Julie Toke

Illuminating Ice Cores, 2018

Julie Toke’s practice engages both traditional and experimental materials and techniques to work across ceramics, object and jewellery design. By means of material associations, metaphor and re-contextualisation Julie conveys affective and insightful messages through the ‘agency’ or ‘thing power’ of her objects. These messages highlight expressions of fragility, preciousness, balance and sustainability in our interaction within natural ecosystems.

Illuminating Ice Cores aims to throw light on the relationship between inefficient energy consumption, its consequential CO₂ emissions and the changing state of the Polar Regions.
Each year, we emit two billion tons of CO₂ through our use of artificial lighting technologies. Current projections to 2040 estimate a 50% increase in CO₂ emissions from standard light bulbs each year. At the same time, ice core samples bear evidence of historical climate changes dating back thousands of millennia. These verify a ten-fold increase in the current rate of global warming when compared with previous warming periods.

Acting simultaneously as warning signals and beacons of hope, Illuminating Ice Cores are three luminaires that represent hypothetical ice core samples taken from the Arctic. Through material associations – porcelain for old ice, recycled glass for melting ice and coal for carbon – each luminaire is lit by a different globe; incandescent, compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) and light emitting diode (LED). The three speculative ice core lamps highlight the significant positive impact of lowering carbon emissions by using efficient lighting sources. 

Image: Julie Toke, Illuminating Ice Cores (detail), 2018. Southern Ice Porcelain, cast recycled bottle glass, Bio-epoxy resin bound coal luminaires. Photo courtesy of the artist.