POWER SURGE
2023
Public work commissioned by Colchester and Ipswich Museum, UK
Power Surge (2023) is a public installation sited in Christchurch Park, Ipswich, commissioned as part of Landscape Rebels; an exhibition of historic and contemporary works at Christchurch Mansion that explore ecological and environmental urgencies. Felicity Hammond’s outdoor contribution to this exhibition is a sprawling sculpture which asks us to reflect on the global infrastructures of extraction and energy consumption, through the lens of its local coastal landscape.
Power Surge makes connections between the mining of the Earth’s resources and the burial of toxic waste. In part this is a visual response to the local plans for growing nuclear power provision; Power Surge responds to environmental concerns over expanding the nuclear site at Sizewell. The work also takes on the structural form of a flood defence system, inspired by cross-sectional drawings of nearby tidal barriers which are designed to respond to storm surges. Power Surge reflects on the deep time associated with these two structures; the minerals mined, the waste deposited, and the flood defences acting on behalf of the future.
Power Surge also invites its visitors to consider the material journeys involved in energy production processes, and the fractures that they leave behind. Central to the work is an image of an extractive landscape ruptured by the subsurface; an impossible view of the threshold between the ground and the subterranean as an infinite process of extraction and burial takes place.
