Over the past few months I've been working on the Future Stratigraphy program and exhibition, for New Materialism in Contemporary Arts research cluster at Sydney College of the Arts. Future Stratigraphy explores ways of understanding, engaging and envisioning the materiality of landscape, and the repercussions of human impact on the Earth.
My work in the exhibition is a bioart installation with tree trunks, beeswax and growing oyster mushrooms. Within and Without 2016, reflects on attempts to restore forest biodiversity, questioning how we value and experience the enchanting complexities of such ecosystems. Echoing recent scientific research into Mycorestoration, a process in which Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms) are used to rehabilitate abandoned logging roads, this work invites viewers into embodied engagements with these processes, to touch the logs, smell the beeswax and watch the fungi grow.
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| Kath Fries, Within and without, 2016, (detail view), beeswax, tree trunks and Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms) |
Future Stratigraphy exhibition focuses on art practices that metaphorically and actually engage with various layers of complex geological strata showing traces of human impact, referred to as the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a proposed epoch that begins when human activities started to have a significant global impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems; causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluting the land and oceans, altering subterranean, aquatic and atmospheric layers. In a multi-disciplinary response to these discourses, Future Stratigraphy asks, ‘how will current human activities reveal themselves in the layers of the future?’ Questioning our understandings of deep and future time, engaging human relationships with matter and materiality, these art practices explore traces and scars of human presence on Earth, challenging how we work with, exploit, understand and attempt to rehabilitate our planet.
Artists: David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Emma Robertson, John Roloff, Tracey Clement, Josh Wodak, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, Elaine Gan, Kath Fries, Sean O’Connell, Penny Dunstan, Bryden Williams, Dell Walker, Kenneth Mitchell and Madeleine Boyd.
Exhibition: 6 October to 29 October 2016
Monday to Friday 11am - 5pm, Saturday 11am - 4pm
Sydney College of the Arts Galleries, Balmain Rd, Lilyfield NSW 2040
New Materialism in Contemporary Art research cluster
Sydney College of the Arts Galleries, Balmain Rd, Lilyfield NSW 2040
New Materialism in Contemporary Art research cluster
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