Surveying a scarred planet
LAWRENCE — Jemila MacEwan’s show “Human Meteorite,” now up at Essex Art Center is driven by empathy for planet Earth.
The artist, who was born in Scotland and raised in Australia by Sufi parents, approaches the natural world with reverence, care, and a mystical imagination. For “Maiden Grass Voyage,” they took on the identity of an invasive species and wandered through New York. Other works seem to speak directly to a beleaguered natural landscape: “Tell me the stories of your losses, and I will sit with you in your grief.”
MacEwan’s work includes land art (altering landscapes in the manner of Robert Smithson or Andy Goldsworthy), sculpture, and performance captured on video and in photographs. The performances, in which the artist engages with nature, resonate like creation myths, or world-ending ones. Or both: After all, once humans are gone, restoration can truly begin
For the show’s title piece, a 2017 performance, MacEwan dug a crater intended to evoke the effect a meteorite the artist’s own size would have hitting Earth. It was laborious: They used a pick ax and a shovel every day over the period of one lunar
JEMILA MacEWAN: HUMAN METEORITE At Essex Art Center, 56 Island St., Lawrence, through Dec. 15. 978-685-2343, www.essexartcenter.org
cycle. The crater came to about 70 feet across at its widest, 6 feet at its deepest, displacing critters and more. The impact of one human disrupts ecosystems and leaves a scar.
“You know you’re in the realm of the sacred when your work involves holding sensitive vulnerable bodies in their own home,” MacEwan writes in wall text. Those bodies don’t all belong to plants and animals. For “The Wake,” a performance video, the artist went to Vatnajökull, Iceland’s largest glacier, which is quickly melting as Arctic temperatures rise.
In the video, they retrieve huge, sculptural wisdom teeth with bloody roots from the Arctic Sea. The sculptures resemble unmoored chunks of ice, but also look vaguely human, suggesting that landscape and people are both elements of nature. MacEwan hauls several teeth across the rugged landscape, as if trying to get them home. In the end, a single tooth speaks in the voice of a child. “Nothing lasts anymore,” the tooth says. “We know we can never return. But in a way, we are free.”
“The Wake” ends with the white teeth strewn beside a rushing brook, bodies coughed up by snow melt, as sheep wander past on grazing land. MacEwan, too, is gone. Earth continues. It is we who mourn.