a journey of accepting and learning to care for a terrain torn apart by the processes of extraction, human exploitation, hyper-capitalism, globalisation, and industrialisation. The landscape I travelled to is that of a mining town in Ba-Phalaborwa Limpopo, close to the home I grew up in. This is a project that took me home.

I worked, both photographically and sculpturally, through processes of salvaging debris, reconstructing waste and capturing the foreign and faraway atmosphere of a dying landscape in film photographs. This process of salvage, deconstruction, and reconstruction is a way for me to give the waste a place in the world that allows it to tell its forgotten stories.

I wanted to tangibly encapsulate the ghostly experience of being in a landscape where the air is laden with dust from centuries past. The photographs depict blurred black and white landscapes, the dust in the air exaggerated by the film’s grain and haunted by the silhouettes of the monstrous machines inhabiting this desolate space.

Similarly, the sculptures are shaped from the dust and debris salvaged from around the mines, and their material memory opens a dialogue that engages directly with the landscape. They are vessels that hold the residual traces of histories and traumas from the spaces they came from. The abstract nature of both the found objects and visuals in my work insights notions of ‘enchantment’ that allows it to create recognisable but unidentifiable dystopian landscapes: ‘Ghost Scapes’. The forms of my sculptures speak equally to the unbecoming as much as they do to the restoration of a 'dying-but-not-yet-dead landscape': a depiction of the unfamiliar precarity of this landscape that sits at the bleeding edge of environmental chaos, a wasteland scattered with objects and minerals both ancient and new. ‘Keepers of time’ and memories of place. It is through this process of salvaging and construction that we can encounter these reconstructed objects that echo the murmurings of conversations to come as humanity negotiates the precarious living through the fragility of time. Here, under this weight, we can stop, look, reminisce, mourn and remember.