Clementine Edwards – Toxic Inheritances
Clementine Edwards: Toxic Inheritances
Sunday, 14 January, 3–6pm
One-day event
Toxic Inheritances (2024) is a new video that animates some of the histories of white phosphorus. Light-bearing and brutally hot, white phosphorus is pyrophoric, meaning it combusts on contact with air. The video considers the role of storytelling and inheritance in human-chemic relations, and how toxicity plays out on and implicates different bodies differently across systems and structures of domination. It is a deepening of Clementine’s studio exploration on toxic inheritances, and an attempt to sketch a sort of fictional family tree for the chemical.
Sound mixing by Maoyi Qiu. Thank you to Marta Hryniuk, Cannach MacBride, WET and CBK Rotterdam. Quotes from Joe Miranda and from Andrea Sella, professor, inorganic chemistry, UCL.
Clementine Edwards’ art practice is led by sculpture, also encompassing text, performance, video, installation, wearables and workshops. Across form, their practice is shaped by their relationship and proximity to (dis)possession – of body, land and personhood. Clementine is the artist and co-editor with Kris Dittel of The Material Kinship Reader (2022), collectively produced the Climate Justice Code (2023) and was a research fellow at Rietveld Academy in the Jewellery—Linking Bodies department (2022).