Under Land Over Sky
Under Land Over Sky
Susie Ganch's art installation invites both collaborators and viewers to viscerally experience the overwhelming scale of plastic pollution and its relationship to climate change. Ganch works with excess material - the abject waste of human consumption - that has not (yet) found its way back to a functional afterlife. Her human-scale form of recycling has woven coffee cup lids into swirling tapestries, plastic bags into cloud rooms, and now water bottles into architecture. In Under Land Over Sky, seven elevations of green emerge through 6,680 translucent plastic bottles activated by daylight from unshuttered
gallery windows. Together, the varying colors of the bottles create a topographical map of Sweet Briar College and the Shenandoah Mountains to the west.
Ganch's work responds to and comments on our ongoing interaction with the landscape and environment. Drawing on her background in geology and metalsmithing, her practice-led research is reliant on discoveries that can only be made by working with materials and finding solutions through hands-on experiments. Ganch's studio practice centers beauty, references science, is influenced by culture, and uses criticism to address the environmental urgencies of our times.
Under Land Over Sky is a collaboration between Sweet Briar College's Galleries and Sweet Briar College's Center for Human and Environmental Sustainability and is generously funded by The Friends of Art. In the first project meeting in January 2023, Ganch shared her initial concept for the Pannell Gallery installation, and Lisa Powell, Professor of Environmental Science and Agriculture, offered up the decommissioned greenhouse roof as a base structure. This material proved a key impetus for the collaborative project, in which circulatory reuse on campus was the goal. Because the project required the gathering and processing of a substantial amount of single-use plastic water and soda bottles, as well as reclaimed furniture foam (used to fill cloud-form seating beneath the expansive landscape), it connected people across campus, and beyond.
Using Rhino 3D modeling software, Ganch turned a topographical map into a dot matrix of twelve CNC-cut greenhouse roof panels. The 6,680 bottles that would screw into this 24-foot wide grid were each assigned one of seven colors, essentially creating a giant color-by-number pixelated landscape.
The material-processing phase began in immense seasonal heat and, by the Fall, the campus would be engulfed with forest fire smoke from Quebec and later Matt's Creek. These continent-crossing heat waves and smoke hazes are a sharp reminder of the project's stakes and align with an observation made during a research trip to the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica by chief scientist Rob Larter: "The public only becomes aware of how dynamic the earth is when change occurs on a time scale that matches our own — When it's something they can see. Volcanoes erupt, and tsunamis hit. And for a little while, people understand the power of geologic forces." (Rush, 126). Art installations, such as Under Land Over Sky, have the power to stop us in our tracks, not as geologic forces might, nor as sites of overwhelming eco-anxiety, but as active sites for generating fresh ideas for environmental gain.
There is also a socially connected joy in the challenge of recycling everyday materials by hand and on this scale with students. However, there was equally a sense of futility and unpleasantness in the repetitive processing of slippery and static material. Students moved the bottles from mesh storage bins (repurposed containers from field hockey turf installation) to the farm pick-up. After scooping them out of the truck bed with a snow shovel, the students then sat for hours stripping plasticated labels, clipping off seals, and unscrewing lids, leaving just the clear bottles for rinsing in diluted bleach. The time and number of people it takes to turn used plastics into a reusable resource speaks to the challenge of effectively recycling plastic on a societal scale.
Ganch bound us all into this practice on an individual level, with none of us able to identify where our contribution began or ended.
Beyond the social interconnectedness of plastic processing, are the personal water and soda brand associations that conjure up a hyper-local mix of people and occasions on campus - the Alaskan student who noted the lack of Arrowhead water, the passing professor who is responsible for the pile of Dr Pepper minis, and the Admissions' staffer who has a Pellegrino habit. The brands in our pile are full of big-name regulars from Kirkland to Niagara to Aquafina, each a
relief on long days or game days - an archive of tastes, choices, and special occasions now gridded or spiralized within the topographical details of Under Land Over Sky.
Further aesthetic and material selections were made during the bottle-processing phase, with clear soda bottles that were at first unwanted, proving structurally stronger than crinkling water bottles. They are positioned along the 24-panel's edges for strength. Additionally, the separation of red, orange, and blue screw caps from the more tonally-sympathetic green, yellow, and white ones ensures a consistent color glow through the structure. The caps function
as the twist-in fixings on the back of the greenhouse panels. The clashing caps will be melted down to form chopping boards. At every turn, the throw-away elements of this structure are elevated by meticulous material standards set by the artist.
Ganch's focus on increasingly rare plastic-green is the material opposite of environmental journalist Elizabeth Rush's observations on glacier blues. Rush was the keynote speaker for the Julie B. Waxter Environmental Forum at Sweet Briar in 2023, where she spoke of her role on Rob Larter's scientific research trip to the West Antarctic. In the resulting book, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Rush describes the seemingly endless
opalescent blue ice before her, "It's almost like the blue carries you back in time" (Rush, 122). The archaeology of this blue is an uncomfortable corollary to the green Mountain Dew and Ginger Ale bottles we have dug through trash to find. However, in 2022 Coca Cola chose to turn the green glow of Sprite clear, given the dangers of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) dye, and so our spiralized green elevations tell a shorter (more toxic) story than the deeper stories
being released by the melting blue of ice.
In processing a total of 14,000 clear and green bottles for Under Land Over Sky, I am struck by what a trained geologist-turned-jeweler can make of our worst single-use waste, elevating it to something of aesthetic and material value. A plastic landscape that tells of new possibilities, without negating the overwhelming scale of our consumption-fueled threat to the polar ice caps.
It will be in the quiet of the gallery that visitors will be able to activate the space, as wind in the sky, moving the cloud-form recycled seating to whatever formation suits the moment, beneath the glow of Ganch's mountain landscape. A gathering space, a meditative space, and ultimately a collaborative space in which deep care and repetitive actions become visible. In the shimmering seven elevations of green, that swirl across Under Land Over Sky is a promise of a more conscious and circular relationship with single-use plastics.
Clare van Loenen, February, 2024
Director of Galleries and Museum / Program Lead Arts Management