Reclaimed T-shirt fabric offcuts on secondhand board

120 x 930 cm

The title of the installation Slow the Warming is a reference to both the material composition and what the visual composition represents.

The Infographic
Each vertical bar represents a year from 1850 to the present day with the colours showing deviations in average global temperature over time (blue stripes are cooler years, red stripes are warmer years). It’s a chronological history of global climate change that makes the warming trend abundantly clear. Originally conceived by Professor Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist from the University of Reading in the UK, it was designed to be as intuitive as possible for a broad audience. Versions have since been reproduced in numerous contexts ranging from all kinds of murals and installations at events and festivals to being used as the cover design of The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg and Midnight Oil’s album Resist.

The Material
From a distance, Slow the Warming might appear to be painted or printed, but upon closer inspection one will notice that each of the individual stripes is made out of fabric—scraps of organic cotton, hemp and wool from the T-shirt making process, to be exact. The choice of material was a practical one as the intended scale of the piece meant that it needed to be relatively lightweight, but sourcing this particular fabric was the result of a chance encounter.

Serendipitous Sourcing
In what turned out to be a serendipitous turn of events, in the process of sourcing materials for this piece AOD struck up a conversation with the team at Citizen Wolf after walking by their clothing factory in Marrickville one day (which just happened to be right around the corner from AOD’s studio). AOD learned that Citizen Wolf is a slow fashion company that is Ethical Clothing Australia and B Corp certified and, like AOD, committed to 100% circularity and zero-waste. The antithesis of exploitative fast fashion, their clothing is all made-to-order.

Not only were they happy to help by supplying AOD with fabric offcuts, and not only was their range of material well-suited for the specific shades of blue and red that were needed for recreating the graphic, AOD and Citizen Wolf also discovered that they shared a mutual connection in Greenhouse. Citizen Wolf participated in the inaugural Retail Innovation Program developed by Investible (the team behind Greenhouse) in partnership with the City of Sydney a few years back. Small world.

To learn more about Citizen Wolf visit citizenwolf.com or check out @citizen_wolf on socials. Learn more about the warming stripes at showyourstripes.info and @climatehawkins.