CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #11: Carrie Fertig

Carrie Fertig is a socially engaged interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, sound, sculpture, installation. Her aim is to make compelling and safe environments inviting deep reflection and participation in self-discovery and well-being. Much of her work is an exploration of difficult and uncomfortable aspects of being human: dying and forgiveness. She is interested in pushing societal norms around dying and the lack of conversation about the inevitable.

"The Curator Space bursary will aid the development of a new kinetic, sonic, performance-based video addressing climate-centric lockdown lessons. This draws on my own experience of shielding and isolation from other people in the Highlands of Scotland over the past year. This has mostly been spent in total sensory immersion in nature. Incremental changes in water, plants, animals, and atmosphere, highlight gains made when humans drastically changed their behaviour, forced by Covid.

To ensure the work inspired by my experience is less impactful upon the planet, most of the components will be recycled. Thousands of hollow glass musical icicles I made for a previous project Ausklingen (Fade Away) will be transformed into a massive plumb bob or plummet of symbolic melting of ice. Tethered to the plummet, my movement will cause the icicles to crash into each other, chiming a mighty roar tolling end times. Thousands of these glass icicles will swing on a threatening trajectory, as inescapable as the consequences of our behaviour. The harder I try to escape, the louder the repercussions.

This bursary will enable me to develop this work for the UNFIX Festival, a global performance art festival with ecology and climate crisis at its core. It builds on my previous experience of producing sonic, kinetic, and performance works, and work begun during my residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, as recipient of the 2020 Jane Adams Wait Residency in Performance, cut short by the coming pandemic."

You can see more of Carrie's work here. 

 

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