Kelley Anne O'brien

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Liberation of Terra Superna

Forest Hills Park is a place where contradictions coexist in space and across time: the power of men, the knowledge of women, and the determinacy of plants. Decades prior to the park’s creation, botanist and suffragette Harriet Keeler explored this land, conducting research into native species, advocating for non-intervention and recommending instead that areas remain untouched for some amount of wilderness to exist within the city. Working not only for the freedom of plants, her efforts propelled the surrounding city of East Cleveland (OH) to become the first in the USA to grant women the right to vote. Forest Hills Park was designed in 1938 by landscape architect A.D. Taylor with a willful disregard for the course of nature, instead promoting a harmonious social order amongst the country’s elite. Today, the city is bankrupt and the park is abandoned, becoming once again a haven for rare native plant species.
The Liberation of Terra Superna, a three-channel immersive animation, proposes an alternative environment for the future of Forest Hills Park; one in which the knowledge of our great-grandmothers is valued and the natural world is given political agency. A world where rather than the domination of women, plants, and animals, we learn to collaborate and co-create a future of power sharing across all forms of consciousness. Exploring cycles of birth and death, value and depreciation, dominance and destruction, as well as agency and subjugation, the mythical landscape becomes both a specter of the past and a vision of the future, examining the possibilities for native species to thrive in abandoned public spaces, and for cycles of life to endure and evolve.

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We too, traverse the earth

This film contrasts the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the 1910’s with landscape architect A.D. Taylor’s design philosophy for Forest Hills Park, located in East Cleveland, Ohio, the first city east of the mississippi to allow women the right to vote. The park’s design was intended to promote harmonious social order, allowing women a place, free from the sins of the city, to experience nature. The narrator elicits memories, recollections, and dreams echoing the work of suffragist, educator and botanist Harriet Keeler, who argued for the presence of wild flowers and natural flora in urban parks decades before Taylor devalued the native plant life of Forest Hills. The film itself focuses on elements of abandonment within the park. Shot entirely in the winter months the lack of movement, few signs of life and the overcast grey skies speak of absence, longing, and pain. While the narration describes specific and concealed occurrences as a speculative approach to exploring the present-day environment as a space of suppressed stories embedded within the contemporary experience.

The metal legs become frames through which one’s perspective of the world can be examined from a new position. By altering the orientation of one’s head we are given a moment to mediate on the value of and our relationship to space. These street corners give the appearance of the ‘everyday’ while being embedded in the history of women’s suffrage as locations that women stationed themselves to petition men to support their cause.

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Residence Time

In 2014 it was reported that an unknown quantity of the carcinogen “dioxane 1,4” had leaked into the Cape Fear River Basin contaminating the drinking water of over one million people. Over the past eight years numerous spills of up to 18 times the EPA recommended parts per billion have been documented as originating in Greensboro tributaries and thus traveling downstream to the Atlantic. Due to previous spills and lack of action by the local government, the Department of Environmental Quality has entered a Special Order by Consent with Greensboro to monitor the city’s detection and notification protocols of future spills. Yet, despite the known risks of liver/kidney damage and death, dioxane 1,4 remains unregulated at the city, state, and federal level. While the City of Greensboro refuses to release the name of the company responsible for the largest spills or how much was discharged, it is known that the synthetic chemical 1,4 dioxane is a by-product of dyes used in the textile industry.
This project investigates the ways in which the city is complicit in violence, both against humans and the environment, in support of the industries that fund the City. Immersing the viewer in the waters laden with unseen state-sanctioned violence; a soundscape and corresponding projections explore what can’t be captured on film, that which slips by unnoticed and the trust we place in images and institutions. As a highly miscible (i.e. mixes well) substance in water that does not readily biodegrade in the environment, dioxane 1,4 is virtually undetectable without scientific equipment, however in large volumes it has a distinct smell. Often described as sickly sweet like overripe fruit, the scent of dioxane 1,4 will waft through the gallery, subtle yet present signaling that not all dangers can be seen. Antagonistic kinetic sculptures will lurch at and splash viewers challenging our assumptions that our water nourishes our bodies when in reality it depletes them. Through overlapping social, environmental, and industrial concerns this installation illustrates that all local actions flow out to sea.

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