Holocene
Civic Centre and Beach
Inspired by the natural world, responding to its power, its fragility and how it is affected by human development and industrialisation, Alex Duncan’s major new installation portrays a possible future scenario of how the natural world may be. Polyurethane foam pebbles, a by-product of the oil industry that the artist has collected from the coastline, become monumentally enlarged, washed up on a rising sea.
Duncan presents these objects as the debris of the modern world, stemming from a rolling history of copper smelting, coal extraction and oil refinement, exposing the complicated relationship between man and nature in an uncertain future where these boulders may yet hold true and exist, washed up on a surge of environmental change.
