‘A Mission’ is a work which was inspired from a lecture during a creative cultures class held in my second year of Art School. It discussed Massey Universities carbon footprint and the journey for us to be a carbon zero university by 2030. Over the three campus’ Massey had produced an estimated output of around 2500 - 3000 tonnes of carbon (2021). I found this was a very hard number to comprehend and wanted to be able to communicate it through my work.
I started with what one tonne of carbon would look like, to be able to then visualise this 2500 times. I researched items which contained carbon and ways I could represent the quantity. Humans are made up of 18% carbon if the average person weighs in at 80kg; meaning 1 tonne is equivalent to 69.4 people, fire extinguishers contained 2.27kg of carbon, needing 440.5. However, I settled on carbonated 330ml cans and found there was 170 grams of carbon in them. This meant it was equivalent to 5882 cans. I originally had planned to make a sculpture from this amount of cans, with the limited 6 week timeframe on the project I only generated the sculpture out of a few hundred. I then duplicated this sculpture to then make up the exact 5882 cans to represent the 1 tonne. The project ended in the form of a projection which stretched across 5m.
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