Recent years have heralded predictions of final days in the guise of the Doomsday Clock, Mayan hieroglyphs, Hollywood disaster movies, and the overwhelming flood of articles and scientific reports documenting the unfolding climate emergency. Adding to this subconscious burden are the accompanying hallmarks of the Anthropocene – environmental degradation, habitat loss, and species extinction – which are happening on an almost unimaginable scale. These sculptures embody this collective repressed and deflected anxiety, delivering it back to the viewer in ways that are self-deprecating and playful, prioritizing possibility and transformation over closure. This approachability encourages us to reflect on our responsibility, both individually and collectively, making space to seek solutions.
The works in
Illuminated Collapse combine scientific warning with speculative fantasy, diverse cultural references, personal symbolism, and metaphor to register the concept of planetary collapse. In
Ice Cap, a glacial head melts in the sunlight, weeping rivers and streams onto a flooded cityscape. Reflecting Alice’s dramatic pool of tears in her Adventures in Wonderland, the world is sunken or swimming in remorse – our collective culpability symbolized by the glacier’s many crying eyes.
Black Ark presents a reverse Noah’s Ark narrative, in which a procession of spectral animals is corralled by bulldozers around a deforested landscape. The animals are boarding an ark that is a black void, representing species extinction rather than salvation. The series culminates with the cautiously hopeful
Through Ash. In a collapsed world an enthusiastic hybrid weed – representing new horizons – sprouts through the wreckage.
Crafted from a combination of clays, papier-mâché, textiles, and hand-carved woods and presented on large museum plinths, these works are whimsical in their attempt to bestow material form to fleeting states. The anthropomorphic qualities of the figures borrow from a myriad of histories of the re-imagined body – from grotesque representations of the Renaissance era to the shape-shifting characters of mid-century popular cartoons.
The obsessive craft quality of this work subverts the various functions and histories of the miniature and diorama. They occupy a grey area between traditional natural history displays and toy models; oscilating from a crafted illusion understood as fact to a miniature realm on which we are able to insert our ideas and fantasies. When applied to Griebel’s imaginative introspections, these elements cause the sculptures to waver between fantasy and objective understanding. From this liminal space, they describe both difficult fact and dystopic fiction, attempting to mediate personal space within them.