About

A collaboration between artist and poet Sarah Hymas and inTer-aCtive artist Maya Chowdhry.

‘Ripple’ is a triptych of freestanding oversized artist books that use augmented reality, organic objects and poetic text to explore climate change. Through visual imagery and interactivity opening up a soundscape and animation, the audience experiences three different poems in ways that bring each poem into their intimate physical and aural space. Audiences become enveloped in the poem’s world via their smart device using a free app Zappar.

‘Ripple’ evokes the ripple effect, the cumulative consequences of climate change, of human responsibility for that and how it will, in turn, affect humans. Each piece is a large concertina structure echoing this expansion of action. There is a sense of overspilling, of precariousness which there is – both geographically and politically.

The works explore how a poem is a transient entity, hanging in the air, how it passes from speaker to recipient. Some of it is caught in the listener’s mind: words, lines, images and phrases ; perhaps more often the sense of it lingers: the emotional resonance, memories and reverberations that it triggers in the listener. All the while the listener is also viewer, explorer of the sculpture and its physical imagery, linking what they can see with what they can hear.

Translations of sections of the poems, in Urdu and Bengali, run alongside the audio English poems and excerpts of the translations are embedded in printed text within the sculptures:

Siachen Glacier Butterfly Orchid Heritage Carrot