2020 Honours Exhibition UTAS Academy Gallery

Making Anew; a restorative imagining of fictional hybrid organisms in ceramic form.

INTRODUCTION

Making Anew: a restorative imagining of fictional hybrid organisms in ceramic form (from here on referred to as Making Anew) considers the notions of hybridity, ecology and co-habitation alongside ideas of redemption, restoration and renewal through imagining fictional hybrid organisms - or what the project making has identified as Mycozoophytes (Fungi – animal – plants).

Inviting the emergence of the unknown and unseen, Making Anew aims to imaginatively reveal the growth, cumulation and relationships of fictional hybrid organisms in the face of fragile and changing environments, marked by manufactured materials. Studio-based imagining through material enquiries alongside observations from nature, nature documentaries and scientific materials have provided rich imagery to support the generation of abstracted hybrid life-forms.

Material investigations employed ways of making that were attentive to biodiversity, relatedness of organisms and the interdependence of ecologies. The process, therefore, lent itself to the additive/subtractive qualities of mutations, adaptations and evolutions identified as the intersection of biomimicry, imagination and the material of clay in the hand of the artist – making anew from the dust.

Growing up in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne it was not difficult to see urban sprawl devouring the landscape. Ever expansive ribbons of bitumen and concrete blanketed the sliced and diced paddocks, which, when I was a girl, housed cattle and orchards, and before that, bushland.  Now when I visit those places I see giant movie theatres, industrial complexes and shopping malls.  Further out, the carving and covering construction continues. As a person living with nature caught in the tides of tension that is the current geopolitical climate in relation to climate change, this project emerged from a desire to mitigate the heaviness I felt at the prediction of the disintegration of crucial connections and the impending collapse of entire ecosystems (Attenborough, 2019).  Moreover, Making Anew creatively expresses my belief that redemption of the landscape is possible, believing that non-human life embraces an agency of its own to respond to a humanised environment, engage its resilience and do more than merely survive.

I begin by considering the conflicts surrounding the notion of nature, confessing and challenging the centrality that humankind has afforded itself in accounts and treatment of the natural environment. Acknowledging the need to dispel constrained ideas of purity, I then propose that the humility of hybridity allows a new way of seeing. Looking through a new lens on nature, this project envisions adaptation and hybridity as an alternate future given the immense capacity of the non-human.