I went to see Cabot Institute Artist in Residence Neville Gabie’s Archiving Oil installation in the Basement Stores of Geology last night
(16 May 2013). It’s pretty cool to be
down in the depths of the Wills Memorial Building at the University of Bristol and I can safely assure you I
saw no ghosts. I started off by going
into a lift and as the doors opened into the basement, there was an eerie
darkness with a bright light emanating from a creepy corner. A man dressed in white was in front of me and
he was pouring a sticky black substance into buckets. A distinctly thick, gloopy and dirty sound
filled my ears. I promise you it wasn’t
a ghost but the image in front of me was quite harrowing.
We use oil in everything we do and here was oil in its bare
nakedness – black, shiny, thick, dirty.
I stopped and stared for a while, mesmerised by the horribleness of the
clean white background being splatted with this dirty substance. When you see oil like this, you know deep
down that there is something quite sinister about it. I moved on to the next
area, walking past rows of wooden drawers filled with items including fossils,
meteorites, and geological rock formations.
These things had been dug out of the ground and were possibly millions
of years old...just like oil.
Around the corner was a group of people on hand to tell you
about the exhibition including the organisers Neville Gabie (Cabot Institute
Artist in Residence), Merle Patchett (Cultural Geographer at the Cabot
Institute, University of Bristol) and Claudia Hildebrandt (Curator of the
Geology Basement Stores). I was given a
torch and ushered into a dark storage area with wooden shelves towering above
me. In every nook and cranny was an
interesting oily artefact with a story to tell.
The accompanying brochure put a personal touch to these stories especially
when you find out each artefact and story comes from a Cabot Institute
researcher whose goal is to do research to tackle the challenges of uncertain
environmental change. Uncertain
environmental change has in large part been caused by oil. Cities have grown, populations have risen,
people want and need ‘stuff’ made from oil like cars, mobile phones, medicine,
beauty products, clothing, toys, packaging etc etc...Oil was once embedded in
bedrock and it is now deeply embedded in our lives.
My favourite bit of this dark storage area was a row of
bottles of oil from different places in the world. All different colours and interestingly all
different smells, some potent, some sweet.
The smell of the Arabian oil – a strong diesel type smell - brought back
memories of my childhood when I would greet my dad at the door when he came
home from work. He would smell of this
oil as he worked as a mechanic and it was the thick gloopy Arabian stuff that
could have been used for car and lorry engines that my dad would work on day in
and day out. However much I dislike oil
and what it has done to the planet, I cannot deny the fact that I came from
someone who had his hands covered in oil and therefore oil is as much a part of
my history as it is anyone elses.
And this I realised is what the exhibition aims to do. It aims to show us that our lives are all affected
by oil and in so many different ways. We
may like to think we are ‘green’ and doing the right thing but actually we have
a deeply embedded dirty relationship with oil that is unlikely to go away
anytime soon...
------------------------------
If you missed out on this experience and you want to
understand your connection with oil, Neville will be holding the exhibition
again as the ‘Oil Common Room’ with a few new art pieces added. This will be held during BIG Green Week over
two evenings in June.
This article was written by Amanda Woodman-Hardy, Cabot Institute
Follow me on Twitter @cabotinstitute @Enviro_Mand