Irene Loughlin Irene Loughlin is an interdisciplinary artist interested in local and global ecological issues and their related strategies of resilience and regeneration. She works towards furthering an investigation of these themes through the mediums of performance art, video and installation. Ms. Loughlin has presented her work in various national and international contexts, and has produced several works for the Vancouver Performance Art Biennial including the work NADIA (2005). She currently serves on the Programming Committee for Hamilton Artists Inc. and on the Board of Directors of The Print Studios.> Exposé et présentation Grieving/Separated from the Ayles Ice Shelf What happens when migration is initiated by global warming? When the idea of crowd control is applied to the absolute inability to control a gigantic moving block of ice that should have never “broken free”, a movement initiated by environmental deterioration? Throughout the world, the effects of violence, economic disparity and globalization have caused massive migrations. Similarly, the movement of tectonic plates and unusual weather ruminations are initiated by global warming. I am interested in the effects of environmental degradation on the contemporary psychic and ecological landscape. I am aware of the sense of reeling towards self destruction in the current context of global warming; I am living in the heart(h) of the burning furnace - the smoking skyline – a visual panorama that unfolds in the days that I take the bus down the Hamilton escarpment. My lungs constrict in fear. The project and its effects speak to others that share my experience of living on the periphery an urban centre of consumption in an environment that challenges our bodies environmentally and socio-economically. Grieving/separated from Ayles Ice Shelf is based on the performative action of trying to hold onto the giant Ayles Ice Shelf, which has recently snapped free from an island south of the North Pole. The work relays some of the frustration and futility felt by the individual when facing the fact of global warming and its spreading consequences. Special thanks to the Ontario Arts Council. On Grieving/separated from Ayles Ice Shelf Dr John Brannan is a respiratory physiologist and researches alternative diagnostic and treatment strategies for asthma. Originally from the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia, he now currently resides in Hamilton, Ontario where he is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at McMaster University. 
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