Terminal Eden (2005) was a response to the impact of e-waste - with a specific reference to the town of Guiyu in China - an example of many developing countries in the East being used by the West as a dumping grounds for redundant technology. I constructed these works from salvaged keyboards and motherboards, harvesting literally thousands of computer keys and capacitors and reworking these into an installation where our insatiable desire for new technology and designer obsolescence suggested a dystopic Eden - where indeed knowledge (IT) becomes our undoing.
"Dunedin
artist Ana Terry has begun to establish a sculptural
vocabulary that manipulates found objects to both enlarge
and alter their associative presence. In this project she
works with obsolescent technology that she has intercepted
on it’s way to the dump, exploring and critiquing an
increasingly insatiable and insanely unsustainable
production and consumption of technology. Terry reworks the
cast-off items manipulating their surfaces and interiors so
that the objects are ‘reactivated to generate a sense of
pathos’ with a beauty and superseded ugliness that may
unplug perceptions. Terry’s Terminal Eden is a place where
our desires are recognised, the lure of technology is
acknowledged but the hardware may also have the power to
interrupt our composure. Terry ‘intimately teases out’ our
individual responses and responsibilities within a much
broader global process of western
capitalism..." Ali Bramwell, Blue Oyster Art
Project Space, September 2005.
also see Kathryn Mitchell,
Terminal Eden, Art New Zealand, p.40, Summer NUMBER 117 /
SUMMER 2005-2006