As a 7-year-old in 1996 I was terrified of the hole in the ozone layer, the sun is going to burn us all alive. "The Great Ozone-scare" (as I like to remember it to somewhat purify the horrors) in ways painted my whole youth afterwards.
The glaciers and ice caps are melting. The world was going to end in 2000. Nuclear war will start. The bees are going extinct. Nuclear plants are leaking. Earthquakes and tsunamis- and the coral reefs are dying.
Corals have fascinated me ever since I remember. Shapes, colors, textures. I probably learned about the coral reefs because they were going to die.
Articles about coral reefs in the 00's are sobering read. Words used commonly were "bleached", "degrading habitat", "chance survival", "mortality", "disaster"... Even though the artificial nurseries for corals nowadays offer hope, it is simply a hope of species existing through programs, not an ecosystem thriving. Somehow, the coral reefs have been fighting for their survival the whole time I have been alive, and I decided to deeply ingrain this newfound information as a child and guilt myself with it.
I started to craft this series of rings when I wanted to use my scrap pieces of silver. I had in mind to create something flowy, birthing my own kind of corals. Suddenly, there was a resurgence of millennium-fascination in popular culture. It is surely a weird feeling to have a defining era of yourself come back in the cycle of fashion, lifestyle, and overall aesthetics. You start to see the clothes you once wore, the jewelry you loved, and the hairstyles your teenager-self was dying to have, be once again present in the media you consume. The fluid metal shapes of the millennia seemed to form my corals too.
Researching the period, I found out there was hope in the new millennia too, something I don’t remember experiencing much myself. It wasn’t just the world ending or the ice melting. The words in articles were full of anticipation of the coming decades, of economy growing, or human rights becoming everyone’s rights, of community, of wealth. The overall feeling was optimism.
For a millennial, someone who grew up without much hope for the world, the adults were surely hopeful for our futures. Diplomacy, world peace, balance.
Did the hopes come true? The world is on the brink of new wars popping up every day, species are still disappearing, the caps are more water than ice, and we are barreling off the cliff to an even more hostile and empathy-drained generation than we have in decades. The rights of people are being stripped, and fascism is taking over the globe.
And the silver, man-made corals, will surely out-live the real ones.
“Human Rights Endgame”
Survival Economy
“Recovery Dissolve”
“Superpowerful Pollution”
Partial Mortality Diplomacy
Rapid Decline Solution
Acidic Erosion