27/09/24 - 02/11/24
FIRST SPACE
Pakana Textiles & Upcycling by Rina Designs
Bonnie Starick
My textile designs often depict marina shell and woven baskets. By using these images I create opportunities for me to speak to our continuing cultural practices and their importance to the pakana people. With my shell designs, I always highlight the diminishing amount of marina shells, particularly the green marina. The shells will eventually become extinct due to the warming of the oceans and seas, in turn killing our kelp forests and the sources of food that the marina’s live on. The importance of upcycling is important to me as a textile designer as the world currently produces 92 million tons of textile waste every year and the fact that the fashion industry is responsible for nearly 20% of global waste water, with only 1% of clothing being recycled into new garments.
INNER SPACE
Transmutations
Transmutations is an exhibition that forms a series of dynamic relationships between a body of both digital and sculptural works. Present within the space are the simulations of Reaction Diffusion models, universal pattern forming formulas found within a range of phenomena, from the morphogenesis of animal coat patterns and coral growths to the dynamics of epidemic growths and neural communications. Feeding these systems with old soft drink advertisements, these images of aesthetic perfection, cleanliness and appeal become subverted to organic material noise and chaos. Through a body of work made from melted aluminium cans, slumped glass and advertising screens, the exhibition allows the materials to become autonomous and self-generative, reclaiming their inherent natures to form an outcome of their own.
BACK SPACE
Secular Ritual (selfie)
This work is an encouragement of self and fluidity of persona and the liminal states of being. As a known ritualistic activity, “scrying”, the gazing into something for the purpose of divination, takes a number of forms.
One might use what is known as Catoptromancy, staring into a reflective surface, or Hydromancy, the use of water. This work combines those two, framed within a more contemporised device, the selfie. Is the selfie a new form of scrying? The results may be unknown, but the possibilities may be endless. Much of my installation work is about presenting a space where a ritual may take place. The atmospherics are created by elements of the everyday, a selfie ring, carbonated water, an ordinary household mirror, but presented in a reverential fashion.
The work is intended to be an immersive and meditative place, with participants able to come and go as they please.
THE SPACE
electric plateau
electric plateau explores the landscape of the Central Plateau of Tasmania, through electricity. Using backlit traditional film photography, and sound created by neon oscillators, the movement of electricity deep within natural materials is traced out and sung. Through slivers of wood, fragments of stone, handfuls of dirt, vials of tarn water, and shards of animal bone, materials from the landscape are imaged using high voltages directly over photographic film, revealing the internal character of each sample. Exhibited alongside the images, sound works further explore these materials, using layered slivers of pencil pine to build capacitors, and vials of tarn water to make resistors, wired together to create electronic audio oscillators, to sound out the plateau. These images and sounds explore this epic landscape, from an energetic perspective, and imagine what it could be like to be electric.