AGE OF MAN

Age of Man, 2023

Smoked fired clay, wood, paint.

This ceramic frieze reflects our recent entry and rapid advancement into the current Anthropocene epoch – the Age of Man. Smoke fired flint artefacts are dipped into cadmium yellow industrial paint, evoking our relationship to the sun in the face of climate change and man’s technological development. The increasing amounts of cadmium yellow in each concentric layer depicts the rise in atmospheric temperature.

Geologists have described a key environmental marker, ‘The Golden Spike’, when plutonium isotopes left from the hydrogen bomb tests of the 1950s. This is when the Earth left behind the previous Holocene epoch – a relatively stable period that had lasted for 11,700 years, at the end of the last major Ice Age.

With each circular ring, the yellow starts to drown the fossils, suggestingthe ‘Great Acceleration’ caused by a range of activities: the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, plastics and chemical fertilisers, the loss of biodiversity; and radioactive contamination from weapons testing. Reaching back through the lens of geoarchaeology, we can understand our human path through our cultural evolution and the traces of what we have created.