Following its display at the National History Museum, Vienna, the MELTDOWN exhibition featuring Flowers Gallery artists Edward Burtynsky and Michael Benson will be on view at the Horniman Museum, London from 23 November 2019 (exhibition closing date TBA). 

Project Pressure uses art as a positive touch-point to inspire action and behavioural change. The selected artworks in MELTDOWN relate to vanishing glaciers, and demonstrate the impact of climate change through various media. Unlike wildfires, flooding and other weather events, glacier mass losses even out variations and can be attributed to global warming. As such, they are key indicators of climate change.

The exhibition is a narrative of the importance of glaciers told in a scientific, illustrative and poetic way and each artist has a unique take on the subject. MELTDOWN shows scale from the planetary level to microscopic biological impact, and considers humanitarian suffering and more. Together the artistic interpretations in MELTDOWN give visitors unique insights into the world’s cryosphere, its fragile ecosystem and our changing global climate.

MELTDOWN will inspire, and will also activate the visitor. It is time to move beyond awareness: the mission of Project Pressure is to incite real behavioural change.To encourage this, Project Pressure has created a carbon footprint calculator. Touchscreens for this digital tool are placed at the exit from the exhibition, where individual visitors can learn how carbon-intense their lifestyle is. As well as an estimate, they will get recommendations for improvements to make in areas such as home, transport, energy, food, and more. They will then be prompted by email to revisit and re-calculate online after two months. As they track their changes, each individual is reminded to keep on.