The Systemic Sublime

Germaine Koh’s extended artist statement documents her weather- and climate-related works. She summarizes her body of work that adapts commonplace objects and technologies to suggest connections between human activities to naural and built environments, especially by introducing environmental forces into unexpected situations such as building interiors and domestic settings. These include the Fair-weather forces series of interventions that control architectural elements in relation to weather conditions, and process-based works that engage geological time. These works are provisional and continually changing, and they provoke reflection and reckoning and a sense of awe in face of our connections to the greater-than-human, but also remind us of human agency and responsibility within these. Koh suggests that the hand-made character grounds these works. She proposes to speak of the Systemic sublime, a variant of the sublime which acknowledges human implication in systems which exceed our comprehension.