Hope Ginsburg, associate professor of painting, has created a four-channel audio and video installation for the Arts Research Institute that places visitors at the center of a project to restore a Caribbean coral reef. The 13-minute-long piece “Swirling” mixes vignettes that capture the tragic destruction of climate change and the optimistic pursuit of regrowth.
“Swirling” is named for the Swirling Reef of Death in Saint Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands. At the site’s coral nursery, conservationists and divers cultivate and replant fragments of surviving coral, using plastic trees and epoxy to hold them in place.
The show, which is viewable at the Arts Research Institute in the Depot, was produced during Ginsburg’s residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University last fall.
Not teaching classes gave Ginsburg the time to finish “Swirling” as well as work on a new concept, Meditation Ocean. That concept, Ginsburg said, is a product of both “Swirling” and her interest in land diving—breathing on land in scuba gear.
Ginsburg has completed land dives from the beaches of Florida to the deserts of Qatar. She began situating land dives in sites that can be interpreted environmentally, she said. For instance, she and collaborators went to the coast of Canada and four divers—including Ginsburg—sat in meditation at the edge of the Bay of Fundy as the world’s highest tide flowed in and “rose on our bodies until we were gone,” Ginsburg said.
Read the full story in VCU News. Photo by Kevin Morley.
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