Expression - CONTEXT Fall 2024

The Carboniferous Period, approximately 360-300 million years ago, was a time of carbon sequestration, when vast swampy forests covered much of the land with thick deposits of organic matter that became coal. The phase was followed by a global calamity called “The Great Dying.” By contrast, the New Carboniferous Age, our time, is marked by carbon release through the profligate burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and the onset of a new period of global environmental peril.  

The work of artist Andrea Krupp is featured in The New Carboniferous Age: Creative perspectives on coal, culture, and calamity, on exhibit at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, until December 9th. This show imagines a new geological era, characterized by three carbon-rich materials: Pennsylvania anthracite coal, Calamites fossils, and plastic objects made from petro-carbon. Hand-carved anthracite sculptures leverage material and aesthetic ambiguity. Graphic works on paper, stamped and stenciled with black carbon derived from anthracite coal, explore themes of deep-time, energy culture, consumer culture, and human/nature entanglement. The art and objects on display bridge the geological past, present-day realities, and a future, post-fossil fuel world.  

Transforming pieces of anthracite coal into art objects opens new perspectives on a significant material that is not often visible in culture. The New Carboniferous Age aims to provide a deeper imaginative context for how we understand our time, and how we relate to energy and nature, to shape a new narrative of a sustainable, just, and calamity-free future. 

Krupp is a visual artist whose practice traces ongoing experiential, emotional, and intellectual engagement with earth and nature, both as a framework for how we experience reality and as the material source of human knowledge. Her works employ simple materials, graphic language, and layered semiotics to spark curiosity and wonder; transmit ideas about perception and reality; and contribute to forming a new cultural imaginary of the future.  

Krupp’s position as a rare book conservator and her expertise in material culture bring historical grounding to her creative practice. In 2017, she was awarded the Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. In 2018 she was a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellow in Ireland and an Arctic Circle Residency participant. Her works have been exhibited around the world and have been acquired by the Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art, Woodmere Art Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and private collections.  

Exhibit Photos: John Carlano 

Section through the Girardville coal deposits from the Sixth Annual Report of the Directors of City Trusts, 1875. Courtesy of Library Company of Philadelphia, www.librarycompany.org