entwined as others

A collaborative installation work with Tiana Jefferies @tianajefferies, IN X The Old Lockup, Maroochydore (@in_ari)

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Helen Hardess and Tiana Jefferies combine their shared art practices of casting, collecting, assembling and collaborative action. They focus on the affective registers of objects, bodies and architecture at The Old Lock Up site. Through material histories and the sensorial, the project explores the ungraspable forces of our destabilised biosphere, recognising that humanity cannot survive without non-human others.

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As a point of departure, they reference the Old Lock Up’s history as a space of transition, marginalised bodies, punitive architecture and unequal power relations. The affective forces of these histories are centralised, as are the narrative agencies of materials and studio processes. With a shared interest in alternative and irreverent forms of ecocriticism, the artists reject traditional conceptions of ‘nature’ which have been wielded to validate harm against vulnerable populations, human and non-human.

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The installation’s materials have been sourced from marginalised or transitional spaces - recycling bins, skips, kerbside collections, and domestic waste. The installation's objects engage with relational qualities of balance and counterbalance, tension and release, precarity, dependency and synchronicity; speaking to ecosystems as intermingled assemblages of human and non-human actors. The casting workshop A positive take on negative space held during the exhibition explored the material and plastic potential of plaster casting using discarded containers.

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The work's materials are mostly drawn from the margins of usefulness, and include an uncanny shadow, blacksmithed metal fragments (by a novice), welded steel, homemade bee hotels (constructed and deconstructed), hempcrete birdbath (overturned), wokeish desiccated coffee grounds, concrete impressions, plaster reliefs, salvaged wire, hand dyed fabric fragments, native grass bundles, beeswax, a partial palm root ball, cantilevered dowel and assorted fragments, goodwill, bollard base, mud wasp home, floor sweepings and cobwebs.

 

Photos Cody Wood @cody_._wood