Resources Mobile (Rock-mobile)

I created a mobile with items group-members have collected from the landscape in Iceland as a way to focus in on how the group has learned about resources. The stones, shells, and sea glass most of us have acquired during our time here are pieces we have taken from the land: resources provided by the land, which we take for our memory, pleasure, and inspiration. Slowly, we have picked up these pieces from all of the places we have gone, for their beauty, uniqueness, their feel, weight, or distinction from their surroundings. We have shown them to each other in cupped palms; like treasures, we have murmured approval and appreciation for each others collections. I have always felt a conflict about these types of collections, and I am not alone in tis feeling as one member of our group has not gathered any rocks or shells. I continue to take a couple here and there, but is it right to gather these pieces of beauty? Is it right to take one stone, just a little one, made up of the materials of this place, miles and miles across the ocean, never to contribute back into the land that creates it? I remember someone telling me as a child, "If everyone took a stone from the summit of this mountain, no matter how small, the mountain would be a whole lot shorter." I remember this every time I pick something up, and silently struggle with it. I know if every member of the human race came to Iceland and took one stone, that it would result in quite the excavation. In this sense I liken our mobile to the way humans use resources in general -- I relate it in the questions of how much to take, if it is right to take any, and how our use effects the environment from which these resources are taken. I am not claiming it is wrong, as an expose of our bad habit, but rather as a representation, in part, of my questions about resources.

Mobiles are whimsical and hang over the cradles of infants. I conducted interviews with each group member, from which I gathered statements and ideas about how humans use resources, what needs to change, and in what ways time spent in Iceland has influenced these opinions. All of these ideas, as well as each of our little treasures, hang in this whimsical frame, floating above us. In a way I hope these ideas, criticisms, and inspirations are to float above future generations of our species, a mobile for the infant of the collective human race, to inspire change.