Inundation

Bettina Matzkhun

September 12 – October 16, 2003

Much of my work deals with narrative through serial imagery. With the fibre images in Inundation, I am contemplating the projected results of global warming. I subject a small house to flooding, dislocation, and possible adaptation to a new life underwater. The work contrasts the ideal notion of home as the site of comfort and sanctuary, with a problematic, dislocated version. While the planet will continue to exist despite environmental degradation, human life will be irrevocably changed.

I am presenting drastic changes as part of physical geography, but they can also be read as metaphors of a more personal landscape. Flooding represents many other kinds of inundations. A flood represents a force which is mythical and ineluctable, causing unimaginable upheaval. It raises the spectre of homelessness in a personal, ecological and geopolitical sense. In this series, the viewer is invited to consider what precipitated these situations and what might be the outcome for the house. I am aware of an irony in describing the dissolution of home and familiarity through a medium so intimately connected with a domestic setting. The combination of domesticity with pathos is hardly new, but the setting of human-induced climate change is particular to this century.