Leah Raintree

Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR) is a two-part project that addresses the scale of human impact within the environment, specifically through a consideration of hydraulic fracturing, a controversial form of natural resource extraction. The project includes a 132-by-168 inch drawing created through the process of breaking a series of shale stones down until they were fully dispersed. The final drawing is a tracing of the dissolution process. The resulting work is folded to suggest a large-scale map.

The second component of the project is a folded, newsprint document available for visitors to take away from the installation. On one side of the newsprint is an image of shale taken from the site from which the material for the project came. The reverse side is curated research on shale and hydraulic fracturing. In addition, the words “estimated ultimate recovery” (a term used by the oil and gas industry to note an available resource) are reconfigured into a series of questions.

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