Dan Holdsworth: Continuous Topography

26 Oct 2018-6 Jan 2019

Overview

Since 1996, the English artist-photographer Dan Holdsworth has explored the “extreme” territories that characterize humans’ changing relationship to the ‘natural’ world in the Anthropocene. Since 2012, the artist has worked alongside academic geologists to map the exact contours of Alpine glaciers and rock formations, by using drones, lasers, photography, and high-end software ordinarily employed by the military and climate scientists. The result is the series Continuous Topography, consisting of images created from millions of points marked in space, each a millimetre-perfect registration of the precise contours of a rapidly changing landscape. This landscape is the Argientière glacier in the Alps. Indeed between the recording of the landscape, and its presentation as artworks made to be conserved in perpetuity, the landscape has already begun to change beyond recognition.