Future Threads

Future Threads is a multi-media art installation that will bring public awareness to the impacts of climate change on Arctic coastal communities through the creation of a collective art installment and narrative voice over. Photos of the impacts of climate change on Arctic coastal infrastructure, marine resources, and community food access will be publicly sourced from the international community and printed on dead stock fabric. These photos will then be stitched together using silver thread in order to create a quilt, accompanied with a narrated voice over. The form of a quilt is both representative of shared experiences of climate change impacts among communities of the Arctic, and symbolic of how the addition of each photo panel adds to the overall warmth of the quilt-- at what point does each additional panel of fabric make the quilt so suffocatingly hot that it becomes unbearable? Depending on the decisions we make today, what threads does the future hold? These questions hold even more significance as the Arctic faces warming temperatures at three times the rate of the rest of the world. The silver thread itself is representative of the Arctic ocean and the streams, rivers, and estuaries that feed into it – water that both connects and binds our collective experiences in the face of the climate crisis.