JASMINE PRADISSITTO

Rewilding (2021) Pollution Absorbing ceramic NOXORB, wood found in a forest fire, soot, wild grasses, resin.

As I worked with a new material that could clean air for humans, I became increasingly aware that pollution also affected all living things from flowers to pollinators. The concept of ‘Rewilding’ is a method of conservation focused on restoring biodiversity and healthy ecosystems by protecting wild areas and reintroducing keystone species. Billions of years of evolution has created ecosystems that our holistic and balanced. As a species we have disrupted this equilibrium but we have an opportunity to find new symbiotic relationships if we remember we are only holobionts and part of a much larger organism.

Breathe (2020) Pollution absorbing ceramic NOXORB and metal.

By 2050 the UN predicts that 66% of the world's population will live in cities. Imagine then a material that can clean the air of the brown nitrogen dioxide (NOx) pollutant gas that defines our urban sunsets; a gas that not only exacerbates breathing difficulties but is increasingly posited as a contributary factor to diseases from dementia to heart disease. This is what the award-winning ‘Breathe’ above ‘Camden Peoples Theatre’ as part of The Mayor of London's clean-air, initiative to lead people to walk cleaner streets, is made of. This naturally material-occurring ceramic called NOXORB, was developed over 15 years for use in building and transport but I have pioneered its use since 2017 as a sculpting material. I believe that artists can create tangible change as well as growing awareness.

The by-products of our industrial progress have created lasting effects, none more evident than on Euston Rd which was once the second most polluted road in the UK. Surrounded by the white Regency architecture of John Nash, reminiscent of Greek temples and the Goddess Nike from which I drew inspiration, the figure in ‘Breathe’ floats as a paradox. Smothered or inhaling depending on perspective.

Jasmine Pradissitto is an award-winning London-based British artist, scientist, speaker, environmentalist. She holds a PhD in physics from UCL and studied art at Goldsmith’s and London Metropolitan Universities. A polymath, her critical practice spans painting, sculpture, and technology and she is the only artist in the world licensed to use NOXORBTM, a newly developed ceramic material that absorbs nitrogen dioxide (NOx) pollution from the air.One pioneering public art project, ‘The Horniman Museum Gardens’, which won the Museum of the Year Award 2022.

Pradissitto’s work is based on innovation inspired by the natural world and biomimicry, is increasingly less about the narrative of our past planetary ingressions, and more about our adaptation to a post-industrial, anthropogenic world. Inspired by Darwin’s 1862 ‘evolutionary arms race’ theory between an unusual orchid and moth, through her works she seeks a new era: the ‘Symbiocene’ a time during which we realise that one species can only survive because of the existence of the other. A homeostasis or equilibrium needs to be established, much like prey and predator; individual and global; consumer and consumed, industrial and natural, and ultimately our past and future ancestors. By looking to the holistic and to methods sympathetically joining that which is manufactured, to that which is grown we challenge our ability to hold two opposing ideas and overcome our 'cognitive dissonance' is a subject, she explores ‘the realisation of mechanisation'.

All images and words shown courtesy of the artist ©️ Jasmine Pradissitto. All rights reserved.