SPOTLIGHT: Aurora Robson

Aurora is Canadian, but grew up in Hawaii and has lived and worked in New York for 20 years. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn with her husband, cinematographer Marshall Coles and daughter Ona.

In addition to her work as an artist, she is Director/Co-founder of Lumenhouse, a photo studio, artist in residence program, exhibition space and community/cultural event space located in Brooklyn.

She is also the founding Director of Project Vortex, an international organization of artists, architects and designers working with plastic debris – working with Project Kaisei to reduce the amount of plastic debris littering our oceans and shorelines.-Aurora Robson

…and now an excerpt from Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG:
“A hundred thousand Evian bottles then might someday be transformed by compression into a new type of quartz: vast and subterranean veins of mineralized plastic. In other words, plastics will become our future geology. It may take a hundred million years, but it will happen. Future desert adventures will stumble upon belts of plastic, compressed into ribbons between layers of bedrock. Volcanoes of the future will erupt, belching transparent magma –liquid plastic – rolling out in great sheets, boiling everything in its path. Unlucky animals will be entombed as it cools, trapped in that plastic amber, fossilizing slowly over another million years, till the hardened remains of extinct species will seem to hover inside translucent hillsides, like specimens in a resinous vitrine, an open-air museum. Future Darwinians will open their sketchbooks, stunned.

After thousands of years, perhaps a forest moves in, learning to metabolize this strange rock into transparent soil. Roots grow steadily downward through what appears to be air-the ground like transparent plastic or glass- and people come out just ot sit there in the sun, watching those slow and ancient roots push deeper and deeper into the earth. Worms wriggle as if through space, leaving tunnels-underground landscapes of air. After the sun goes down, you walk out into the middle of the woods and shine a flashlight down through the surface of the earth, illuminating tangles of roots and buried streams.

Given the time and right chemical composition, these underground stratigraphies of white plastic could begin to dissolve, forming caves. Blurred and colorless stalactites will hang over subterranean lakes where blind fish swim, sensing rather than seeing the milky walls and abstract rock formations hovering all around them. A distance descendant of Steven Spielberg will direct his own version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, setting the film inside enormous tunnels of white plastic that extend tens of thousands of feet into the planet. One by one, actors lose consciousness and fall to the ground, passing out in contemplation of the apparently infinite abyss that extends for miles beneath their feet…hypnotized by the hazy white glow that comes from the very core of the planet. A hundred thousand Evian bottles then might someday be transformed by compression into a new type of quartz: vast and subterranean veins of mineralized plastic. In other words, plastics will become our future geology. It may take a hundred million years, but it will happen. Future desert adventures will stumble upon belts of plastic, compressed into ribbons between layers of bedrock. Volcanoes of the future will erupt, belching transparent magma –liquid plastic – rolling out in great sheets, boiling everything in its path. Unlucky animals will be entombed as it cools, trapped in that plastic amber, fossilizing slowly over another million years, till the hardened remains of extinct species will seem to hover inside translucent hillsides, like specimens in a resinous vitrine, an open-air museum. Future Darwinians will open their sketchbooks, stunned.

After thousands of years, perhaps a forest moves in, learning to metabolize this strange rock into transparent soil. Roots grow steadily downward through what appears to be air-the ground like transparent plastic or glass- and people come out just ot sit there in the sun, watching those slow and ancient roots push deeper and deeper into the earth. Worms wriggle as if through space, leaving tunnels-underground landscapes of air. After the sun goes down, you walk out into the middle of the woods and shine a flashlight down through the surface of the earth, illuminating tangles of roots and buried streams.

Given the time and right chemical composition, these underground stratigraphies of white plastic could begin to dissolve, forming caves. Blurred and colorless stalactites will hang over subterranean lakes where blind fish swim, sensing rather than seeing the milky walls and abstract rock formations hovering all around them. A distance descendant of Steven Spielberg will direct his own version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, setting the film inside enormous tunnels of white plastic that extend tens of thousands of feet into the planet. One by one, actors lose consciousness and fall to the ground, passing out in contemplation of the apparently infinite abyss that extends for miles beneath their feet…hypnotized by the hazy white glow that comes from the very core of the planet. “ Geoff Manaugh