Solar Nap Coal Rest

Solar Nap Coal Rest | Performance at PAWA Performance Art Week Aotearoa | Brydee Rood 2017 Wellington New Zealand. 

Solar Nap Coal Rest is about energy, sustainability and climate change – encircling dialogues about personal and collective power systems, fossil fuels, the national grid and New Zealand’s current political posturing around these critical concerns. I lay in the intertidal zone of Island Bay, taking a nap before the rising tide and setting sun. I was cocooned in a gold emergency survival blanket with my head on a pillow of raw coal nuggets and a line of solar powered LEDs drawing a line up to the high tide mark. There’s strength in lying there and knowing that the ocean is coming up, feeling resilient yet fragile in a freezing Wellington onshore gale. For most of us the knowledge that the ocean is rising rests somewhere in the recesses of our minds. Uncomfortable, but far from urgent. This work asks us to consider "Can we afford to take a nap in the face of climate change?"

Feature Article Come Hell or High Water by Julian McKinnon published in Art News New Zealand Autumn Edition 2018 and Cover.

Images: Brydee Rood 2018 | Photographs by Sara Cowdell and Essi Airisniemi

Please Return Me to the Earth

Please Return Me to the Earth | We Are Weather - Installation and Performance Part 1 & 2 | Brydee Rood 2017 | Corban Estate Art Centre and Western Park Auckland NZ

We Are Weather saw me collaborate with paleoclimatologist and University of Auckland Associate professor Anthony Fowler HOD of Environmental Studies in the development of an installation, workshop and performance project for the TEMP exhibition of art, science and climate change. In Please Return Me to the Earth 10.8 tons of Huntly coal quantifying the average NZ household's carbon footprint is installed in the centre of the park-like grounds on a wider bed of wood-chips. The performance involved a ritual arrival and dumping of the coal to a grounded public site with an experimental droning composition of earthly, ceremonial bagpipes derived from the iconic musical score Dark Isle by Iain MacLachlan 1963 and a gravitas gathering, collective contemplation, sharing and handling of the coal. Assisting Performer: Robyn Jordaan, Bagpipes: Lewis MacDonald. We Are Weather was generously supported by Creative NZ

Please Return Me to the Earth Part 2 involved the actual writing out of the 10.8tonnes of coal from Part 1, following the terrain of the landscape in Western Park Auckland and measuring 86m long by 7m high. Through this process the coal physically completes an organic cycle of returning to the ground and allowing the carbon to break down into the earth and biodegrade naturally. The text installation was completed through a public working bee supported by Generation Zero and TEMP. 

Images: Brydee Rood 2017