Carbon Flurry
Curated by: Imogen Clendinning
Western University Visual Arts Centre, Cohen Commons
November 2025
Photos by: Dickson Bou
In Carbon Flurry, artists Danielle Petti, Racquel Rowe, Emelie Robertson and Behnaz Fatemi conduct new creative interventions and experimentation as they animate the engineered material biochar. Created using a process of pyrolysis--a chemical decomposition of matter through heat--biochar is a material remnant of waste management technologies that seek to mitigate climate change, by capturing carbon and storing it in soil for hundreds or thousands of years. In Carbon Flurry, the artists respond to the agency of biochar, allowing the material to take on new layers of meaning beyond its utility as the biproduct of waste. Petti, Rowe, Robertson and Fatemi emphasize the affectual and tactile qualities of its form, as well as the potentiality of biochar as matter; how it abstracts geologic time, fossilizing abundant carbon-emitting chemicals and holding them in stasis.