How can we work through the history of a place to get to the next one? The histories of colonisation, imperialism and capitalism are entangled with the history of the image. I explore how innovations of the image stem from war and extraction, and aim to demonstrate the many ways they have been harnessed by these systems to perpetuate and normalize violence. I’m interested in the types of authority that emerge from different photographic approaches. Lately, I’ve been thinking about satellite imagery, microscopy, stereoscopy and slide viewers, but I’m sure others will become of interest to me in the time that this text circulates.
I say all of this while also highlighting how critical I am of my own gaze. At what point does doing this work become fetishistic or violatory itself? I wonder about the artist’s implication in the history and discourse surrounding extraction. To image is to extract. To archive is to extract. To research, collate and disseminate knowledge is also to extract. So what then, when an artist looks at visual histories of extractive projects to produce knowledge that, through art making, critiques those histories and ideologies? The circle collapses in on itself, a sort of ouroboros. But, aesthetics are a necessary tool for rearrangement. The act of doing these things is an act of remaking these things.
In some ways I’m an essayist, but writing in an expanded form. I’m committed to interdisciplinarity, stories deserve a say in the containers used to tell them. Audio, video, photography, scent, sculpture, text and textile coalesce in my installations, and so does your body. I invite you to learn with your body, to touch, to bend, to sniff, to lie down. I want to slow your pace and evoke a state change that enables you to take in information differently when you’re invited to do presence differently. I hope that my work reminds you of your body, because it is only with our bodies that knowledge and practice can come together in meaningful ways. For this reason, I center my research-creation approach in acts of listening and acts of translation. My works are exercises in and invitations to listen differently. Soundworlds are infinite. If you listen closely, you can hear where pasts, presents and futures overlap. If you listen closely, you can hear where there is potential for new worlds too.
I am invested in a perpetual undoing and unlearning of colonial logic at the core of the systems and practices that shape my subjects and methodologies. The practices of undoing and unlearning insist upon the impossibility of completion. Impossibility is a generative and expansive space for me, I spend a lot of time there. For instance…What is the smell of the deep sea? It is impossible to know. How can the voices contained in rock be translated? An anthropocentric approximation at best. What does it feel like to be subsumed by an asbestos tailing pile? Perhaps possible but certainly not advised. I love working through questions that necessitate failure, it’s honest. It also honours the gaps that are created through the process of retelling histories of a place. The life and livingness of a site are a fundamentally inaccessible part of my work. I ask myself how do we disrupt the colonial logic that dictates land is a site for extraction and capital gain. While I can take up that question through theory or through dreaming, in practice there is an inescapable micro-scale recreation of these systems. But I keep trying, because oceans were once thought to be bottomless and they say the power of imagining is emancipatory.