Emma Wootton

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Spectre

Spectre investigates the concept of climate anxiety, both in personal experience, and as a global phenomenon. “Climate anxiety” is the phenomenon where one experiences an anxiety-driven freeze response due to the seemingly insurmountable crisis of climate change. My own experience of climate anxiety has led to an avoidance of climate-activism within my personal life. Nothing felt as if it would be impactful enough, so why attempt to fight an already lost battle? This only increased my guilt and frustration, this time directed towards myself as well.

Spectre aims to express my feelings of powerlessness and loss, through the use of monstrous imagery and references to a dystopia. By combining the forms of birds, insects, and machines, my monsters exist as both victims, and as creators of destruction. They aim to invoke the fear of the unnatural, the out of place, and uncanny, yet also the beauty of both natural and man-made forms. Moreover, I drew inspiration from another form of climate destruction - coral bleaching - where beings are in a position of extreme precariousness, but not yet dead. Additionally, the colours were chosen to create an impression of ghostliness, of something insubstantial and imagined. 

Using these monsters, I created a vision of the future that haunts me, that is completely unrecognisable from the world we live in now. However, I did not want to create the impression that this future was concrete. Fatalism has become so entrenched in our understanding of climate change. For this reason, I chose to make this installation entirely from fabric, using softness to undermine the certainty of the fatalist framing of climate change. While the threat of climate change is real and imminent, if action is taken, further destruction can be avoided. By emphasising this narrative of uncertainty and hopefulness, I aim to undermine the doomist narrative that has prevented me from taking climate action.