Fine Arts

Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. The results of this engagement are being shown not only through the way artists and designers are developing innovative visual representations but also through the way images are combined with other media or through artists challenging the status of the visual through prioritising other media, such as sound.
The ways in which artists have worked with geological data is also a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures. Many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. Instead of accepting, or even creating, binary oppositions this paper will examine how virtual and material spaces are not oppositional but connected and communicated through creative practice for the earth sciences.
This presentation will provide a short overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, highlighting historically significant examples. It will include a discussion of themes being explored in the work of interdisciplinary artist, Perdita Phillips whose project, The Sixth Shore is exploring the geological formations and the natural environment at Lake Clifton, in the Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia. Phillips works with spatial sound, presenting immersive sound environments in galleries and in situ (using GPS technology). How connections are made back to the material world and the consequences of meshing the visual and the sonic will be analysed and discussed.

((Pollen)) is a project that began in response to the InConversation exhibition that was shown at Spectrum project space, Western Australia October 9 to 24 2014. A diverse group of makers and thinkers have been investigating pollen — in particular how pollen can be interpreted in different ways in different disciplines and by utilising different perspectives.

The aim of the InConversation exhibition overall was to bring together teams of three or more collaborators. Collaborators had to be from a different discipline or profession, in an attempt to work through the difficulties of transdisciplinarity.

The ((Pollen)) project began with a mail art exchange. So far the project has generated letters (c.f. “love letters” to nonhuman worlds) and other material exchanges, as well as a short video/performance about Canola in Western Australia. Most of what we created as part of the collaboration couldn’t be included in the InConversation exhibition and plans are underway to bring the works together as a whole in 2015.

Inconversation was a cross-disciplinary/cross-art form collaborative exhibition held at Spectrum Project Space 9 to 24 October 2014. Works by the ((pollen)) collective were shown in the abbreviated form of pollen sampling tubes containing text, prints or thumb drives of video works. A digital print was created that mapped the collaborative process. A collaborative response text titled - collaboration is airborne - was written for the exhibition catalogue.

"Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. The results of this engagement are being shown not only through the way artists and designers are developing innovative visual representations but also through the way images are combined with other media or through artists challenging the status of the visual through prioritising other media, such as sound.
The ways in which artists have worked with geological data is also a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures. Many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. Instead of accepting, or even creating, binary oppositions this paper will examine how virtual and material spaces are not oppositional but connected and communicated through creative practice for the earth sciences.
This presentation will provide a short overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, highlighting historically significant examples. It will include a discussion of themes being explored in the work of interdisciplinary artist, Perdita Phillips whose project, The Sixth Shore is exploring the geological formations and the natural environment at Lake Clifton, in the Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia. Phillips works with spatial sound, presenting immersive sound environments in galleries and in situ (using GPS technology). How connections are made back to the material world and the consequences of meshing the visual and the sonic will be analysed and discussed."

This is the first of two conference panel sessions convened by Louise Boscacci (Australia), Perdita Phillips (Australia), and Sally Ann McIntyre (Aotearoa New Zealand/) for: "Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies." 2019 AAANZ Conference, 3 - 6 December, Auckland/ Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. The short title in the program is: "Affective Traces, Shadow Places, and Resonant Naturecultures."

This was followed up with a second panel series: "Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics." Convenors: Boscacci, Phillips and McIntyre.

This event was a full day of three separate sessions with nine papers by the following ten speakers:

Associate Prof. Janine Randerson, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland.
Prof. Heather Galbraith and Raewyn Martyn, Massey University, Wellington.
Christopher Houghton, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Heather Hesterman, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Rob Kettels, Curtin University, Perth.
Maria O'Toole, Massey University, Wellington.
Kelly Lee Hickey, Victoria University, Melbourne.
Nicola Dickson, Independent Researcher, Canberra.
Leighton Upson, Independent Researcher/ Massey University, Wellington.

SEE THE FULL PROGRAM PDF FOR ALL ABSTRACTS.

Here are our two Introductions to our panels of artist-researchers, natureculture writers, curators, art historians and environmental humanities scholars:

"Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn.
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre.

Listen. There. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene is under interrogation by contemporary artists, theorists and historians. New collaborations across the emerging open-field of the postconventional arts and humanities are creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain in this age of extinction and climate change.

How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the impingements and implications—the effects and affects—of the Anthropocene-in-the- making? This panel highlights and explores the affective encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. Here we name, make, listen, think and intervene with three instances of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerge from the feminist ecosocial pivot towards local, embodied and affect-engaged practices that also trace and make planetary connections. Each begins with a bodily encounter, or an encounter-exchange. Through multispecies conversations and resonances we listen to the faint signals of extinct New Zealand birds in the noise of history, lost traces re-collected from encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections re-figured as ‘minor’ memorials and re-sited within their original landscapes (McIntyre); trace, wit(h)ness and sound shadow ecologies of zinc entangled with extractive colonisation of Country in northern Australia, in the here and now (Boscacci); and follow the water down mountains to the sea, as the rocks, water, weeds and humans of Albany deal with seeping, maintaining, flooding, and repairing (Phillips)."

and

"Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics. (Call For Papers)
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre

Listen. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She is heard but not seen. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene continues to be interrogated by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. In this age of extinction and climate-change, many are working to expand alternative critical frameworks and modes in which the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain.

How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making? This follow-on panel explores the bodily encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. We situate this in a developing ‘field’ of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerges from feminist ecosocial thinking and pivots towards local and affect-engaged practices. We delve into diverse contemporary practices that trace and make planetary connections and ecologies of relations in multispecies naturecultures: connections and intersections that can be unknown, unpredictable or provocative; speculations, narratives or poetic reveals. Papers by the convenors will detail encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections, shadow ecologies of zinc mined in northern Australia Country, and seepages and flows of water through granite and swamp lands.

We invite twenty-minute papers or presentations on art practices, collaborations, alliances, or speculations that take the pulse of what is happening now in the capricious spaces of attunement to the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Proposals for alternative presentations in media and methods other than a scholarly paper are welcome."

CITATION (please cite if you use this work).
Boscacci, Louise, Phillips, Perdita and McIntyre, Sally Ann 2019.  ‘Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn,’ in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Conference 3-6 December 2019, University of Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand.

A variety of artists today are working with geoaesthetics and/or long-term scales of thinking that relate to geological processes or geological timescales. Volcanism, earthquakes, weathering and/or the stages of change in plate tectonic processes are dealt with directly, or as analogical and metaphorical terrains for wider issues. The artists recognise the large-scale processes that may go backwards or forwards in time at scales that are more-than-human. Tectonic thinking looks at social, ecological, political, and human issues through the lens of ‘deep time’, particularly recognising forces causing change at different scales: from the local and structural to the significant or considerable. It reverses the polarity of human-centred reasoning. Diverse approaches and media are included in the online exhibition. Some creative works explore exchanges of energies or radiation; others work with geo-materiality. Responses include speculations, performance, video, sculpture and site specific works.