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| Kath Fries, Entanglements, 2019, detail view of work in progress |
World in a Room
Pause a minute to inhale and exhale. Inhale again, this time apprehending that for all our specific and nuanced words for looking, there are far fewer equivalent words for smelling. Draw in the rich, animalic aroma of mushrooms, past your skin’s bounds to deep within you. It’s of you, and you are of it. It’s all connected. It’s all now.
Interconnectivity and co-creation between Kath Fries and living material has generated Entanglements. Recycled industrial felt, its past fibre life still distinctly evident, has been curved, twined, and rubbed between the artist’s palms to form new branches, tendrils, and capillaries. Fungus-forming mycelium reaches through the felt to spawn new lives, the mushrooms’ colouration uncannily reflecting a thread here, a tuft there. Curious shards have been recuperated from an alternate junk-heap fate. With both rough and smooth surfaces, these fragments speak simultaneously of interiority and exteriority, of positive and negative spaces, form and void. These aren’t binary states, but rather suggest a permeating wholeness: a galaxy of connection expanding across the gallery and down into the microcosmic worlds of the terraria that house the fungi. Death and life are intermingled; in Fries’ vocabulary, the underworld that the ancient Greeks feared teems with creation, mirroring the world of light above.
Late capitalism has deeded us the Anthropocene era in which the things we produce, consume, and discard cause universal damage. Fries’ holistic comprehension of life counters this focus on individual gain achieved at all costs, including unchecked growth and oppression. An artwork doesn’t need to be monumental to be deeply materialised, nor does it need to be tradable to be significant. Entanglements models an alternative mode of being to capitalism’s products: a quiet, democratic attentiveness to the infinite and crucial interrelationships that comprise us all. Step closer. Pick your way through the works on the floor. Notice where your feet fall. Feel the forms. This consideration of somatic experience proposes a coming to understanding through haptic values. In this way of thinking, spectatorship–remember all those words for seeing–is only one way to attend, reflect, and understand. In navigating both the greater world and works of art via multisensory perception, we gain the opportunity to recognise our interrelationships with all things.
At the core of Fries’ work lies her Buddhist appreciation of impermanence. Entanglements reminds us that life is flux and the act of creativity is ongoing, ever-changing, and relational. Walking meditations led by Fries in the Auburn Botanic Gardens cultivate attention to the present (at polar remove from the Gardens’ annual cherry blossom Insta-frenzy). As Rebecca Solnit suggests, “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.”[1]We might further consider that walking (through a garden, through an artwork) invites consciousness of the self’s integration with the world, and in this way points to some recognition that we are both more and less than ourselves.
It’s a sad irony that as global extinctions accelerate, our understanding of its other forms of intelligence is deepening: plants learn through experience and warn one another of hazards; animals use tools and work cooperatively. Like these collective intelligences, Entanglements is a symbiotic co-creation with other species, coming into being through the artist’s careful tending. The words ‘tend’ and ‘attend’ derive from the same Latin root word. That which we bring our awareness to, we care for. Take care. Pay attention. Feel this. It’s all of us, and more than us.
Rebecca Shanahan
[1]Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of WalkingNew York: Viking, 2000, p 29.
Entanglements
Kath Fries
1 - 30 June 2019
Opening: Saturday 1 June, 1.30 - 3.30pm
Kath Fries
1 - 30 June 2019
Opening: Saturday 1 June, 1.30 - 3.30pm
Deaf-led tour and workshop: Saturday 15 June, 12pm
Artist talks and workshops: Sunday 30 June, 1.30pm
Peacock Gallery: Auburn Botanic Gardens, corner of Chiswick and Chisholm Roads, Auburn NSW 2144
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 4pm (closed Mondays)
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