the eternal emissions of a dying star,
Etched Steel, Corroded Copper, Aluminium Sublimation Print, Magnets, Paper, Pencil, Concrete, LCD Screen, Moving Image, 5:1 Surround Sound
2026, 16 collective for Glasgow International, in collaboration with Dianne Burdon.
Hunterston A and B nuclear sites, on the Firth of the Clyde, are engaged in a process of decommissioning - the name for the slow administrative afterlife of nuclear power. This involves long-term, near-surface storage of radioactive waste, until a final decision upon disposal is reached, with the possibility of remaining on site for eternity.
How might we transmit refusal to a society whose interpretive frameworks may bear no resemblance to our own; what if language fractures entirely?
This installation engages sound and sculpture to sort through fragments of enduring nuclearity at the site of Hunterston. Visual forms recur as echoes: thistles used for site remediation in nuclear sites, concrete inspection chambers, the field of spikes drawn from early warning proposals, uncertain codes, hidden messages, images over-processed into obscurity. Salt water gathered from the Firth of Clyde has been used to etch steel and corrode copper, mimicking an accelerated process of weathering and decay observed across the Hunterston site. Sound moves across it all; textures drawn out from field recordings, geophones and digital archives, to become a degraded tocsin call.
Nuclearity is a pool that reflects and condenses the world back upon itself, water which has no choice but to contain the arrival of contamination, which spills beyond its linguistic confines, demanding a continuous re-evaluation of our apparatuses of knowledge; A new axis, the competing of two suns; It is like how the emissions of dying stars inform us of the date of their formation, and yet, luminous, they have become something else entirely; We have long since passed some threshold of total extinguishment; Everything scrubbed still leaves a trace; corrosive, interminable; This is the epistemological catastrophe of radioactive waste, which extends and endures so far beyond the framing of the now; Thrusts us out of ourselves; Language twirls on the present, toppling backwards, forwards; Our warning is a form of transtemporal care, the ways we shade into one another, even in aeons of time, through the legacies of our tedious materiality; Our intimacies are enduring infrastructures, suffused with affect, urgent and always; Stains onto everything; All this gushing in and out.
