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Having helped to pioneer green building throughout the 90’s, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the idea of sustainability. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to see just how utterly unsustainable modern industrialized civilization is. Genuine, meaningful sustainability will be extremely difficult for humankind to achieve, yet there is no doubt that we WILL achieve it. Sustainability is not optional. Whatever we fail to do voluntarily, we WILL do involuntarily. Our current “leaders” will be seen as fools incapable of clear thinking and sound decision making.
My art reflects a pondering as to what future generations (or archeologists) will think of us. Concrete is the second most widely used substance on Earth (after water) and responsible for five percent of greenhouse gases. When I’ve pour concrete, I’ve sometime had a little extra leftover that I’ve used to make a small hand print block, seeing it as an object of interest to future archeologists and a testament to humankind’s folly.
I see landfills as a sort of culmination of the Big Bang (Earth getting consumed by a super nova or plunging into a black hole not withstanding). Creation sprang into existence, biodiversity flourished, civilization brought us a dizzying array of material diversity and then it all just sort of ends up at the dump. Future archeologist will puzzle, “These people made many things and then threw them away…” My art is an exploration of this strange and fleeting moment in history.
Robert Bolman