Anna May Kirk. Juried Artist
As Above, So Below
QUT Art Museum
Artist Statement
In 1815 Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Dense rock and superheated gases filled the sky, ash fell like snow, and vast quantities of sun-blocking particles circulated the planet, blown by stratospheric winds. By the following year, the Earth had cooled by an average of one degree Celsius sparking extreme weather events across the globe: social breakdown, crop failure, and widespread famine. This period of darkness stretched for three years from 1815–18, and is remembered in Europe as the ‘year without a summer’, but perhaps is better described as the years without a sun.
Year Without a Sun looks at the present through the lens of this historical climate crisis. In sculptural glass and film, the past catastrophe, caused by the eruption of Tambora, is reanimated as an eye through which we can view the environmental precarity of the present. Here, black volcanic sand from Tambora has been melted and shaped into a camera lens. Through this lens, Australia’s recently unseasonable wet weather has been documented, mobilising the past to inspect the present. A large volcanic sand glass lens hangs in front of the film, distorting its perception and giving history a form that is both tangible and transparent.
Two centuries after the eruption of Tambora, humanity once again finds itself in the midst of a climate crisis – but this time it is a catastrophe of its own making. Where Tambora plunged the global temperature by 1 degree, the 21st century will be defined by its contemporary reversal, forecasting at least 1.5 degrees of warming. Year Without a Sun explores Tambora as a climatic case study, lens, and urgent warning.
About the artists
Anna May Kirk is a multidisciplinary artist based on Gadigal land. Kirk makes tangible the spectral nature of Anthropogenic climate change through sculptural glass, sensory installations, and film. From shifts in planetary weather patterns to microscopic chemical changes, her immersive works grapple with the many processes of environmental transformation that act upon temporal and geographic scales beyond the human sensorium. Kirk takes a research-based approach referencing past and contemporary moments of climate change, historical weather instrumentation, and aesthetics of the Romantic Sublime. Often utilising scent in her work, Kirk prioritises the non-ocular senses to involve the audience’s body as a sensitive instrument for encountering atmospheres of change. Her artworks act as conduits through which the intangible can become visible, employing materials that are porous to their changing environments, such as the crystalising 19th-century chemical composition of a storm glass, oxidizing copper, and glass. Kirk’s practice endeavors to facilitate corporeal encounters with the immaterial nature of climate change, producing new manifestations of a molten planetary condition.
Credits: Anna May Kirk