I'll be exhibiting Within and Without an installation of beeswax and log sculptures with growing and dried oyster mushrooms. This work invites embodied encounters with these materials conjuring the enchanted nuances within the interconnections of fungi, insects, forests and people; in a multi-sensory encounter of tactility, aroma, decay and growth. Link. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).
Kath Fries PhD practice led research
Touching Impermanence: experiential embodied engagements with materiality in contemporary art practice
Abstract: Touching impermanence describes the experiential moment in an art encounter when one senses the enchanted reality of one’s interconnections within the sentient matter-flow of existence. All matter in existence is constantly vibrating, changing, assembling and evolving into forms and organisms, cycling through decay and disintegration, then reforming again with diversity and difference; this is the impermanence of sentient matter-flow. Humans are just one form of these reciprocal assemblages; we are within and part of sentient matter-flow. We also co-create with sentient matter-flow, changing these cycles on micro and macro levels, just as they change us. On a macro level human actions have impacted and changed the Earth’s biosphere, altering and polluting sentient matter-flows to the extent that our present time period is becoming known as the Anthropocene, the human age of destruction and disconnection. There are many efforts to readdress our anthropocentric feelings of apathetic disconnection from the Earth; one is found in the arts and correlates with my practice-led research.
Touching impermanence is a doctoral study of sensate experiences of materiality and haptic thinking, which provide both maker and audience with direct palpable experience of time, forms a specific understanding of touching impermanence. My art processes involve working with tactile materials such as beeswax; tree branches, stumps and bark; paper; ash; rocks; ice; snow; charcoal; light and fungi. Engaging with these materials co-creatively involves a methodology of touch, multisensorily following materialities’ sentient matter-flow. Acting with the material, I am present to the material’s own sense of time, interactions, agency, histories, layers of interbeing and interconnections with surrounding matter. This requires being open to the mysteriousness of materials, inviting moments of enchantment within art encounters and the realisation of touching impermanence. Touching impermanence investigates my studio practice and works produced, alongside related practices of Australian and international artists, by drawing on New Materialism discourses and Buddhist philosophy to address aspects of phenomenology and eco-philosophy in the complexities of these art practices and artwork encounters.
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