SOME NOTES ON PRACTICE
Being with the world : body, earth, atmosphere
I work with the intuitive and sensory processes that are shared across the liminal zones of encounter within both landscape and art-making. Within my practice, which traverses land, atmosphere and studio, I collaborate in transformative dynamics with substances, environmental entities and energies, and chemical and electrical forces, where they find agency and some form of authorship in my creative process. These explorations are anchored by the central endeavours of understanding the ways in which felt experience contributes to a sense of meaning and empathy within encounter; the transformative power of being in the ‘unknown’; and the continuum between what we perceive as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.
I am deeply interested in the space of affect and becoming that unfolds between human and non-human entities, materials and atmospheres, as it is here that the we can attune to the nuances of our relationship with the more than human world, and come to a more expanded and embodied understanding of the complex and beautiful network of life that we are inhered within. My work begins in the energy of this experience. I create sensory wellsprings for my studio practice by exploring this space of becoming through immersive experience in natural environments. My current work investigates the nature of liminal environments, such as the temporal threshold of dusk and the spatial threshold of the Australian desert. Through deepening into my relationship with these landscapes, I explore the ways they may inspire one towards their liminal, transforming qualities, prompting a loosening of the frameworks of ‘ordinary’ perception. Through attuning to the lesser trodden territories of sensory experience, perception begins to expand and evolve. In my recent PhD research I engaged with the environment through materials and artworks, which were activated by land and atmosphere, interpreting them in their own unique ways. These performative engagements in landscape were a way of exploring and reframing perception within it by reaching into it differently through material. They precipitated in visual, felt, and affective ways, the networking between self and environment, the breath-like, perceptive and energetic flow across the boundaries of self and other.
Through my experience I have found that in slowing and becoming more sensitised to the intricacies of expanded sensory experience within these liminal environments, it is possible to sustain the threshold between the sensed and the explicit. I have come to believe that this hovering in openness on the boundary between what we can know and describe already and what lies in the ‘unknown’ realm of ‘other’ is a key factor in the expanding of perception that allows our empathy with the more-than-human world to deepen. This is reflected in my material practice, where through transformative processes my materials come to embody a threshold between the known and the unknown also.
Flows between, forces within: material thresholds
My studio investigations involve the creation of sensorially evocative substances and forms that embody a sense of becoming in themselves. Here I explore the capacities of materials beyond our usual estimations of them, where they might be re-figured to inhabit their greater potentials for form and meaning. My primary area of material research involves exploring the complexities of affect through the creation of new materials. I develop hybrid substances, suspended in transformation as perpetual thresholds: metal-textile blends created by growing copper into velvet and organza through electroforming.
Electroforming is slow electro-chemical process, where microscopic particles of copper are grown into a substrate in an electrolyte bath. I am fascinated by this process’s ability to unpredictably express itself, I set up a material to be submerged in the process but the resulting form is often a surprise, as it is being shaped not only by my hands but by the organic growing processes of the technique. It is in essence a collaboration with some of the invisible but inherent life forces that form the structure of our world. The forms that I create with these forces have come to feel like living entities with their own sense of volition, that have come through their own evolution in the uterine-like, blue liquid world of the electroforming solution. In working with this technique, I am not imposing an idea on material but working in conversation with it and a process to create something that draws me beyond my own ideas into something broader.
In an endeavour to create a threshold substance as an exploration of becoming in material, I began experimenting with integrating the hardness of metal with the softness of textiles through electroforming - meshing something from deep in the earth (that also exists in trace quantities in our own bodies) with something skin like, vulnerable and humanly manufactured. I developed two distinct types of materials using this electroforming technique. The first incorporated copper and the moss-like plushness of velvet to create a thick, fertile skin. The result was a hybrid material, neither one thing or an other, but a meshing of both. I use the word Pelt to describe it, the word incorporating references to the gravity of a warm animal body or a sun-drenched blanket of moss, but also in more general terms, the skin of something growing and alive.
The second material I developed expressed a threshold in a different way. I stitched into a diaphanous membrane of organza and left it to develop in the electroforming bath only to the point where the fine lines of copper were strong enough to create a delicate integrated skeleton in the fabric, like veins in the membrane of a dragonfly wing. This material is very delicate, and fine enough to let light pass through. Its development was driven by the desire to manifest a temporal edge, where there is a balance felt, for a very short time, between one thing dissolving and another growing into its space, as darkness meshes into the fraying light of the day, where invisible and visible come into balance, and we start to feel things more so than seeing them. I use the term Gossamer to describe this material, in reference to its veil or membrane-like ephemerality.
The mercuriality of copper
Copper is a primary material in my work. I have always been drawn towards it, more so than other ‘precious’ metals. Copper is warm and behaves in a mercurial way in regards to colour. In heating its surface, an extensive spectrum of surprising, vibrant hues emerge, through blue, violet, magenta, red, yellow and turquoise. It also changes simply in the presence of air, oxidising to become dark toward black or the green of verdigris. I find these patinas, often considered as ‘tarnish’, lovely as they express time in the material, and its interaction, its relationship with the atmospheric elements it comes into contact with, a sensitive and expressive metal in this regard. My attraction also comes from feeling it to be an egalitarian material, in our age. Copper carries water and electricity around our cities, it is a trace element in our own bodies, and it is anti-microbial, acting as a defence against disease. It is a material with which we are closely and beneficially aligned. I have also always enjoyed the freedom I feel when working with it, the non-precious cast it conventionally maintains can be shifted through the care, time and dedication with which it is treated in the creative process, an example of how the political and cultural status we imbue materials with can be challenged, and the materials themselves freed, through creative acts.
My practice often feels like a ‘tending’ of forces and materials. I try to nurture a substance’s dynamic nature and allow it to precipitate and evolve through my hands. I work to create forms that allow this sense of becoming, or emerging to remain present. In this way the forms often sit in a space before the settling of representation, in the felt and abstract realm of unknowing and potential, where there is an interstitial space for the viewer to intuit into. I keep the work hovering here as a way of highlighting and activating the fertile spaces of unknowing, that may engender an empathic engagement with ‘other’ and thus a blossoming of the trendrilled sphere of ‘self’.
Images from top/left:
Windsilk 2017, steel, silk 2210 x 800 x 400 mm
Meshes with Wind and Light 2018
Calls VI 2018 (Pelt brooch), velvet, copper, 90 x 50 x 45 mm
Subtle body I 2018 (Gossamer neckpiece), silk organza, copper, bamboo, 480 x 420 x 35 mm