Changing Ideas Award
The sculpture "Rare Earth Rising" highlights a defining issue of our time: our growing dependence on critical minerals to power modern technology and the transition to renewable energy. Materials such as cobalt, lithium, and copper are essential, yet finite, and their increasing demand is accelerating scarcity.
The extraction of these minerals carries significant human and environmental costs. Mining is widely associated with child labour, unsafe working conditions, forced displacement, and serious health impacts on Indigenous communities. At the same time, large-scale operations contribute to deforestation, biodiversity loss, water contamination, and air pollution, while also releasing greenhouse gases and contributing to climate change.
A proposed alternative is the harvesting of polymetallic nodules from the ocean floor. These small, mineral-rich formations contain many of the elements required for batteries and renewable technologies, appearing at first to offer a promising solution. This sculpture incorporates clay sourced from the abyssal plains of the South Pacific Ocean, where such nodules lie in total darkness, having formed over millions of years within one of Earth’s least explored and most fragile ecosystems.
Despite their obscurity, these polymetallic nodules are now at the centre of growing environmental and geopolitical debate. Deep-sea mining could reduce pressure on land-based resources, but it also threatens largely unrecorded marine life, risks disrupting the ocean’s capacity to store carbon, and perhaps most importantly of all would remove “dark oxygen,” a newly identified source of oxygen in the ocean whose removal could have far-reaching consequences.
The sculpture’s fragile crystalline form reflects this moment of uncertainty. It asks whether deep-sea mining represents genuine progress or simply another short-sighted solution. The inclusion of gold leaf, reclaimed from electronic waste, points instead to a more sustainable path: making better use of the resources we already have.
Clay donated by Seabed Mining and Resilience to Experimental Impact (SMARTEX).