Impressions of a Geologic Afterlife

Here, we are featuring recent bodies of work by Erin Woodbrey – The Carrier Bag Series and The Continuing and Spreading Results of an Event or Action. These distinct but interrelated bodies of work draw from the artist’s research into the history of objects and offer philosophical, existential, and material investigations of time and materiality.

Inspired by objects, ancient building materials and methods, analog forms, and the urgency to rethink materials and cycles of waste and consumption, The Carrier Bag Series is a recent body of work named after the seminal essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this text, Le Guin retells the story of human origin by rethinking and redefining narrative and technology as a cultural carrier bag. Rather than a weapon, a tool of domination, or a narrative of colonisation and conquest, Le Guin upends the record of human origin that proposes rather than a spear, a stick, a blunt object, a sword, and the first tool was a kind of net, a basket, a piece of cloth, a carrier bag, something to gather things with, something to carry something else.

‘Continuing to explore my interests in objects and how they mirror, form, and inform our experiences, relationships, and understandings of place, environment, culture, history, narrative, and time, The Carrier Bag Series specifically examines the object of the container. Thinking about ideas of containment, specifically around ideas of sustainability, scalability, consumerism, distribution of food, and other life-things, as well as the paradox built into materials that are intended to be discarded but not intended to decompose. Looking at vessels, this series began a month before the first lockdown in the United States. Undoubtedly informed by living arrangements defined by a new dimension of containment, closeness, proximity, and isolation, this series began in part as a material exploration but turned into a kind of experiment with my own life and patterns of consumption.

In March 2020, I stopped going to the recycling centre, where I would ordinarily deposit my plastics, glass, metal, and paper. Instead, my studio turned into a de facto recycling centre. Where I could compost things, I did – setting up a worm bin in my house and a kind of experimental compost bin for some paper and fibre-based waste. Plastic containers and fragments of other packaging materials were sorted from glass, metal, and styrofoam. Composed of materials in and around my everyday life, with this work, I hope to illuminate a new capacity for objects and materials and subvert their typical evolution. Rather than discarding the emptied object and waste material, in this series, the container is animated from within, becoming a central figure in a narrative about consumption, accumulation, and new materiality.

To create the sculptures in this series, single-use containers and repurposed objects are covered in ashes from wood-burning stoves, grills, and campfires. This ash came from my studio and from my friends and neighbours, who I traded their ashes for vegetables from my garden. The entombed objects are then arranged around one another using dilapidated wire plant supports.

Imagined as a whole installation and often installed in groups, each piece is a stand-alone object that acts in conversation with one another. The loosely gestural works, sometimes seeming to be animate characters (as often alluded to in their individual titles), can also appear to be objects suspended in time, perhaps displayed in some dystopian/utopian museum of the future. Or maybe it was something lost, forgotten, and then found in the rubble of a demolition site, or at the bottom of the ocean, or unearthed from a volcanic eruption. Embedded in each of these objects are registers of time that speak simultaneously to the present and the past. Some of the objects feel very much of this time, while some things have likely been unchanged for the last decades. In looking at these containers covered in ash, one can see multitudes – histories, the legacies of consumption, capitalism, the environmental crisis, issues of food distribution, habit, function, use, value, repetition, and accumulation.’

As an extension of The Carrier Bag Series is a body of ephemeral photographs made using plant matter, paper, and single-use objects. Coating paper with a photosensitive emulsion made from vegetables and plant matter, objects are rested on the surface and exposed over the course of several days to months. The process is slow. As time passes, the sun permeates through the objects and “bleaches” the areas most exposed to light. The more opaque areas remain pigmented. The resultant prints produce photographs often referred to as anthotypes and shadowgrams. In using insubstantial materials – spinach, beetroot and cabbage for the emulsion and discarded objects as the subject matter, these photograms bear witness and depict the tension of time, permanence and transience, decay and growth.

The artist’s most recent work comes from the ongoing series, The Continuing and Spreading Results of an Event or Action. ‘This work is created from collecting rubbish and discarded debris on daily walks. Some of the objects were of clear and recent origin – a discarded beer can with a legible logo, a plastic bottle rendered brittle and frosted from exposure to the sun, heat, cold, sand, and rain. Some objects, long fragmented from their original form, have been transformed by exposure to time and the environment and were largely unrecognisable. Each of the collected objects is brought back to the studio, washed, and carefully dried. In a form of recycling, the objects are arranged in a circle radiating outwards – the centre representing “the event” of time and the outside being implications and things that accumulate over time.

Through this work, I view art-making as a means for communication, reflection, and a gesture of caregiving. What is made visible by the things we leave behind? Through art, how can we honour each other and the landscape as well as listen, relearn, unlearn and create a better future?’

Erin Woodbrey (b. 1985, Portland, Maine) is a New England-based visual artist whose body of interdisciplinary work utilises sculpture, printmaking, photography, and time-based media.

Woodbrey’s work seeks to parse the fused and knotted qualities of the global environmental crisis as examined through objects, the landscape, and the relationships between bodies and architectures. Woodbrey’s work is presented, piece by piece, as a study of fabricated and naturally occurring units of space and time. Her gaze, wide in scope, is trained on the interrelated qualities of process, time, material, nature, the body and architecture. Using sometimes insubstantial materials to depict what seems simultaneously indestructible and delicate, Woodbrey’s work, explores the tension between permanence and transience, growth and decay. Often involving a dialogue on contemporary ecological discourse and new materialisms, Woodbrey’s work asks essential questions about how the functions of objects and space inform, mirror, and tend to the human condition and, more broadly, conditions of being.

In her own words, ‘recently my work has been motivated by trying to decipher the global environmental crisis as seen through objects, forest and mountain landscapes. Taking cues from the ecological art movements of the 1960s and ’70s, contemporary Ecofeminist discourse, and humanities-based ecological studies, I work to illuminate the urgency of preserving the natural world as well as the parameters of our understandings of time, space, wilderness, and ecology. Through examining the history of how humans have shaped and are shaping the environment, I am interested in the temporal, corporeal, and spatial notions of history, time, and site and what they may illuminate about the present. My work is centralised on the inquiry: how do we create space and, in this process, affect nature? What is the shape of the exchange that takes place between the environment and human activity? What are the terms and histories of these relationships, and how can we better create space for each other?’