Constructing Futures: Making Ecological Art in an Age of Uncertainty with Student Linnéa Gad

Constructing Futures: Making Ecological Art in a Time of Uncertainty is a biweekly series that features artists who use found materials, natural resources, and the landscape to construct work that addresses the harsh realities of our ecological age.

Student Linnéa Gad  is an artist working across many mediums. Through processes of printmaking, sculpture, and installations, she finds ways to channel her research. In her work, she asks questions about the human impact on the environment, always working to recognize that the Earth will outlive us and climate change is truly a human reality.

Born in Stockholm, Gad received her BFA from Parsons in 2013. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows at Spencer Brownstone Gallery; New Release Gallery; RØM, Copenhagen; and SBG31, Stockholm; amongst others. She has received grants from The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and NYFA. Her work is currently on view in a group show entitled Biting The Nest at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen.  

I met Gad on an overcast day in October. Despite the weather, it was bright in her corner studio and the little sun there cast natural light on the sculptures littering the space. Over the sound of construction from the plot next to us, Gad told me how lucky she felt to have received a corner room. “It always puts me in mind of time,” she told me, “soon this room won’t look the same once the newly constructed building is there." 

How is your art engaged with this ecological moment? In what ways are you responding to our ecological time period?

Linnéa Gad [LG]: I have a new materialist approach to my work. I try to think of what the materials I work with are like, what are their properties? What are their life cycles? How can I collaborate with materials and give space to the agency in the material itself? That is connected to environmental politics in a broader sense because I believe if we think of material in a more embodied sense and about the life cycle of material, we might treat it differently.

I think many of our issues at the moment come from the fact that we have thought of materials as resources that serve us—and failed to understand what they need from us.   

How does that way of thinking play into the sculptures you are working on now?

LG: The work I'm doing at the moment is focused on the material lime and by trying to sculpt in that material, I'm also learning about it. So, there is a lot of research that guides these sculptures.

My goal is to have a whole series of works, like a grouping of works. I’m thinking of it as almost an archipelago of these little islands of the works that support each other. Then also I want to have images of my research, too. That’s the part I’m trying to figure out now, how to incorporate my research into this archipelago.

It’s almost like you're collaborating with the material, not just using it or sculpting it. Instead, you're imagining that the material itself has an agency that you're responding to as well.

LG: Yeah, exactly. And then there's some specific things that I'm starting to think about, for example how not to work with too many virgin materials.

I’m also considering my work in terms of a longer time span. That's been a key thing with this lime project. The sculptures are entirely made of one material and different variations of it—lime mortar, lapis lazuli which comes from limestone caves, limestone itself, and oyster shells—and I know that in the future, even just tomorrow, I could throw my sculpture back into the sea and it would just reenter the life cycle of the material.

Wow, what a beautiful idea! You’ve talked a bit about how your work relates to a future temporality in the sense of impermanence and recyclability. How does this practice relate to the past and present?

LG: Time is a very important part of my practice. Just by unearthing  a material and even in a single one of my lime sculptures I have layers of geological time just within the piece itself. But I'm also reflecting on how other humans have worked with this material during another time span. In some ways to think in deep-time and take on that perspective as an artist is a way of understanding our past in order to better understand our present and future.

But also, importantly, I try not to think of time as a linear thing. Instead, in my work, I try to offer it more as a cycle.

What sort of impact do you hope this work has on our present moment?

LG: Well, I aspire to make curious work, work that invites curiosity. I want the viewer to engage in trying to learn without being too didactic. I don't want to just comment on our contemporary moment and say, Oh, we're so oversaturated by this and that. I actually want someone to be able to learn something and think of a material differently, the same way I've come to think of the material differently in my own process.

This idea of new materialism seems really central to your work. Tell me a bit more about it.

LG:  New Materialism attends to the vitality in matter, that materials are alive and have agency. It is a way to confront the image of dead matter that has fed human hubris with ideas of conquest and consumerism. But also a framework of thinking that makes you consider transcorporeality—the interconnected web between humans, beings, and non-beings. 

Right now, you're only working with lime. Do you feel like it's easier to understand that interweaving when you strip back and work with just one material? Also, I suppose, why lime in particular?

LG: This is the first time that I approached one material as a starting point for my work. And as I have been digging deeper into lime it feels like the whole world is connected to it, it is kind of wild. 

But my interest in lime began when I learned that the oyster sucks up lime particles in the ocean to form its shell. For example, this mollusk binds lime to build its shell and then when it decomposes, on the ocean floor together with sediment and pressure and time, turns into limestone. So part of the life cycle of this material is connected to a being (the mollusc) and that made this idea that material is alive easier to understand. Although I think it is important to note that contemporary concrete that consists partly of lime that has been crushed and mixed to its anonymous grey is no less alive than an oyster shell. 

I think I get it. It's almost as if the oyster is also a sculptor. In these new works you’re trying to be like the oyster.

LG: Yeah, exactly. My approach to sculpting with lime is not so much about my individual expression as an artist but connecting with other hands and beings and movements that have interacted with this material over time.

I grew up in the Stockholm archipelago, and I often return to thinking of how that whole landscape was sculpted by a glacial ice sheet. There's something about that fact that is very incomprehensible — to imagine the kilometers of thick ice on top of this land that I know really well. But then there's actually marks and you can see the direction of how the ice slid across the land. So, I think I came to the idea that there are sculptural agents other than humans by spending time in that landscape.

You grew up on an island but now you’ve been living in New York City. How has that changed your work?

LG: Well, a big part of this project is actually connected to being in New York. I found out that New York used to have one of the largest oyster habitats in the world and it has completely disappeared because of pollution and overharvesting. I found a photo of these mounds of oyster shells that were built here in New York and they were from the native Lenape. They collected the shells and created these huge structures which anthropologists used to consider archeological landfills as if they were just mounds of trash. But now there are some new scholars who suggest that these are actually purposeful structures that were maybe used for rituals. But there are shell mounds and middens all over the world. There are a lot in Denmark too. I’ve been working with this sculpture for an exhibition in Denmark and it has been great to find the indinginous connectivity between these two places. 

It is great to find connections that reach beyond our ideas of borders and countries. For another example, I was talking before about the marks the ice left on the land where I grew up but you can see glacial marks in Central Park, too! 

That’s nice to think of because our response to climate change will have to be so global. It's nice to uncover these histories to where our response to the climate has been global, even as it is also particular. To change the subject a little, I’m wondering, how do you source your materials?

LG: As for the lime sculpture here in my studio, the limestone is from Buffalo, New York. It used to be part of a bridge, so it is recycled in that way. The mortar that I use to bind the sculpture together is the only thing that is bought. But the thing about the lime mortar is that it's CO2 neutral because it sucks up CO2 when it cures—well, carbon neutral minus the shipping.

The oyster shells I got from restaurants, one in particular upstate that I found out about by word of mouth. It was actually a brewery and they knew that oyster shells should not go into landfills, that they need to return to the sea, but they were not connected with any of the organisations, like the Billion Oyster Project that picks up shells and uses them for reef habilitation. Anyhow, they had collected their own shell midden outside their kitchen window. It was kind of incredible to come across.

One of the reasons why the New York oysters’ habitat was almost wiped out was because we failed to understand that when we take shells out of the sea they need to return to the ocean. This is important because when the shells decompose, they become substance for new shells.  Also the old shells create reef structure for the new shells to latch on to. 

After Hurricane Ida in New Orleans, I was listening to the news and they mentioned that they built these cement structures to protect land from flooding. And I was thinking about all the reefs that probably were out there but have disappeared because of ocean acidification and rising water temperatures. Not to mention the fact that by failing to return shells to the ocean we have changed the amount of lime in the environment. This causes fewer mollusks since there is less shell-building material and these oyster reefs have historically protected land from the effects of the oceans’ waves. It’s interesting how all this has created a new problem of flooding and our solution is to take the same material, lime, and make cement out of it and replace that reef-like structure. While these cement structures might stop flooding they fail to perform other tasks the oyster reefs they imitate used to, such as absorb heavy metals and other pollutants, including nitrogen, which can lead to destructive algae blooms. Plus, their abandoned shells would offer homes for other organisms.  It feels like we are doing all these detours and disrupting ecosystems out of ignorance. We are not in tune with the matter that surrounds us. It might sound naive, but I want to make a call for empathy towards matter. If materials like lime were valued and understood wholeheartedly, I do believe that we would live and act differently.