The artist duo New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė) engages critically with the extractive landscape through sculptures and geo-poetry. Pressure Points consists of mint-green spheres and needles that connect our bodies (through references to wellness bath bombs and acupuncture needles) to the ocean as one large collective body - reminding us that our individual habits are reflected in the health of the Earth itself.
In Pressure Points, they explore how natural resources - such as sand - shape our aesthetics, technology, and way of being in the world. Through a poetic approach, they heal the landscape after extraction using bath bombs for the sea and acupuncture needles for the coastline, as a critique of the capitalist exploitation of nature. The intention is to intervene in the politics and management of the tidal landscape through sculptural imagination and to point toward new, more sustainable ways of being part of the planet.
New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė) is concerned with the intersection of nature, materiality, and human practice. The collective takes an investigative approach to landscapes, minerals, and processes as both geological and cultural phenomena, exploring how raw materials shape our aesthetics, technologies, and ways of being in the world. The artists examine the relationship between land and body, and the desire to “extract” through pleasure rather than destruction.
BIO
New Mineral Collective is a collaboration between Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987, Lithuania) and Tanya Busse (b. 1982, Canada), established in 2021 and based in Tromsø. Like an organism, they infiltrate the extractive industries with alternative forces such as desire, bodily extraction, and acts of resistance.
Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the SIART Bolivia International Art Biennial; Artists’ Film International Season 7, organised by the Whitechapel Gallery; the inaugural Toronto Art Biennial; SeMA Seoul Museum of Art; On Earth, Structure and Sadness at the Serpentine Galleries, UK; ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Stockholm; Swimming Pool: Troubled Waters at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and more recently at Mercer Union, Toronto, and Salzburg Kunstverein, Austria.