My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

I’m start­ing work on a web­site for the Natural History Museum at Edinburgh University (old web­site here) and I came across the work of Samatha Clark, and artist who’s doing some work in col­lab­or­a­tion with the museum. One of her oth­er pro­jects, A Year of Breathing, seems rel­ev­ant to men­tion here:

I was invited to pro­pose a work for this exhib­i­tion that would use only loc­al and recyc­lable mater­i­als. However, it struck me that I myself was not a loc­al mater­i­al, and I’m quite a heavy lump of mater­i­al to trans­port all that way. So instead of fly­ing from Scotland to Girona to install an art­work I donated the car­bon emis­sions of my flight to the people of Girona for the pur­poses of exhal­a­tion. According to some online ‘car­bon cal­cu­lat­ors’ my one way flight to Girona would emit approx­im­ately the same amount of CO₂ as a year of breath­ing for the aver­age person.

With the help of stu­dents from the Faculty of Architecture and the exhib­i­tion organ­isers, a med­it­a­tion space was set up for the dur­a­tion of the exhib­i­tion in  the medieav­al closter of San Domenec, with ses­sions run by loc­al yoga and med­it­a­tion centres. Visitors were invited to par­ti­cip­ate in ‘mind­ful­ness of breath­ing’ med­it­a­tion, bring­ing aware­ness to the breath as it moves out of the body and into the atmosphere.

Her blog has some inter­est­ing reflec­tions on the pro­ject which:

I men­tion to col­leagues that I’m work­ing on a pro­ject in Girona, and they assume I’ll be fly­ing over — it seems to be expec­ted of aca­dem­ics that we clock up air­mil­es as a token of pro­fes­sion­al acheive­ment. When I say I am not going, and that is the point of the exer­cise, I feel like a crank, or a spoilsport. And on a day like today, when a cold, wet front is blus­ter­ing in from the west here in Glasgow bring­ing driv­ing rain and a leaden sky, while Girona basks in spring sun­shine, and I could be hanging out there with some new friends, I think I prob­ably am a spoilsport.