Faculty member Skye Moret explores Design + Ecology during International Artist Residencies

æðislegt (understory)

For the month of September my studio overlooked the ocean. Rainbows, boats of all kinds, wind combing over waves that shook our old coast guard building for days, slanted sunsets, my muraled neighborhood… From my desk I could see a glacier on clear days and, off to the right, Mt. Esja looked down on colorful Reykjavík. While the other nine artists at SÍM Residency were fine artists—painters, sculptors, musicians—or journalists, I honed in on something closer to art+science investigation. Filming underwater and taking cyanotypes of beached jellyfish, capturing coastal textures and tracing contours of geothermal rivers and pools, I explored the more nuanced aspects of the Icelandic land- and seascapes. I continued to explore a fundamental inquiry in my practice that examines place as discrete information luring us to meaningfully engage with nature: what makes a place truly unique? What sensory or non-sensory information makes humans aware that we are somewhere novel or different, and how do we know? What interactions or experiences with the natural world prompt us to ask new and better questions? SÍM Residency.

Indizi per l’immersione (Cues for Immersion)

In June I found myself living in the Orobie Alps of Italy as a 2018 Nature, Art + Habitat Residency Fellow. For three weeks I explored the nuanced, indexical thresholds within the Taleggio landscape and aquatic ecosystems and paired these experiments with an investigation of investigation itself. As in Iceland, I asked, what makes a place truly unique? What objective and subjective cues allow us to understand our environment and how can we reflexively explore these cues? By highlighting thresholds visually, I created prompt cards that allow both residents and visitors to explore and discuss the valley’s environment at multiple spatial scales. Through curious engagement and transdisciplinary perspective, participants contextualize their natural surroundings in a rich and pragmatic way, adding to the collective dialogue of the valley. Nature, Art + Habitat Residency 2018 Water focus. Residents.

Directly after my residency in Italy, I went to Science Gallery in Dublin where my installation ‘Antarctica: a Chromatic Paradox’ was exhibited for 3 months as part of their ‘Life at the Edges’ show about extreme environments.