Emma Piper-Burket

My PhD dissertation research employs documentary, experimental, and narrative modes of cinema to explore ways of capturing climate change on film. As a practice-based dissertation, my work includes short film studies, a collection of essays, and works on paper that utilize handmade pigments made from rocks that I have found throughout Colorado and New Mexico. The films span diaristic essays informed by motherhood and climate precarity to less directly personal works that employ archival material (Hollywood films, movie trailers, etc) to explore our relationship to the natural world– remixing the material to reveal gaps in our cultural record and latent biases so that we may better untangle them from our psyche. Each film experiments with de-centering a human perspective through changing timescales, incorporating geologic, plant, human, and insect perspectives. Accompanying this creative research is a collection of essays that explore these issues using approaches ranging from film criticism, geology, and foraging—alongside investigations into my established diaristic mode of creative film practice. My work is experimental and exploratory in nature, incorporating mistakes, interruptions and diversions that appear along the way. With this dissertation research I look at how these techniques that embrace uncertainty can be channeled to take up pressing issues of our time.