Kellie Bornhoft, Boundless Sediments

featured in Between a Love and a Hard Place, a video art exhibition presented by Vinegar at the Media Window in downtown Birmingham, Alabama.

Boundless Sediments centers on the moving-shaking animacy of our planet. The common space of ground, this shared layer of earth, has been a crucial topic in anticipating the warming planet. Geologists and climatologists have staked claims that we are now living in a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Markers of this new era include the ground’s strata infiltrated by plastics, nuclear radiation measured in the atmosphere, and mass extinction. Rocks, although seemingly unchangeable, have become reactionary. This should come as no surprise as we extract from fossil fuels that hold the energy of millennia of once-living beings. Colonial logics of measuring and marking ground are the dangerous acts that led to our planetary crisis. What we assume to be a static resource, is active and pushes back. I am interested in the way that the earth moves in refusal: earthquakes after fracking or landslides after wildfires. The ground shakes and shifts beyond human-drawn borders. Boundless Sediments is a two-channel video that uses poetry, ephemeral performance, and animation to reimagine our human relationship with this pale blue dot.

2020-2021, Two-Channel video, 11:53, plaster, TVs, speakers, wood, foam, and pigment

Kellie Bornhoft (she/her) practice seeks tangible and poetic narratives needed in an ever-warming climate. Bornhoft utilizes sculpture, installation and video to delve into the whelms and quotidian experiences of our precarious times. Scientific data and news headlines do plenty to evince the state of our warming planet, but the abject realities of such facts are hard to possess. Through geological and more-than-human lenses, Bornhoft sifts through shallow dichotomies (such as natural/unnatural, here/there, or animate/inanimate.) Bornhoft lives in Ogden, Utah where she is an Assistant Professor/Coordinator of Foundations at Weber State University. She holds a MFA in Sculpture + Expanded Media from Ohio State University and a BFA from Watkins College of Art and Design. Bornhoft’s work has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and film festivals such as the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kulturanker in Magdeburg, Germany, and the Athens International Film and Video Festival. Bornhoft’s work has been reviewed in many publications including Frieze Magazine, Burnaway, INDYweek and ArtsATL.