Emily Parsons-Lord

On the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, award-winning artist Emily Parsons-Lord makes visually stunning, embodied installations and performances. They elicit wonder and provoke critical re-examination of some of our most fundamental materials: air and explosions. These materials of the climate crisis speak to both the invisibility and the spectacle of collapse, and the confluence of personal and environmental catastrophe. 

Air is simultaneously local and global, encompassing the effects of breathing as well as the governance of polluters and policy-makers. Air is where what we jettison into seeming oblivion is caught and returned. It is a physical site, as well as a place to project our imaginations. An explosion is an extreme condition of air, a rapid state of transformation from one state to another. By shifting our experience of time to a geological timescale, the rapidity of change since the industrial revolution makes it clear that we are exploding. This is how it feels to explode. Through air and explosions Emily’s work interrogates the experience of witnessing this expanded unstable moment of multiple simultaneous catastrophes. It shifts in register and scale from the sublime to the relatable, humorous and queer.