Solastalgia

What you are looking at

A life-size human brain, modeled in matte white porcelain, is shown from the side with its folds, cerebellum and stem carefully described. A large section of the cortex has been cut away like a window. Inside, in miniature, is a forest: branching eucalyptus twigs with long leaves and gumnuts, ferns, a spray of small flowers, and in the middle a koala clinging to a trunk and looking out at us. A small bird perches on the lower lip of the opening, another sits in the foliage. Attached to the outside of the brain, where it does not belong, is a human ear, and beside it bursts a cluster of lily-like flowers.

Everything is the same unglazed-looking white, so the forest reads less like a living landscape than like a memory or a fossil.

The title

Solastalgia is a word coined in the early 2000s by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It joins the Latin solacium (comfort) and the Greek -algia (pain) to describe the distress people feel when their home environment is degraded around them: a homesickness experienced while still at home. Albrecht developed the idea from communities in New South Wales living beside open-cut coal mines.

MacDowell's choice of a koala and eucalyptus is therefore precise. The forest inside this brain is an Australian one, the landscape that gave the word its origin, and the koala has become an emblem of habitat loss. The ear, placed on the outside and listening, suggests a mind that hears what is happening to that world and holds it inside.

How it was made

Kate MacDowell is an American artist based in Portland, Oregon. She builds her sculptures by hand in porcelain, without molds, and fires them with a cone 6 glaze. She has said she prefers porcelain for its luminous, ghostly quality and for its ability to hold very fine detail; the leaves here are paper-thin and the koala's fur is suggested with tiny incised marks. Porcelain is also fragile and associated with precious, decorative objects, which sharpens the contrast with her often disturbing subjects.

Meaning

MacDowell describes her work as exploring the conflict between a romantic ideal of union with nature and our actual impact on the environment. Many of her pieces fuse human anatomy with animals and plants: hearts, lungs and skulls that open onto wildlife. Here the brain becomes a reliquary for a threatened ecosystem. Is the forest a memory of what has been lost, or something still alive that the mind is trying to protect? The work leaves both open, which is the feeling the word solastalgia names.

Related works

See MacDowell's Canary 3 and her artist page. For other works that grow nature from inside the body, compare Modem Swamp by Daniel Popper and Flower Figures Nº02 by Jean-Michel Bihorel.