The Smallest Measure, 2021 (3-channel version)

Artist Statement, 2021
Slow emergencies are forms of harm and damage that are not acute but occur gradually and imperceptibly to most of us - like climate change, environmental pollution and radiation. Yet despite remaining largely unseen over time, the effects of slow emergencies are palpable, their relative invisibility rendering the harm they wreak all the more entrenched and difficult to address. How can we recognise and respond to the slow emergencies that are threatening life on earth? In The smallest measure, Jessie Boylan proposes that we stop to deeply honour that element that we rarely see and take almost entirely for granted: air. Boylan’s approach to representing air’s fundamental importance is to visualise the work that climate scientists do to take care of air, rigorously studying, capturing, measuring, observing, and comparing samples in some of the world’s most remote locations. In particular, Boylan has trained their attention on Cape Grim in lutruwita/Tasmania, a historical Aboriginal massacre site and the location of an air pollution monitoring station and science program, jointly managed by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere lab at Aspendale south of Melbourne. Untouched by land, the wind that arrives at Cape Grim after blowing over the Southern Ocean is one of the cleanest in the world and is considered ‘baseline’ air: that is, it represents the background atmosphere and thus grants insights into the driving forces behind anthropogenic climate change.
Using a range of bespoke and complex instruments, the dedicated scientists at Cape Grim and Aspendale measure greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide; stratospheric ozone depleting chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs); concentrations of natural and anthropogenic aerosol particulates; reactive gases; radon and solar radiation; wind speed and direction; rainfall, temperature, humidity and air pressure; and solar radiation, including harmful UV-B radiation. As an early iteration in an ongoing research project, the work here surveys the caring ethics the scientists bring to every act of research and how the atmosphere, land, water and science are working together in the formation, collection and analysis of the air and the ways in which global changes in this seemingly invisible matter affects all life-forms.
www.jessieboylan.com