Gina Glover - Ice Mountain
Ice Mountain, Jökulsárlón Lake, Iceland, 2011
The Metabolic Landscape: Perception, Practice and the Energy Transition Exhibition and Book by Geof Rayner, Gina Glover, and Jessica Rayner navigating the disciplines of art, science and philosophy to picture and interpret the planet’s current state of metabolic distress. Humankind’s search for more powerful sources of energy to sustain an urbanising existence has created an energy transition that, while hugely beneficial to human existence, is now being identified as a source of harm. Just as metabolic disease refers to energy-sourced medical problems, so too, the authors propose, the planet is showing increasing signs of metabolic distress.
Following a career in documentary photography, Glover shifted focus to science-based constructed imagery across the medical and biological fields. She also instigated a variety of long-term projects. Over the course of two decades, for example, she examined the impact of hydrocarbons on the climate and the scope for a societal shift to sustainable forms of energy, a project spanning multiple countries. This project combined landscape, constructed, and alternative hybrid photography, as well as, more recently, the integration of AI-derived images with portraits of her sculptural artwork. During the COVID lockdown, she developed techniques in hybrid lumen photography, aiming to capture a sense of the future form of our overheating planet. Other longitudinal projects have taken a different direction. History, archaeology, and memory were the preoccupation of her four-decade project, Playgrounds of War, which dealt with the monumental and emotional detritus of abandoned military bases, drawing upon childhood memories from the Cold War.
Trained in fine art and later photography, Glover has more recently worked as a UK- and France-based interdisciplinary artist, with an investigative focus on the natural and human-made environments through photography and sculpture. Glover co-founded Photo Co-op in 1979 in London, which later evolved into Photofusion Photography Centre (Photofusion.org) a decade later. She is a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal and a multi-year winner of the UK Medical Research Council’s Visions of Science Award. Her arts awards have included Welcome Foundation funding (with Cambridge University) for Life in Glass, an exhibition employing the scientific photography of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Professor Sir Robert Edwards (received for his establishment of human fertilisation). Her exhibition (later book), The Metabolic Landscape, shown at Fotofest in 2016, explored hydrocarbons and the energy transition, the need for sustainable alternatives, and the rise in sea levels caused by the melting of the Arctic and Greenlandic ice sheets.
Gina Glover - Ice Mountain
Ice Mountain, Jökulsárlón Lake, Iceland, 2011
The Metabolic Landscape: Perception, Practice and the Energy Transition Exhibition and Book by Geof Rayner, Gina Glover, and Jessica Rayner navigating the disciplines of art, science and philosophy to picture and interpret the planet’s current state of metabolic distress. Humankind’s search for more powerful sources of energy to sustain an urbanising existence has created an energy transition that, while hugely beneficial to human existence, is now being identified as a source of harm. Just as metabolic disease refers to energy-sourced medical problems, so too, the authors propose, the planet is showing increasing signs of metabolic distress.
Following a career in documentary photography, Glover shifted focus to science-based constructed imagery across the medical and biological fields. She also instigated a variety of long-term projects. Over the course of two decades, for example, she examined the impact of hydrocarbons on the climate and the scope for a societal shift to sustainable forms of energy, a project spanning multiple countries. This project combined landscape, constructed, and alternative hybrid photography, as well as, more recently, the integration of AI-derived images with portraits of her sculptural artwork. During the COVID lockdown, she developed techniques in hybrid lumen photography, aiming to capture a sense of the future form of our overheating planet. Other longitudinal projects have taken a different direction. History, archaeology, and memory were the preoccupation of her four-decade project, Playgrounds of War, which dealt with the monumental and emotional detritus of abandoned military bases, drawing upon childhood memories from the Cold War.
Trained in fine art and later photography, Glover has more recently worked as a UK- and France-based interdisciplinary artist, with an investigative focus on the natural and human-made environments through photography and sculpture. Glover co-founded Photo Co-op in 1979 in London, which later evolved into Photofusion Photography Centre (Photofusion.org) a decade later. She is a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal and a multi-year winner of the UK Medical Research Council’s Visions of Science Award. Her arts awards have included Welcome Foundation funding (with Cambridge University) for Life in Glass, an exhibition employing the scientific photography of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Professor Sir Robert Edwards (received for his establishment of human fertilisation). Her exhibition (later book), The Metabolic Landscape, shown at Fotofest in 2016, explored hydrocarbons and the energy transition, the need for sustainable alternatives, and the rise in sea levels caused by the melting of the Arctic and Greenlandic ice sheets.