Maria Sledmere
Published: 21 January 2019
Anthropocene Aesthetics: Tracing Deep Time, Daily Life and Dark Ecology through Critical-Creative Practice
University of Glasgow
Anthropocene Aesthetics: Tracing Deep Time, Daily Life and Dark Ecology through Critical-Creative Practice
Much ecological thought is ‘holistic’: examining the biosphere as a whole and thus attending to environmental catastrophes rather than incremental shifts. Timothy Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ instead proposes subscendence: a notion that concentrates on constituent parts over the whole itself. My doctorate will attend to these ‘parts’—human/non-human, cultural/ industrial, active/superannuated—and how we engage and coexist with them ecologically.
Addressing a ‘representational bias against slow violence’ (Rob Nixon) in climate-change discourse, I will investigate, via critical-creative practice, otherwise-occluded causalities between individual, everyday experience and mass, planetary effects. My research negotiates everyday studies, Romanticism, ecocriticism and the energy humanities; I critically situate my own poetic practice by reading contemporary works in multiple media (including photography, music, art, blogs, essays and poetry) through a dark ecological lens. Using poetry, lyric essays and experimental journaling, I will also collaborate with other writers/artists, enabling reflection on the aesthetic and ethical questions surrounding creative practice, reception and material context.
First published: 21 January 2019