Ella Dawn McGeough
June 27, 2026 | Cagliari Sardinia
All my life I’ve been on the move. As a child and adolescent, this movement meant changing apartment or houes, on average, every two years. As an adult, I’ve reached towards stability, and hope to stay put for awhile, but trend continues. All in, I’ve lived in some twenty-one separate places and moved back and forth between thee any number of times. Moreover, I travel frequently, often several times a year, whether for residencies, exhibitions, academic conferences, new jobs, or just vaguely felt research interests. Because of this, my work has necessarily been shaped by encounters with highly specific terrains—from the outskirts of Beijing to the urban pollinator gardens of Berlin and Toronto; to dense rainforests of Peru and Guyana; intertidal zones of Norway, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island; and, more recently, the prairies of Saskatchewan and the dry landscapes of Sardinia. Like all travellers, or those who are asked to relocate for whatever reason, I begin from a place of lack. Often, I don’t understand the language, getting by with a combination of translation apps and hand-movements. But even when I do, there are certain subtleties I miss. Language escapes me and I turn inwards, falling either quiet or assuming an intensity that gets me into challenging conversations. More prosaically though, I often wonder how much food to order and if certain clothes will make me stand out as the foreigner I am, feeling both unkempt and overly intentional, in equal measure. I mean, what can I wear that won’t leave me dripping in sweat or freezing from windchill? And, what species of flower is that? Is the snake poisonous? Do the doors open in or out? What are hardware stores called and where do I find them?
Trying to make art amongst these uncertainties can feel daunting, particularly as I tend to work with the heavy materiality of sculpture and installation.
In 2016, when I spent three-months at Peru’s Tambopata Research Station, six-hours up-river from the nearest store, I began the residency by combing the forest looking for rocks to assemble into some kind of forms. Possibly mermaids. The research station was initially developed to study how various species interact with the local salt-lick, a mineral-rich exposed cliff-face that daily attracts a large collection of animals and birds, most famously scarlet macaws who gather each morning in great droves to gossip and munch clay, a practice known a geophagy. As I walked the forest’s paths, my skin soon solicited its own array—with sweat bees and multicoloured butterflies stealing quick licks on my arms and face before being automatically brushed away.
The project with the rocks wasn’t coming to much, but all that sweating and general lack of good ideas had me thinking of my mother. Specifically, how when my father fell ill in the early 1980s (following a world-wide economic collapse) and she had to figure out a path forward, she applied what seemed like implausible means: flour, water, and salt. Stuff of the kitchen. Turning balls of colourful dough into small figurines—clowns, animals, characters from fairy tales—and with them a cottage industry that kept us fed and housed. So, with questions of how to make something out of next to nothing swirling, I began making salt-dough, mixing in whatever was near at hand: Gatorade, chewed coca leaves, salt, flour, urine, and the light-sensitive blueish ink of a fruit called huito.
Since then, when faced with doubts about how to approach my studio practice outside my home studio I make dough and quickly find my hands doing what they know how to do.
My dear friend, H, likes to say, “All our work is about our mothers.” Responding to this statement, our mutual friend, D, comments on H’s plurality of mothers. Within this back and forth, it reminds me that I was not raised by one woman alone. Alongside my biological mother stood a community for whom the magic of making was not a metaphor, nor adjective, but action, a way of life in which material reality could be transformed, regularly, through the arts of sustained attention. A community who crafted practices of existence and systems of knowledge through sheer physical labour, material ingenuity, and consistent binding of obligations with acts of giving and receiving care.
I have the sense that I work because they taught my hands to work. Like theirs, much of my practice is found in the domestic research of sociality via cooking, cleaning, dyeing, gardening, kneading, knotting, painting, polishing, repairing, scrubbing, and pouring some viscous material from one container into the next. Their tools are my tools. Their craft, my craft. Their art, my survival.
Sometimes, I begin artist talks by asking audiences to imagine a flower—a relatively easy object, since it fits in the space of our forehead, the favoured imaginal realm. At other times, I ask them to imagine a runner handing a baton to another runner then another and yet another. Instantly, the feeling of grasping a thing and the tangibility of sweat and chalk is given and received. Object and subject rub against one another, conferring awareness, meaning, and knowledge. As the runner runs, they breathe heavy and deep, inhaling the world—grass, exhaust, humidity—while exhaling their own damp interiority. Over and over, turning inside-out and outside-in. The runner is engaged in an emergent process, a sensational affair, an accrued composition.
I find correlation with the repetitive nature of the relay in my studio practice. Recurrent gestures like pouring, covering, building, and hanging are applied to accessible, often malleable materials like linen bedsheets, papier-mâché, local vegetation, salt-dough, wax, composite clay, and found objects to make certain obscurities visible—an abstract thought, a kind of feeling, those half-remembered dreams, some elusive site, or the transience of social space, a dinner party, a picnic, a bed. While many of these works resemble something nebulous or amorphous, others begin to form recognizable shapes: billowing curtains, a stack of buckets or chairs, a t-shirt stuffed into a hole, a single sock or a pair of shoes, a variety of assorted pillows, a duck, miscellaneous flowers, aliens. More recently, objects have begun to combine into temporary gatherings, which may also include various cats, humans, insects, and whoever else wants to join.
Overwhelmingly, these works are ephemeral, susceptible to change. They may last the length of an exhibition, possibly as long as a season, but more usually, merely a few days. Finding themselves eaten away by weather and insects or simply collapsing under their own, inherent, fragility.
As one body of work makes way for another, the previous sculptures tend to melt back into their environment only to reform again at another time and place, as something similar but somewhat different. In this way, the preceding works are both present and absent from whatever current works are under production. Instead of negating past-progress, the work allows for methods of active inclusion and reincorporation.
In 2019, I began rolling my head around a very different kind of project—a project with an altogether different level of ambition—both in terms of physical and temporal scale.
Motivated by the complicated legacy of 1970s and 80s earthworks combined with contemporary artistic practices whose works demonstrate a progressive concern for the social, ecological, and decolonial politics of land use, I slowly began gathering research to conceptualize an artwork that could endure, both physically and communicatively, beyond 10,000 years—perhaps much, much longer. Asking, what challenges and possibilities would such parameters entail?
To determine the constituent parts of this project such as location, content, and reception I began engaging various fields and its potential stakeholders. Nevertheless, the project remains plagued by questions. Crucially, location, content, and reception. I’d like to find a place where time is both legible and stable (whatever that means). But even if I found the right place, what should the work communicate? What would someone, or something, millennia into the future, need to know about us? I don’t want the work to be some kind of salve, nor monument, nor epitome of this culture. What then? A warning? A description? A wild-goose chase? A joke?
A Whale walks into a bar and sits down next to a Man, who says, “Wooooaaaaaaaaaaaoooooowooooaaaaaaaoooooooo…” The Whale turns and says, “Man, you're tanked.”
And then how would the installation respond to the paradox of designing for those futures we cannot predict, for audiences who may not share our language or symbolic systems. For those who may have no concept of Whale or Bar?
With these questions and many more, around and around I go… leading me to wonder if the whole project is worth the effort? And what about scale? And what about materials?
To all of these, I find no definitive answers and the work remains unrealizable. Which is to say, the work and its questions resist even the first steps on the path of material creation, never mind completion. Within this state of research and ideation, the work continues to be in process, open to revision.
Perhaps, one day, the work will take the form of a land-based installation, but probably not.
Why mention any of this? Why write it down? Why expose this kind of high key indecision, these doubts?
I originally wrote this text for an art history conference at the University of York in Spring 2025. I enjoy attending art history conferences, even if I have the suspicion that artists don’t really belong at them. I go because I find it interesting to listen to articulate stories of what an artwork is, and what it does, performs, or contains, by those who truly care about these things, who have devoted their entire careers to these questions, even when I’m not much interested in the artwork, cultural object, or historical trajectory in and of itself. However, I find it amusing that these stories rarely contend with the ways in which an artwork comes to be in the world. In many of these stories, it is as if the artist just happens upon an idea, then pursues the idea or the material until the brilliant or sometimes problematic (and often both) thing gets made. It’s harder (and maybe less interesting) to tell of the false starts and projects that remain undone, to explain the truth of thinking and planning made into form.
We, the artists, are likely to blame. When curators and art historians drop by for studio visits, read our artist statements, or hear our talks, they trust our capacity for fabrication. Yet, it is important to remember that fabrication sits uneasily between truth and falsehood. A sculpture is fabricated. A legal document can be fabricated. A memory may be fabricated. The word retains its material roots even when applied to fiction. To call something a fabrication is to imply not merely that it is false, but that it has been carefully assembled.
But this process of fabrication is far from linear. Instead, making art often feels closer to orbiting an idea, or maybe less than an idea, a turning around of a notion or fuzzy feeling. Like a planet orbiting this or that idea, this or that material, sometimes getting closer to where we intended, maybe getting farther, but never quite where we started… That’s the adventure. The pleasure. The key to obsession.
The following section of this text tries to make visible the orbital path of trying to fabricate an artwork into being, or at least develop an idea worth digging into.
As my title suggests, I am going to tell you a story about mercury. The story of quicksilver.
The story of mercury is a story of naming. What it means to be named, particularly when that naming is based on a gesture: the quick glint of silver sliding between states.
Mercury, the mercurial. A name shared by God, planet, and element. Running from fingers, chasing the sun, refusing to stay put.
Each connotation occupies a different ontological category: mythical, astronomical, chemical and yet all are bound by themes of transition, instability, and reflection.
Mercury the god (Hermes, in the Greek tradition) is defined by movement. God of changeability and free association. God of communication and miscommunication. God of speed and slippage. God of travelling across boundaries that others cannot pass, from Olympus to the underworld, from life to death, and back again. God of getting away with it.
Mercury, the planet, is both smallest and quickest in the solar system. A speedy grey rock whose thin surface is pocked with the ravages of both long-dead volcanic activity and a constant barrage of impact craters. If Mercury were an orange, its core would be the size of a juicy fruit, while the outer crust and mantle would be as thick as the peel and pith.
Its elliptical orbit, made eccentric by its proximity to the Sun, traces a spiraling pattern with a slight orbital drift. This drift, known as perihelion precession, helped Einstein confirm his Theory of Relativity by demonstrating that space and time really do bend around massive objects.
To understand this orbit, picture Mercury revolving around a massive shallow depression of space/time. Next, draw an elongated circle around a central dot. Draw it again but turn it ever so slightly. Keep drawing, keep circling. Each orbit follows close to the same path, but not quite. Over time the accumulated shift opens into a flowering form, with each orbit becoming a petal. As your hand settles into the rhythm, try closing your eyes.
Now imagine that each loop marks the path of the small planet called Mercury, travelling at an average speed of 47.9 kilometres per second. Every eighty-eight Earth days it completes another orbit of the larger dot—the Sun—covering a path that spans roughly 360 million kilometres. The planet circles the Sun nearly four times for every Earth year, speeding up as it approaches the Sun and slowing as it moves away. With each revolution, the ellipse shifts by a tiny amount, slowly drawing its spiralling flower into space.
The element mercury, code name: Hg, for hydrargyrum, Latin for “liquid silver,” is a metal, which behaves like a liquid at room temperature. A gauge for temperature change: we can tell it’s hot and it’s getting hotter. Reflective, toxic, and volatile. Crossing the blood-brain barrier with ease—particularly in its methylmercury orientation—when it becomes highly toxic for living beings. This occurs when inorganic mercury particles in water and soil are transformed by microorganisms into an organic compound.
This catastrophic animal-mineral hybridity is felt critically by the Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows) First Nation, whose people have been irrevocably affected by the Dryden Chemical Company and subsequent slack response of the Canadian government. Between 1962 and 1970, the company dumped some twelve-tons of mercury waste into the English-Wabigoon River, a major source of food and livelihood for the community.
As I watch YouTube videos of survivors and victims detailing the impact of this atrocious devastation, my breath catches when, in addition to the ravages felt at the hands of Minamata, a neurological disease caused by severe mercury poisoning, I learn of increased instances of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ALS. My mother was also taken away by ALS.
Thinking with the compounding disaster of Grassy Narrows, I am reminded of a broader shift in how we relate to land on Earth. Once measured by what it bore: grain, shelter, story, land is now surveyed for what it can swallow, implying its geological stability—particularly its suitability for “safely” storing radioactive and otherwise noxious waste.
This subject is what some scholars have begun to call deep time infrastructures, systems of containment and communication that must endure beyond human timescales. The commons, that once-unspoken pact of sharing, succumbs to a different kind of enclosure. One that radiates and compromises.
In these cases, the land becomes a vessel for toxicity, and with it, a kind of mythic responsibility emerges. How do we mark danger across millennia? How can we warn of these radionuclide reliquaries. What semiotic systems can outlive the conventional language of today to warn future beings of harm? How can we attempt to protect them, when we cannot even protect us? The us of the complicated present tense when many are living the disasters of the future, girded by technologies of the past.
The semantic convergence of these three entities: God, planet, element is not accidental. Language preserves a kind of cross-domain logic. Each mercury denotes a form of instability.
Yet this shared name also leads to confusion, where the myth and the matter become conflated. Consider how the planet’s orbit is so fast that from Earth’s perspective, it appears to move backward several times a year, an illusion known as retrograde. Contemporary astrology references mercury-in-retrograde as a period of miscommunication—a time of accidental reply-alls and laptops on the fritz. In this way, the metaphor becomes embedded in public consciousness as a means to deflect personal accountability, even when the original referent is astronomical in origin.
Today, the naming of Mercury’s surface features is guided less by myth and more by formalized scientific body. In 1976, following NASA’s Mariner 10 mission (the first spacecraft to visit the planet’s orbit), the International Astronomical Union (IAU) began designating Mercury’s craters after artists, writers, and musicians who had made significant contributions to human culture. Those deemed to have, “made an impact.” Thus, myth was displaced by curatorial gesture, even as that gesture remained symbolic. For the ensuing fifty years, those named remained predictable, I do not have to tell you who they are, you already know them as those who fill the halls of museums like the Uffizi and Metropolitan with crowds striving to gain a glimpse of that rare genius.
There have been a few exceptions: in its first year, the legacy of poet Li Qingzhao of China’s Song dynasty and Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet-diplomat and educator who was the first Latin American author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, were each designated a crater. Soon after, the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, shared the honour.
In August 2024, alongside seven other notable women, a crater was named for the American artist Ruth Asawa (1926 – 2013). Asawa’s sculptures, defined by looping wire forms that hang in space, resemble both the nested complexity of Mercury’s elliptical planetary orbit and the geometry of a crater. Concavity turned inside out.
While I understand the naming of Asawa’s impact crater to denote a tribute, an acknowledgement of her genuine influence, the very idea of an impact seems opposed to that of meaningful contribution. For me, an impact conjures feelings of a clearing away, a kind of violence, an eradication. Not recuperation.
These overlapping instances—the naming of a crater, the burial of waste, the etymology of an element—all point to a broader question: how does language attempt to stabilize what is inherently unstable?
The concept of mercury resists permanence. Whether through myth, matter, or motion, it deflects easy categorization. Even the element’s reflective, mirrored surface resists direct gaze, offering back a distorted or fragmented self-image.
I first turned towards Mercury as a research subject in summer 2020. It was more of a reflex than an intellectual decision—an intuitive grasping for a form that could accommodate the surrounding instability.
During the early months of the pandemic, time collapsed. Structures that once marked a day—like teaching schedules, studio routines, seasonal travel—dissolved, and with them, the distinctions between interior and exterior, past and future. What remained was a kind of floating anxiety, a disorientation that was difficult to put my finger on.
Grief, yes, but dispersed. Distributed across losses both minor and profound. A loss of momentum, a loss of clarity, a loss of friends. It was in this context that I noticed mercury’s looping recurrence. More as a pattern than an object of study. The way that any subject looked at too closely begins to fill our field of vision.
In Instagram posts bemoaning retrograde. In numerous graffiti scrawled across my city imploring fellow citizens to “Remember Grassy Narrows.” In myths about holy messengers and erroneous news reports of impending crimewaves—anxieties of the former reflected in the shiny faces of newly installed security cameras protecting the mirrored car windows ringing alleyways of my upper-middle class neighbourhood. Mirrors I fantasized about smashing.
Over and over, around and around, mercury returned. A volatile symbol.
I wanted a map. I got a labyrinth of circles within ellipses.
The pattern that emerged held a kind of permission, to think elliptically, to move between registers, to admit contradiction without demanding resolution.
With time, the project became less about mercury as a subject, and more about adopting a mercurial stance: responsive, provisional, protean. Less about permanence and more about registration. About tracing a passage, even if the path loops or falters.
Mercury, with its eccentric orbit and fractured identity, became a model for that kind of movement. Not forward, not upward, but around and under. Research oriented towards change.
Asawa’s naming has made me particularly interested in craters as form, both physiologically and geographically.
Is the planet a marked face? I stand looking into one of those double-sided mirrors, the kind with one standard reflection and the other exaggerated, and examine the skin of my nose and cheeks, cratered by tiny worries and environmental degradation, micrometer excavations of oil and dirt. Pours expanded and expanding. If I named them, whose names would I use? My father or yours? Each one a living measure of doubt and the body’s porosity.
The body as impact site. The chest as concavity. The way breath reshapes itself under pressure.
Although, is it also possible to think of craters not as scars but as absence with both a memory and a futurity?
French historian Pierre Nora applied the concept of les lieux de mémoire, or “sites of memory”—be they places or personas, objects or concepts—to describe that which contributes to the symbolic coherence of identity.
I remind myself that an impactful event must not remain a trauma. Novelist Haruki Murakami notes how the impactful event leaves a hole, but that that hole turns into a passage. A passage into a different reality.
Which reminds me how, astonishingly, in 1994, 50 years after internment, Asawa claimed to have grown feelings of gratitude for the change initiated by her personal experience at the camps which imprisoned her family: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”
A crater will slowly become a basin, a watering hole, then a small lake, a place for gathering, for slacking thirst.
I imagine the giant sloths and mastodons sipping from waters which once filled the lake of Meteor Crater during a much more humid Pleistocene era, in what has once again become the arid deserts of Arizona.
As an artist working within these frameworks, it becomes difficult to separate method from metaphor from myth. The crater is both a literal indentation and a site of inquiry.
The orbit, a structure of return. The element, a lens to assess toxicity. The God, a change in course.
To work with mercury, then, is to work within a slippery system, where clarity is often conditional, and form is a function of what it can, and cannot, hold.
While initially finalizing one version of this text, I performed my own kind of orbit, a quarter orbit of the earth’s globe—from Saskatoon, a small city still buried underfoot by a never-ending winter’s snow, to London’s springtime metropolis. Travelling towards dawn’s rosy fingers, I reflected upon why I chose to make this journey, and its effects...
The impact resulted in a line for my future tenure application, new professional connections developed, and old friendships strengthened, but also and less appealingly, the soggy vegetarian penne pasta and teeny bottles of bad wine, as well as the 2.39 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to carbon dioxide (CO₂), also methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and other gases, as well as the 4.2 mg of mercury emitted by the petrol itself—miniscule in comparison to the approximately 6 grams of mercury filling my mouth’s nine or ten dental cavities.
Mercury is a heavy atom. Bound in metal, it is considered stable and while less volatile than free mercury, it can release vapour over time, especially with grinding, heat, and age.
Consider the billions of such fillings hidden within landfills or urns, slowly releasing. Burial grounds for the ever-toxic. Where Silvia Federici’s “tired earthly commons, the gift of billions of years of labourless transformation meet tired human bodies.” Where so tired ground meets so tired flesh. Within these pits, mercury, ever the shapeshifter, endures; freed from temporary containment to circulate again, not only in my bloodstream, but elsewhere and everywhere.
Once again, I am following another meandering path, digging myself into yet another hole.
This depression, this crater, like any mirror, does not lie, but it does bend. And in its curve, I catch the tail of Mercury, that gleaming silver sandal.
Fast, fugitive, always turning. Always moving. Always changing. Orbiting that monstrously life-giving sun, as violent as we are, as destructive as I am.