Michael Wang

The mechanism of climate change can be reduced to a series of material transformations: air becomes living matter becomes air again.

Burning fossil fuels reverses the chemical transformations of photosynthesis. Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria change carbon dioxide into the living matter of their bodies. Carbon, reconfigured and recombined, moves from gas into solid. As the physical remains of ancient photo-synthesizing organisms burn, the carbon locked within them transforms again into air, and the energy captured from a younger sun is released.

“The Drowned World” (2018–) names a series of works that engage the organic origins – and the ongoing biological consequences – of industrialization and climate change. The works appropriate living matter and the chemical operations of photosynthesis as artistic media. The found ruins of fossil fuel infrastructure and the ubiquitous atmospheric effects of carbon emissions form their site and context.

In First Forest (2018), a forest assembled from plants closely related to those of the Carboniferous period grows from the ruins of a gasworks. These plants once formed vast swamplands that stretched across the globe – the Earth’s first forests. Over millennia, their buried remains hardened to form coal. As at thousands of industrial-era gasworks, the gasworks that form the site of the work heated and burned coal. First

Forest suggests a speculative climatic future. By returning carbon to the atmosphere, the climatic conditions of the Carboniferous period might be restored. Here, a Carboniferous forest engulfs the coal gasworks, and a 300-million–year process comes full circle.

The photographs that comprise the series “Carboniferous” depict the fossilized forms of plants from coal deposits around the world. The images offer a glimpse of the ancient forests that, as coal, would fuel the industrial revolution. While the material imaginary of modernity is dominated by inorganic matter – steel, concrete, and glass – these photographs, produced in a modernist idiom, reveal the hidden organic origins of the modern world.

1. First Forest, 2018; Polypodiopsida, Cycadopsida and Araucariaceae species installed in coal gas plant, irrigation system, stainless steel viewing platform; installation view, Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy.

2. First Forest, 2018; site documentation.

3. Calamites Suckowii, Upper Silesia, 2018; digital photograph.

4. Lyginopteris, Alabama, 2018; digital photograph.

5. Lepidodendron, Upper Silesia, 2018; digital photograph.

6. Mariopteris, Upper Silesia, 2018; digital photograph.

7. First Forest, 2018; installation view.

8. First Forest, 2018; installation detail.