Lily Cox-Richard
For several years, Lily Cox-Richard has been invested in a long-term project Old Copper Futures which focuses on the role of urban mining and reclamation in the copper industry. Lily considered her RAIR Residency an opportunity to refine and reframe this project by following scrap copper as it moves through the waste stream, and to reify the project in sculptural form: working with Sullivan Scrap Metal’s Aljon logger-baler, Lily created three 1,000 lb bales of #2 scrap copper sourced from Revolution Recovery. During the Recycling Center’s quiet off-hours, Lily also produced several large graphite rubbings mapping the surface texture of bales: a meditation on the volume and density of scrap material compressed in its transitional state from use to reuse.
“RAIR provides artists and thinkers opportunities to physically grapple in their enormity and filth as we attempt to articulate better questions about the environmental and economic sustainability of the way we live”
