The Reactions Between Materials

An Interview with Hannah Rowan

By Haley Lauw

 
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Hannah Rowan is an artist who makes sculptural works that meditate on the relationship between the slow geological time of natural processes and the fast paced, technology-driven frenetic activity of humans. She utilizes both synthetic and organic materials in her ephemeral, multifaceted constructions.

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HALEY LAUW: When was the last time that you were home? Or what is home for you?

HANNAH ROWAN: I’m quite lucky in the fact that—well I think I’m lucky in that way but for other people it’s boring—I grew up in the house I was born in, so I have a really strong connection to Brighton. My parents are still there. My dad is a doctor and my mom is a teacher’s assistant, but she just retired. They live by the sea and they have a big garden, so that was always, like, my de-stress place, you know? Like I could go, and things are calmer, so if I think about moving, like if I moved here [NYC], home for me would be like my friends and family and not necessarily the house I lived in. I’m used to moving around but I think the idea of what makes me sad about leaving home is more of the connections to certain people. I think my idea of home isn’t a definite answer—it’s more people than a place. I like London and I like New York, but I stay in London for the people.
 

LAUW: And you’re also planning to do the Arctic Circle expedition?

ROWAN: I’ve decided I’m not doing any more place residencies for a while because I’m still drawing from all of this research and video and photo that I did in Chile and I’m still navigating that—and the one I just did, the thematics of it, is focused on ecological discourse and climate justice, thinking about decolonializing nature, but also the intersection between outdoor recreation and art making and pedagogy and social practice. It’s all so relevant to my work and it’s so nice to do that right after finishing an MA that’s quite in intense bubble and then going to a new place with no materials and starting from scratch. That’s been good. Now, I have the arctic coming up next June and until then I just can’t take on—I so want to go to places and do more research, I feel like if I take on too much it will just become arbitrary, you know?
 

LAUW: Right, you need time to digest all of your experience and data you’ve gathered.

ROWAN: And I’m learning, as well. It seems like there’s always something I need to know more about, especially in Canada just now—the politics of the land and place and being aware that you are in a place, you’re a visitor, you’re not from there, you come from a country that has a history of doing terrible things and you become very aware of that so it feels like there’s this reconciliation taking place there at the moment whether it’s on the surface or with people. You’re on a land that’s not yours and it’s important to recognize the learning happens with that visiting.
 

LAUW: Recognizing that responsibility as an artist—and just a good human of the world.

ROWAN: Exactly.
 

LAUW: Could you tell me a little bit about your relationship to materials? You use these manmade materials that function as hand tools and hardware elements for construction, but you’re also using the elements like water and salt and stone and obviously the different places inform what you use.

ROWAN: The infrastructure of the work really came out of residencies and temporary spaces. Coming from overseas I have a highly material practice, but the work needed to be temporary and ephemeral. There are objects and things that might be standardized in the different places, like hardware at stores you know, for me back home and here and America—clamping, lights, cables, and it’s all temporary, but I also respond to what’s there. I like to involve the materials. It’s the reactions between materials, and what has developed more in my work over the past two years has been the ecology of materials and how those connect.

The reason why I wanted to go to the Atacama is that I had begun researching salt and salt formation. I had been working with water and melting and water and ice are a readable rate of change. It illustrates time in a visual way. In relation to that—salt crystals occur in the absence of water. I love going to hardware and dollar stores or thrift stores that are everyday materials that get bought together. With the salt there was initial piece where I was melting ice on a projector and it was sort of dribbling off and I was catching it in this container and I thought, why don’t I just put salt in it to absorb the water? And then the next day I came in and it had crystalized. The relation between the two—the idea of solid and liquid crystallization—and material states and having that active liveness in the work, everything is undergoing change or suggestive of change.

Materials suggest natural processes like erosion or wind or melting or evaporation but then what is enacting that is often a conglomeration of something that is more utilitarian, and they come together. I think about “Frankenstein,” ha. People have said that to me and so I’m reading it at the moment
 

LAUW: You’re reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”?

ROWAN: Yeah, it’s kind of weird reading it when it’s so hot, ha, but there’s this sort of animate/inanimate thing. I suppose what I’m also interested in is not looking at nature as the outside, you know, in this romanticized view, but being intertwined in something, a codependency, like how Morton and Haraway talk about it—an interconnected mesh. That’s why the materials I use are purposefully traversing those lines between artificial. I’ve been working with casts and modular objects and things in my studio, so it’s all propping and provisional. My process has become quite streamlined since my residencies and I have ingredients that are semi ubiquitous.
 

LAUW: You have a methodology.

ROWAN: Right. In a recent piece I had this piece of ice that was melting over salt and alluding to these two environments—the Arctic and the Antarctic. Like polar regions, they really feature in my work. I have this sort of longing relationship with blue and the liquidity. In relation to me I think about technology and ecology and climate and screens and I’ve been thinking about liquidity in relation to the idea of flux and these things that exist in different states of liquification. Like I’m talking to you on a screen right now and there’s this like the terrains of the digital and the geologic that seem to intertwine with our human condition.

I’m using materials to suggest environments that are rapidly changing, so in itself it’s a transmission device. I’m using the water in the aquarium, and I came to work with aquariums because of this Roland Barthes quote, the idea of the world being contained behind glass, voyeurism, and I think about aquariums and this idea of screens and containment and veneers and artificial ecologies—and touching.

I was questioning in my own work if and how these two states are connected; information overload and ubiquitous screen-based technology and environmental catastrophes, which often is like mediated to us through these devices.
—Hannah Rowan

LAUW: evidence of human control.

ROWAN: Exactly. It’s a detachment and a barrier, but the blue is also of the ice and the oceans. [Aquariums] straddle those two terrains for me. And then salt was informed by the Atacama and these rough, sharp, sort of craggily formation. Since then, I’ve incorporated 3D scanning and 3D modeling into my work. After my first year at RCA, I had honestly been used to traveling around a lot and I got a bit—I was kind of in a pressure cooker. I wasn’t used to making art in one place like that. I felt too settled. I’m informed by place and so are the materials I use. I felt like I needed to do a residency and I didn’t want to do another studio residency. I feel like what my work is talking about a lot is like distance and scale and sort of environments undergoing rapid change. So, I have this relationship with liquid and my thesis at RCA was about liquidity and thinking about shards of data, rising sea levels. I was questioning in my own work if and how these two states are connected; information overload and ubiquitous screen-based technology and environmental catastrophes, which often is like mediated to us through these devices. My research was very much about geology of media which talks about deep time and the environment that doesn’t just surround our world, the tech world, but that runs through it I’m making working that is sort of detached from place. And I needed more like—not just reading in books.
 

LAUW: More experiences. You needed your feet on the ground.

ROWAN: Yeah, I wanted a personal response. You get so—you know when you’re in an institution and its thesis time—I need some kind of place. This work—I felt detached.

Being in that one place for a long time, I felt like the work was getting stale. You know I’m working with water in my work, but I wanted to know about the other extreme. Water in its absence is equally something that we are not confronted with on a reliquary basis.

And then I saw this residency in the Atacama Desert, which is the driest non-polar desert on earth. And the more I looked into it the more I felt like I needed to go there. It has the highest natural abundance of salt in the world, and it’s this region in the Andes, and it’s an amazing place for stargazing, and right before I arrived I realized that [the Atacama] is where all the lithium mines are that go into our devices that aid this tech boom.
 

LAUW: Do they still prescribe individuals with bipolar disorder lithium? Is that the lithium?

ROWAN: Yes, I don’t know how much, but that as well. There was this strong connection with not just the land but the body. The idea of minerality.

So, I went there, and the lithium is in the salt. There are these large mines that look like large evaporation ponds. I was with the directors of the residency and there was another artist interested in this as well, and we couldn’t get access to the mines. It’s all really contentious. And also, what was interesting to me was and talking to members of the communities. The indigenous communities that lived in the Atacama how water is deeply connected to the method of lithium extraction. And how water is deeply sacred in a place where there is none. You’re more aware of these possibilities. I got drawn into the politics of water. And thinking about how, I don’t have to go to see the mines. I can go to Google Earth. And there’s the fucking lithium mine. They’re not gonna let me in. We took these big cars into the Atacama and you can hear the salt cracking—it’s like crrck crckk crckk crck—and I took these scans of salt crystals that I then 3d printed. And it was kind of out of this gypsum powder. So, they had this sort of a white, ghostly quality, and I was thinking a lot about this idea of ghost relics and future fossilization but also how it links this compulsion to digitize our world with fleshy pixels.

The 3d scans and 3d printing sort of becomes—it straddles a line between technology and geology. The salt crystals of stayed with me and endured and have become installations—these little moments on meat hooks or placed—ghost relics—desire to digitize our environment and the ghostly qualities that allude to artifacts and the facts that they’re just outside and on the ground outside of the sites of extraction.
 

LAUW: The things that you’re scanning and printing are moments in time, like how you’re talking about the intersection between our digital world and our impact on the environment. And how each instance of an object you’re using is representative of a point in time and you’re using processes to illustration the passage of time. The rocks and formation that you’ve cataloged are moments in time because if you were to find them again, they wouldn’t be the same next year.

ROWAN: Exactly. The video came in when I as there and I was recording instances of water. I don’t know if It’s because I grew up by the sea, but I have this blue fixation. Rebecca Solnit—distance and longing and the bluey screens of devices and the glow of water and lights. The water atlas project I started in the Atacama and continued in Banff—I’m looking at these instances of water, both ecological and artificial—and I need to look and see if there are connections for when I go to the arctic for scanning and video documentation of water, precedes and absence and just now at Banff we were in the rocky mountains and the glaciers in the rocky mountains are some of the fastest fading on earth and they might be gone in our lifetime and taking a hike along the iceline trail and glaciers which are supposed to be these huge blue things and they’re really just grey and a bit shriveled and you know it’s not what people expect of a glacier. And it’s like no, it’s because it’s melting so much.
 

LAUW: It’s not the nature porn you were promised.

ROWAN: Yeah, and there’s these huge waterfalls coming off of them. Water Atlas sort of started in the Atacama because I was like in these instances of water and I’m drawn to it and it’s an ongoing project. It’s like an archival project now. So now I can’t take too much on my plate. I’m still going through and navigating.

And it’s true! It’s dangerous. You can’t show too much nature porn. You have to show the dirty glacier.
 

LAUW: Most people’s first impact of national parks and monuments are through a screensaver.

ROWAN: That idea of mapping and cartography—I’m getting a more embodied understanding of mapping in my work I tend to use cartograph in a way, but it isn’t an aerial google earth way, it’s a very colonial way of looking at land. Chopping up and dividing it. Extracting from it. Surveying it. And containing it. So, I’m trying to think of ways of passing through places between my MA and the Atacama and the other ways of mapping that happen in your head with materials. This is networks materials in a more spacial sense. Google Earth is most exciting when it glitches and I screenshot it and it doesn’t load, you know? That blur.
 

LAUW: The unplaces.

ROWAN: The glitch.

I want to say we, but what do you say instead of we? It’s problematic because it places equal blame. And people don’t feel it equally, either.
—Hannah Rowan

LAUW: You mentioned that you’ve been reading Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” What else are you reading right now?

ROWAN: I take so many books with me, but I never get to read them all … Donna Haraway, “Staying of the Trouble.” “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.” Esther Lesley on liquid crystals and data that I feel like I read her a lot during my thesis, and she was saying it all better than me! Jussi Parikka, “Geology of Media.” I haven’t started it yet, but “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin. She died recently, and I imagine her and Donna Haraway just being speculative together.

I’m reading a lot about critiquing the Anthropocene. We and the universalizing are problematic, and the money from the mines in Chile is facilitating this tech boom in the US and UK, and it’s this sort of labor, but it’s a source of wealth for only some certain people. It’s sort of new colonization that’s going on. I’ve also read “Decolonizing Nature” by TJ Demos.

After having spent time very interested in geology and geological processes I’m thinking about the problems—like what happens if we embrace humans as neutrally responsible—and that’s not the case. Places that are feeling it the most. I want to say we, but what do you say instead of we? It’s problematic because it places equal blame. And people don’t feel it equally, either. And so that’s why I’m taking a small break to try to read “Frankenstein.” It still feels like research, but it’s still about meddling.

 

Hannah Rowan (b.1990) lives and works in London, UK. She recently completed her Masters in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. She has attended residencies at The Banff Centre, Canada (2015, 2018), The Vermont Studio Centre (2016), VT, and The Wassaic Project, NY (2016). Her work is informed by inter-disciplinary collaboration and research in remote environments, such as The Atacama Desert, Chile, and in June 2019 she will be joining the Arctic Circle: Arts and Science Expedition. Upcoming solo shows include the White Crypt Gallery, London, Nov 2018, and Assembly Point, London, May 2019.