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Five2Watch: Living Materials


For #Five2Watch this week we've selected five artists who make work with and about living materials featuring: Sally Kidall, Andrew Carnie, Ellie Doney, Louise Mackenzie and Brighid Black


In the Bag: is the grass greener?, 2015

Sally Kidall

This site-specific environmental installation is located in the depths of the rain forest in the Blue Mountains at Katoomba's Scenic World.

This contemporary interpretation of memorials and commemorative monuments occupies this historic mining site now reclaimed by the natural bushland. It offers an appropriate platform for discussions regarding the significance and vulnerability of our most precious natural resource: water.

The 9 water filled plastic bags support wire & bamboo ladders with growing seedlings within. The bags stand proudly in a circle reminiscent to a prehistoric site monument.

Sally Kidall

 

Hybrid Bodies, 2017

Andrew Carnie

Four internationally exhibiting artists, Alexa Wright (UK), Catherine Richards (Canada), Andrew Carnie (UK), and Ingrid Bachmann (Canada), have had access to an innovative research study exploring the process of incorporating a transplanted heart. This interdisciplinary study was conducted by a leading research team based at the University Health Network in Toronto. The team consists of Dr. Heather Ross, a cardiologist and Director of the Cardiac Transplant Program at the University Health Network (Toronto); Dr. Patricia McKeever, a health sociologist (U of T);

Dr. Susan Abbey, a transplant psychiatrist (University Health Network);
Dr. Jennifer Poole, a health scientist (Ryerson University, Toronto); and
Dr. Margrit Shildrick, a philosopher (Linkoping University, Sweden).

While significant research has been conducted in transplantation using the bio-medical model, few researchers have explicitly connected organ recipients’ experiences and cultural views about transplantation to the notion of embodiment. Hybrid Bodies focuses on the lived experiences of heart transplant recipients, translating their stories into medical and academic literature as well as into artworks.

Andrew Carnie

 

Food & Transformation: How are materials like us?, 2017

Ellie Doney

This practice-based PhD project takes sausage fork in hand to find out how the sensory practices of cooking and eating together, processing and transforming edible materials, might advance knowledge between disciplines about the nature of matter exchange between human and non-human bodies.

The Ouroboros Sausage is a comic emblem of the ridiculousness of our perceived status as alpha-matter. Its status as the eater and the eaten stands for an integration of matter - a liquidity of subject and object. The Great Chain of Being has been debunked; we too are stuff.

The human body is dynamically changing mixed-meat. We consist of the matter that surrounds us, we are composite animal, vegetable, mineral, and all the grey areas in between. We breathe, eat, absorb, mirror and become our surroundings, we are a fuzzy assemblage of living and non-living material made of complex chemicals, minerals and micro-organisms intra-acting, always dynamically changing in micro-structure according to what we touch and ingest, affecting our desires and actions.

This project is funded by a studentship with BEKO PLC research, to think through how the technology we use every day mediates our connection with edible materials, and how technology can help to address food waste and future health concerns. The PhD is supervised by Gary Woodley (Slade School of Fine Art, and Prof. Mark Miodownik (Institute of Making, UCL Engineering)

Ellie Doney

 

GIVE, 2013

Louise Mackenzie

Plastic bags, plastic tubing, oxygen masks, micro-algae (Tetraselmis)

Louise Mackenzie

 

Liminal Soundings: Cuween (Under the Fairy Knowe), 2019

Brighid Black

Sound recordings made inside the chambers of Cuween Hill Neolithic Chambered Cairn, Orkney.

Found objects from near the Cairn were used to produce sound inside the structure as well as human and animal voices. 

Brighid Black · Liminal Soundings: Cuween (Under the Fairy Knowe)

 

 

Published 22 May 2020

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