“Solar Nap Coal Rest” is about energy, sustainability, and climate change; it seeks to encompass dialogues about personal and collective power systems, fossil fuels, the national grid, and New Zealand’s questionable current political posturing around these critical concerns. “Solar Nap Coal Rest” is a new performance work that evolves from both my recent 2017 installation and performance project, “Please Return Me to the Earth,” and my earlier 2014-2015 performance and video works, “Waste Meditation Performance With Brooms” and “Sweep Dreams.”

“Solar Nap Coal Rest” was the final performance held in Wellington during Performance Art Week Aotearoa. I lay in the intertidal zone of Island Bay, taking a nap before the rising tide. I was cocooned in a gold emergency survival blanket with my head on a pillow of raw coal nuggets. There’s a certain strength in lying there and knowing that the ocean is coming up, feeling resilient yet fragile in a freezing Wellington onshore gale. For most of us, the knowledge that the ocean is rising rests somewhere in the recesses of our minds. Uncomfortable, but far from urgent. This work asks us to consider “Can we afford to take a nap in the face of climate change?” The resting performance hinges on its temporal qualities: the imminent threat of a rising sea, the wild raging onshore weather, a southerly gale sending gusts of bone-chilling wind, billowing my futile gold wrapper, and an audience wrapped in woolly blankets watching over me in anticipation for the moment when the sea licks my frozen toes and rushes up, up, up.