Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance

Sarah Casey’s new body of work responds to the precarious nature of glacial archaeology.

The exhibition’s title is a term used to describe glacier health: a negative mass balance signals a receding glacier, where more ice melts than is accumulated.

Casey’s starting point is domestic artefacts emerging from alpine glaciers as the ice in which they have been preserved for 50, 500 or 5,000 years is now melting at unprecedented rates.

This rare and valuable archaeology provides important knowledge about the past, but the cost of its emergence is environmental change and threatened futures. Casey engages with this timely contemporary issue by looking at how processes of drawing and sculpture might fuse their languages of marking and erasure, space and solid.

Negotiating the space between ‘glacial’ presence and absence, Casey finds new ways of articulating loss and change, disrupting not only the division between drawing and sculpture, but between the human and geological. Casey asks: what is lost? For whom is it lost? What is revealed in its place?