Colin Lyons
Fusing printmaking, sculpture, and site-specific installation, Lyons’ work employs the chemistry of etching to reflect on issues around climate-engineering, extraction, alchemy, and brownfield rehabilitation. Lyons’ most recent site-based installations have been located in sacrificial landscapes such as tailing piles, historic flood infrastructure, decommissioned landfills, urban brownfields, and remote islands, where he develops contingency plans for the post-extraction landscapes we leave behind. These prototypes weave together speculative climate engineering trials to desalinate arctic waters, phyto-remediate contaminated soils using invasive plant species, and fertilize coastal ecosystems using dissolved industrial artifacts.
In recent years, Lyons has participated in residencies and fellowships with The Arctic Circle (Longyearbyen, Svalbard), ÖRES (Örö Island, Finland), MacDowell (Peterborough, New Hampshire), Frans Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee, Belgium), Rabbit Island (Lake Superior), The Grant Wood Fellowship (The University of Iowa), Klondike Institute of Art & Culture (Dawson City, Yukon), and Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, California). His work has been shown in more than 30 solo exhibitions, most recently at Galleria Ratamo (Jyväskylä), Rosemary Duffy Larson Gallery (Davie, Florida), Two Rivers Art Gallery, (Prince George, BC), SNAP Gallery (Edmonton, Alberta), Artcite (Windsor, Ontario), aceartinc (Winnipeg, Manitoba), CIRCA (Montreal, Quebec), and SPACES (Cleveland, Ohio), along with group exhibitions at International Print Center New York, Krakow International Print Triennial, Platform Stockholm, Museum London, and The Soap Factory, among others.
colinlyons.ca
Operation Habbakuk + (Arctic Navigation Maps)
Video and reproductions of hand painted prints, 2022
In 1942, British inventor Geoffrey Pyke proposed an ambitious plan to develop a massive, ice-based aircraft carrier code-named Operation Habbakuk. Soon after, a team of Canadian conscientious objectors were sent to Jasper National Park to develop a 1000-ton prototype that would utilize a new material called Pykrete – a mixture of wood pulp and ice, which was believed to be easily repairable and nearly unsinkable. However, the project was eventually abandoned, and its remains now rest at the bottom of Patricia Lake.
80 years later, on Örö Island, Pykrete was again used to create a frozen one-man naval life-raft, which slowly underwent a form of strategic growth, fueled by several competing Arctic geoengineering technologies. Launched off the island’s coastline, this geoengineered ice can in theory remain frozen at temperatures at least 1.5C warmer than the surrounding sea water. This prototype takes its departure from three speculative climate proposals which aim to thicken the rapidly melting Arctic sea ice:
1) floating wind-turbines and water pumps bring warmer water up to the cooler surface
2) artificial icebergs formed by desalinating and casting sea water to remain frozen at higher temperatures
3) increasing the reflectivity of ice by scattering a thin layer of silica.
Location: Storage bunker in Örö's southern tip
These speculative climate proposals are integrated into an etched copper distiller, in which water samples were sifted through pyrite, (a premodern alchemical technique for making sulfuric acid), eventually etching and dissolving iron artifacts to produce a solution of iron sulfate – the active ingredient in ocean fertilization geoengineering projects. After sundown each night, this fluid was desalinated, misted over the vessel, and finally coated in reflective silica particles.
The raft’s copper floatation system was intricately etched with 16th C. arctic navigation maps, in which Nordic sea-monsters come into direct contact with large-scale geoengineering technologies, perhaps a final defense against the cascade effects of unintended consequences which might be unleashed by large scale geoengineering schemes.
Colin Lyons interview about Project Habbakuk @ ÖRES