Danielle Bobier

TSF 2018 Visual ArtistDanielle Bobier is an interdisciplinary artist of Coast Salish, Kanaka and European settler ancestry. With a deep interest in Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, she is attracted to scientific maps and satellite images as a means of observation and exploration. Through the lens of the Anthropocene (the critical geologic epoch in which human action has resulted in significant alterations of the planet), her work is evocative of the effects of geomorphic surface processes and human intervention upon topography. The themes of construction and new materialism are dominant in her work, and she has a keen interest in states of matter and how they interact on different temporospatial scales.

As salmon go upriver to spawn, so too do we seek home. In 2003, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht introduced the neologism “solastalgia” to describe the feeling of anxiety, sickness or pain relating to environmental changes. Bobier’s 2017 work Catchment Area, touches upon the ideas of solastalgia and water-as-a-guide by joining together liminal imagery with the roughness of material media. The 4’ x 6’ work, routed from salvaged mahogany plywood, imagines a terraformed landscape/perceived drainage basin on a colonised planetary body. Satellite-captured imagery of the Martian landscape blends with inorganic grid-lines and circular pools evocative of the built environment.