Iain Ball

Iain Ball

Work from Rare Earth Sculpture Project

“The Rare Earth Sculpture project is an object-orientated Thinktank developed by Iain Ball for energypangea.org. The project aims to create an alternative energy supply which is injected into each Rare Earth Element. This Energy is formalized into info-matter by creating new connections and associations with the metals, their use-value, geopolitics and extraction processes. In Neodymium / Dysprosium / Europium the three sculptures are hedged against each other in a three-way axis of meaning. Neodymium presents an allegory of the R-Complex in relation to a confounding analysis of the Sun-Earth dualism. Dysprosium acts as an offering to The Rare Earth Technology Development Team Created by Toshiba to harness the Rare Earth by-products of Uranium Mining in Kazakhstan. And Europium uses the forests of the United Kingdom and Continental Europe as a site to promote the accelerated oxidation of the metal symbolic of restrictions imposed on its exports from China.

All of this is intent in addressing many of the ways in which we manage, market and profit from the resources and precious metals in the technology we consume today and how these new materials might be developed and manipulated in an increasingly unstable world.”