Survival, Rubicon Gallery

March 23rd - 9th April 2022

events:

encounters wiTh the vegetal world

in conversation with dr prudence gibson

Video link

terrain Vague: SPONTANEOUS plants in the cIty

in conversation with ecologist Dean Schrieke

Video Link

Catalogue by Prudence Gibson

Survival is a photographic investigation of encountering the vegetal world in the era of mass extinction. It documents a specific site (Pipe Makers Park), an urban nature reserve left to regenerate and overgrow. Plants coexist and thrive, attracting birdlife in this regenerative garden surrounded by housing estates in the western suburbs. This project invites the viewer to look closely at the fragile forms of vegetal life within the Anthropocene epoch.

The installation is a mixture of large-scale landscapes and plant specimens photographed in close proximity. The landscapes are juxtaposed with abstracted colours from the immediate environment and draw attention to the viewer’s visual perception of nature. These experiments reference the ecosystem’s unseen properties such as living organisms, soil and microbes.

This project has been informed by artists investigating the representation of nature and culture in photography and sculpture. The aesthetic qualities in my work have been influenced by: Anne Shelton’s site-specific project, Motherlode (2020), where she documents a farm that wishes to mitigate climate change; Herman de Vries’s, eshenauer journal (2002) and his approach to collecting found materials of plants and human artefacts and displaying them in assemblages; Taryn Simon’s, Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), has influenced my style of display for final presentation. Further, this project is grounded in Michael Marder’s, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Plant Thinking, on encountering the vegetal world; and Emanuele Coccia’s, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, on the importance of plants in creating the atmosphere that all life depends on.   

The resulting project examines what role photography can play to draw attention to the abundant forms of nature, thereby challenging the ways we see and understand the world around us.    

This project has been generously supported by the Victorian Government's Creative Workers Initiative, Creative Victoria and Regional Art Victoria.   

Edition of 5+ 2 AP

Archival Inkjet Prints

100cm x 66.7cm