Euan Lockie Future Failings, 2019
Found and recycled materials, 3400 x 2000 x 2500 mm approx.
Euan Lockie’s Future Failings greets you before you’ve even set foot on the island. It looks isolated, slightly derelict, banal in form and somehow both out of place and strangely at home, as if it has become untethered from a mooring and drifted into Matiatia Bay. The work takes the form of a Department of Conservation hut with its timeless boxy aesthetic. A DOC hut is a welcome sanctuary for a weary traveller and it provides the most rudimental form of shelter. It represents urbanisation and conservation, isolation and community, past, present and future.
Lockie’s work exists in the borderland between the playful and political. He imagines a future where rising sea levels and climate change have put pay to lifein Aotearoa as we know it. Given current concentrations and ongoing emissionsof greenhouse gases the global mean temperature and sea levels will continue to rise, oceans will get warmer and ice caps will continue to melt. Future Failings is on one hand a fantastical cabin, barely keeping afloat on the waves and on the other is a warning: make changes, pay attention, or this is the world that our tamariki might live to see. In keeping with the theme of the artwork it is constructed from found and recycled materials, much of it sourced from Waiheke Island’s waste. The location of the work is integral: like New Zealand itself it is isolated and on the periphery. Viewed against the lush backdrop of the island and the surrounding waters it reminds us how rugged and beautiful our country is and exactly how much we have to lose.
