artworks-polymorphiccarbonlibrary

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, installation view of Carbon Pathways Table and Carbon Reader as part of Polymorphic Carbon Library, Common Room, Newcastle, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, A3 4 side Handout 1.1 for Polymorphic Carbon Library, 2021. An introductory guide and navigational handout for visitors to the Common Room, Newcastle (Former Mining Institute) where the work opened in 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, installation views of Carbon Pathways Table (left) and Carbon Archive (right) as part of Polymorphic Carbon Library, Common Room, Newcastle, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, production view the inset to the Carbon Pathways Table, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, installation view of the carbon sites film series (Gateshead Energy Company) as part of the Carbon Archive, Common Room, Newcastle, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, installation view of the carbon sites film series (Friars Goose Pumping Station) as part of the Carbon Archive, Common Room, Newcastle, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, installation view of the carbon sites film series (Winlaton Mill, Hydrogen Homes) as part of the Carbon Archive, Common Room, Newcastle, 2021

ABOUT:

Polymorphic Carbon Library is space of meeting and exchange. For exploring the many ways in which carbon is entangled with our lives, histories, technologies and futures.

Carbon underpins the diversity of life on this planet, and is the second most abundant element in our bodies. Polymorphic Carbon Library connects us to this, and to the structures of carbon, the places and sites of carbon transition, where carbon is active, seen and unseen. Exhaling carbon dioxide through breathing makes us part of a shared and complex carbon cycle. In the form of coal carbon has shaped the landscape, society and economy of the UK. How we evolve and negotiate our relationships with carbon matter matters to the future.

Within architectures designed using the molecular structures and allotropes of carbon are gatherings of materials, documents, sites, people, data, and apparatus foregrounding visibilities and materialities of carbon at a timely and vital moment of transition from fossil fuels. Polymorphic Carbon Library is the construction of a partial live archive connected to carbon's interactions in our lives, from breathing, to landscape, to technologies, ecologies, and climate emergency.

'Polymorphic Carbon Library is an expansive materials library, living archive, and a place of collective exchange for encountering and sharing the thinking, innovations and futures of carbon. Carbon is a polymorphic material that occurs as coal, graphite and diamond. It is inside every living cell and it is engineered into meshes, fibres, weaves and lattices. While an abundance of carbon, in the form of coal, has shaped the landscape, society and economy of the North East since the industrial revolution, it is how we choose to use carbon that will shape the planet in the future. Polymorphic Carbon Library invites audiences to join an exchange of knowledge, collective action, and experience, through an unfolding archive and materials library.'

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, view of the digital parts per million (PPM) data set (detail), part of Carbon Archive, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, Live Reading parts per million (PPM), print on carbon paper, 2021

Charles Danby & Rob Smith, A4 print out, folding carbon futures invitation as part of Carbon Archive, 2021

With thanks to The Common Room, Newcastle, and to the National Lottery Heritage Fund