draft fissure Five individual floor-based video installations Durations vary, looped, silent 2023

draft fissure responds to the present and future of deep-sea mining and the ethics of extracting from the earth’s last untouched frontier. The International Seabed Authority, the body responsible for the governance of ocean mining operations, is currently in the process of developing and implementing new Mining Codes which will allow for the exploitation of seabed mineral resources. However, environmentalists, scientists, Indigenous peoples, and several nations (including Ireland) have opposed these developments and called for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.

Through multiple moving image channels, draft fissure zooms in on procedures and processes of seabed resource extraction that take place offshore, underwater, out of sight. Stacked on historical seismological charts from oil prospecting off the Irish coast, looking down into these channels reveals plumes of disturbed seabed, and mechanical arm gestures repeating in a constant loop. draft fissure considers how these residual and intensifying processes of extraction turn deep-time, deep-ocean geologies and ecologies into porous zones of production, profit, and multi-scalar harm.

Kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.