NEW INC Y12 Creative Science: Becoming Geologic: The Sensory Body-as-Proxy for Environmental Toxicity, Accumulation, and Ambiguity

RationaleMy work takes seriously that temporally and spatially irreconcilable bio-geoecological phenomena can be apprehended through their sensory traces.Geologists reconstruct past climate conditions across deep time by using biological, chemical and physical signatures of sediment, rocks and fossils.These materials function as proxies: geologic and biological records that stand in for environmental states or phenomena."Sensitive proxies" are those which register ecological data with particularly high fidelity and, in some cases, fine temporal resolution.Following Stacy Alaimo's suggestion that human bodies register and are enmeshed with the residues of environmental phenomena and contamination (2010), I propose an art practice which figures human bodies as speculative and "sensitive" geologic proxies for environmental conditions.Perhaps similar to sediment cores, bodies accumulate markers of current ecological conditions, including concentrations of heavy metals, pesticides, PFAS, and microplastics.If proxies are that which can take the place of something else, then bodies are the place where materials are continually taking place.I suggest that bodies are a resonant medium for sensing territories of accumulations, and for registering eerie thresholds of change, particularly through digestion and the chemical senses (taste and smell).In my work, sensory, embodied, and material interactions are sites for exploring otherwise planetary-scale environmental phenomena.Food, eating, taste, and smell bring visceral aesthetics to contemporary art (Bromley 2017) and bring sensory forms of knowledge to earth sciences (Mol 2021; Wist 2022), although they are often disparaged as being too corporeal in both of these capacities.Alaimo suggests that food is the most "transcorporeal substance," in that consumption and digestion exemplify the body's porosity to material flows (2010).The edible/ inedible binary has long served to manage the anxieties and ambiguities of material ingestion (now often characterized by invisible forms of contamination).Systems of food culture and etiquette construct boundaries meant to contain the unruliness of eating, and, I argue, offer a futile reassurance that we can remain sovereign from the materials that pass through us.My practice extrudes the body-as-proxy to its logical extreme: where bodies already accumulate anthropogenic residues destined for the rock record, geophagy inverts thisthe strata are consumed directly.Geophagy is the intentional consumption of geologic materials, like clay rocks, chalk, and dirt.These represent contested territory at the edges of edibility, and the signifier dirt has accrued everything unwanted and out-of-place, offending against order (Douglas 2013).Geophagy is pathologized as an eating disorder in the United States, often stigmatized along lines of race, class, and gender (predominantly associated with women).It is, however, documented in cultures on every continent and thought to date to human prehistory (Young 2012).Iemanja Brown argues this practice holds particular force in the Anthropocene: eating dirt in conditions of