Nina Elder Explores the Art of Ecological Crisis in “Curiosity is a Compass”

By: Vincent Tanforan

Artist and researcher Nina Elder visited Reed on Monday, February 5, to give her talk “Curiosity is a Compass.” Elder is a visual artist whose diverse body of work centers around the idea of human impact on the natural world, with a focus on geological formations. Monday's talk, co-sponsored by the Art Department and Environmental Humanities Initiative, was introduced by Juniper Harrower, a new faculty member in the Studio Art Department. 

In the hour-long presentation, Elder led her audience through a web of connections between humans and the environment, past and future, terrestrial and cosmic. Throughout the talk, she brought forward questions of how we can react to and reckon with the global climate crisis, both through artistic mediums and in our daily lives.

The program began with an interlude where audience members were asked first to think about something they were curious about, and then share their thoughts with the people sitting next to them. This unconventional starting point set the tone for the rest of the talk, as Elder used the activity to illustrate the connections between people and the significance of pursuing one’s curiosity. From there, she posed the question, “How can you use your connections to amplify that which is under threat?”

Elder established her artistic ethos through a series of poignant stories that emphasized her focus on indigenous stewardship of the land. This was exemplified by her account of the Ontonagon Copper Boulder, which was taken from the indigenous people who revered it, only to be housed haphazardly in the basement of the Smithsonian Museum despite attempts for repatriation. The Copper Boulder was the focus of one of Elder’s pieces, and she cited the ruling in the repatriation case that the designation of a “natural object” was incompatible with a “sacred object” as an impetus for her work on ecological themes. Elder also mentioned the time she spent with descendants of the Iron Mountain Inuit community, whom she described as a “people squeezed to the margins.”

One of the central ideas in Elder’s talk was the term solastalgia, which she defined to be “anxiety about change from a position of wholeness.” This idea of imminent change and fear of the future exemplified the attitudes of Elder and others toward the present climate crisis. Elder detailed how she felt solastalgia during the COVID-19 pandemic, which pushed her work in a new direction. She began to direct her focus toward objects on a smaller, more personal scale through a series of drawings of frayed ropes exploring “the beauty in the breakage.”

More recently, Elder recounted her time spent at a slag heap in Arizona, on the U.S.-Mexico border. She called this site a “blatant weaponization of land,” where American mining has depleted the natural resources, while at the same time, Border Patrol keeps a heavy presence in the area. Elder lamented the products of industrial activity in the slag, remarking, “Even the sovereign sound of rocks has been stolen. Any essence of geology has been taken from them.” This inspired Elder to embark on a new project, where she sewed functional accessories for holding the manmade rocks and documented the process of carrying the rocks in a video, which was shown to the audience. Elder explained that her reasoning behind the project was to “use my strength and softness to restore some dignity to these rocks.”

Elder ended her talk by introducing her book Apop Epoch. The work’s title comes from the prefix apop, meaning “to separate, set down, or shed,” and from which the word “apocalypse” is derived. The book consists of a series of prints made with the artist’s breath. While a video of its visual contents played on the projector, Elder read aloud the written portion of the book. Apop Epoch centers around the concept of “a focal point, a black hole, a death spiral.” The project was developed at a time of both personal grief and growth, which made Elder set aside solastalgia to embrace change. As Elder proclaimed, “I am beyond hope but I am not hopeless.” A physical copy of Apop Epoch, one of ten produced, was on display during the program. 

Through her talk, Nina Elder emphasized the need to move past blind hope and recognize the reality of change when dealing with imminent ecological destruction. She detailed her evolution toward this frame of mind alongside the development of her artistic interests and themes. Elder brought her unique presentation to a striking conclusion, calling on her listeners to “accept the explosive nature of the situation” and “banish denial.”