Carbon Harvest, 2025
SPURSE, EcoArtLab, SUNY New Paltz sculpture program, Processing Collapse
medium
What does it mean to be of a place?
Carbon Harvest asks the people of New Paltz, New York to engage this question through foraging workshops, a public meal, and an interactive mural. Activating SUNY New Paltz’s new EcoArtLab, participants will explore what it means to be an interdependent part of their astonishingly rich urban ecosystem. A public meal of foraged food will be cooked over charcoal made from the remains of fallen ash trees which have been killed by the invasive Emerald Ash Borer. A large collaborative mural made from this charcoal depicts the complex microscopic weave of charcoal’s structure.
Community members will participate in the meal and be invited to add their thoughts about ecological interdependence to the mural. Carbon Harvest expands and challenges practices of social responsibility and environmental stewardship by extending the scope of dialog to more than the human, and in doing so brings the plants and animals that make up the community to the table as necessary partners upon whom we come to depend through direct, hands-on engagement.
Gallery
About the Artist
The EcoArtLab is an accessible, ecologically vibrant classroom that promotes collaboration, biodiversity and interconnection. Designed by the sculpture program at the State University of New York at New Paltz, this project features a public dye and fiber garden, food forest, and test site for bioremediation. The sculpture program at SUNY New Paltz has been at the cutting edge of ecological research and their award-winning students have gone on to achieve international success as artists, educators, and environmentalists. Processing Collapse is a collaborative that uses the remains of fallen ash trees killed by the invasive Emerald Ash Borer to produce artworks. Publicly processing this shared loss from our ecosystem, Processing Collapse offers an opportunity to notice, honor, and explore the ecological and cultural significance of a threatened tree. Spurse is a creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. Drawing upon their diverse backgrounds that span the fields of science, art, and design, spurse utilizes unique immersive methods to co-produce urban environments, public art and expanded configurations of the commons.
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