Brianna Leatherbury’s installation ‘Survival Bias’ begins with a question: ‘which object would you take to your grave?’ The artist poses this question to anyone who has ever invested in the stock market. This conversation is followed by an exchange: Leatherbury asks permission to borrow their chosen object and produce a copy – before returning it unscathed. Previous grave goods have included a harp, suitcase, digital scale and a wardrobe. 

At Brunette Coleman, this borrowed object is the urn of a beloved cat's ashes, ‘Fudge’, provided by a London-based shareholder. Through the alchemical process of copper plating, Leatherbury renders the urn into a friable relic – resembling an early fossil, or prehistoric possession buried alongside ancient nobility. The artist views these objects as premature artefacts of the stock market and its investors, envisioning a future where our capitalist society exists only as a bygone legacy.

Today the value of preservation is outlined by a multi-billion dollar industry: the ‘cold chain’ – a globally interconnected system of freezing, transporting and storing temperature-sensitive goods, in order to extend their usability. At Brunette Coleman, a cold room dominates. The insulated cube is artificially cooled through a system of metals and gasses, syphoning heat out of one place and forcing it into another. These two environments of the gallery become contingent on each other – one half cooling while the other heats – demonstrating the extreme ‘thermal regimes’ that underpin our modern reliance on these cooling systems.  

This science of cooling – known as cryogenics – has brought us a mobile and everlasting winter. Halting decay and degradation, this subzero intervention transforms life into controllable potential. As a material, copper provides a high conductivity that makes it a perfect element for this manipulation of temperature. In Fudge, the multiple copper sculptures replace the heat exchangers of the cold room. Brought into this cycle, the original grave object is resourced as a mechanical component for the cooling system. 

Survival Bias’ is a type of logical error in which we selectively assess only successful outcomes, the survivors of time, largely because there is less evidence of their alternative. Those exceptional successes, preserved physically become, by default, legacy. Leatherbury notes that, ‘in decoupling mortality from time for productivity's sake, extending “life” into temporary inanimacy, means we are today always dealing with cryopolitics – the practice of asking “who’s permitted to die?”