Extinction Studies

Extinction Studies encompasses a durational drawing performance and its material traces. The work is a new iteration of a year-long project where artist Lucienne Rickard underwent a daily reckoning: drawing, then erasing a recently extinct species sourced from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, the authoritative list of extinct and threatened species used by scientists globally. For this new performance of the gesture, Rickard uses the same paper that was daily drawn upon and erased, and which bears the traces, memories and indentations of this accumulative engagement with loss. Extinction Studies merges art and science, a ‘study’ being both a technical art term for a drawing or sketch done in preparation, and more generally understood as the practice of devoting time and attention to understanding a topic, in this case the process of species extinction and urgent concerns for the future of biodiversity and life in the natural world.