2A Earth Core: The Hominin Project

 

Art and science share many attributes, such as observation and experimentation, yet remain largely separate areas of enquiry. Bringing these two endeavours together in one project, this exhibition focuses on the science that seeks to understand the climatic environment of the distant past.

 

The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the artist and The Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), an international scientific research group, investigating the relationship between climate and human evolution. The research in north-east Africa is focused in areas of The Great Rift Valley, thought to have been the origin of anatomically-modern humans, and from where our ancestors dispersed out of Africa. 

 

The work draws on the imagery from the fieldwork conducted in the remote, dried lake basin of Chew Bahir, southern Ethiopia, and the visualization techniques used in contemporary science, bringing it out of the laboratory and into the art gallery. 

 

Implicit in our relationship with the climate is the perception of time; both the human experience of time and the vast expanse of Earth time. The images here are drawn from deep below the Earth’s surface and provide a vision of time, from the present through to the subterranean landscape some 620,000 years ago.

 

Julian Ruddock