Sinking Shore by Clarinda Mac Low

Sinking Shore by Clarinda Mac Low

Sinking Shore is a series of works on paper using photo transfer, watercolor, and digital and physical collage. Sinking Shore is an outgrowth of Sunk Shore, a collaboration between Mac Low and dancer/marine ecologist Carolyn Hall, where Hall and Mac Low lead participants on a site-based tour that time travels from the far past to the present to the climate changed future of specific shorelines, offering an embodied experience of climate change data. Sinking Shore offers another portal into this embodiment, as documentation from tours of the shoreline of Governors Island explodes into the past and future landscapes that are evoked by the tour narrative. Hall and Mac Low will also lead a live series of speculative conversations in response to the works.

Sunk Shore

Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low

The Sunk Shore tour guides (Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low), in collaboration with the Tending the Edge artists, will explore the City’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan and interpret the city-wide Tending the Edge projects by engaging visiting audiences in time travel conversations and imaginings towards a climate-changed future. How do our efforts today play out in 2050? What edge will be left to tend?

Week 11: Sunk Shore

Sunk Shore (Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low) brings you on a tour of the climate changed future on the shores of the East River. 
Join them as they time-travel to 2092 and back again.

Picture a shoreline you know well - it can be near you now, one you grew up with, or one you visited and fell in love with. What do you imagine it will look and feel like 72 years in the future - in 2092? Think about the temperature, the air, the ground, the water, the sounds, the smells. Will it be further inshore or offshore? Who lives there and how do they live? What structures are nearby? What plants, animals, birds, fish, and insects do you see? Note what has changed…

Sunk Shore is a speculative, experiential tour of our climate changed future that takes place along specific shorelines. The experience is built to bring you into an embodied experience of information that can seem very remote or abstract, giving number and date visceral weight and impact. The tour is based on research about events expected to take place (and already happening), including rising sea levels, changing animal species, higher heat, ingenious solutions, social revolutions, and more. 

Sunk Shore

TRYST invited participants on a roving future history of lower Manhattan, walking through an imagined tomorrow and discussing how the city landscape will change over the coming years.

Sea levels are rising, and New York City is surrounded by a series of complex waterways. The borders of Manhattan island have been expanded through landfill and soil scavenged from construction, covering over creeks and streams. Marshes have been drained and filled and formed into streets.

During Superstorm Sandy, the highest flood tide came up to the level of the pre-contact island, a premonition of what is to come. When the water rises again, what will the tip of Manhattan become? Venice in Battery Park? A series of creeks all through the Financial District?

Sunk Shore invited us to embody and invent the new watery reality through observation, physical adventure, and a series of pop-up interactive shared imaginings of a future existence.

Sunk Shore was produced and performed by Clarinda Mac Low, Carolyn Hall and Paul Benny.

Sunk Shore

Brochures, Artifacts

TRYST led Sunk Shore tours around Lower Manhattan, embodying and inventing the new water reality and imaging a future existence on June 16, 17, and 18.

Collaborative floor painting and single channel video of Manhattan waterways with Eve Mosher.

The Power of Ten

Working creatively with water and waterways is inherently interdisciplinary, and requires artists and other creative people to infiltrate and col­laborate with many different sectors. The Power of Ten is an opportunity to intersect with people from different fields, and imagine collaboration. All thinkers and doers are welcome–scientists, social/environmental justice activists, designers, artists, performers, planners, architects, and more.