Sissel Marie Tonn’s practice focuses on the complex ways we as humans are entangled with our environments. Her work zooms in on situations where these relations are revealed to us and reflects on how our senses and perceptual modes of attention, affect our ability to perceive environmental changes, as well as our capacity to act upon them. How does the condition of living in the midst of a changing ecology expose the psychological, social and perceptual/sensory challenges we will all face in a future of volatile environmental change?
She frequently collaborates with artist and composer Jonathan Reus, under the name ’Sensory Cartographies’, in which they create wearable and sculptural ‘tools’ that challenge the body’s preconfigured modes of perception. For instance, by amplifying signals of environmental changes that slip below the radar of our senses, or which exist in a time other than the present. In their work, they research how these ‘tools’ can create an awareness of the reciprocal relationship between the body and the surrounding environment, as well as question how artefacts, forms of knowledge, and architecture, shape our perception of the environment.