palimpsest

Created with support of the Ian Potter Museum as a part of the Meigunyah Student Art Award, PALIMPSEST is a New Materialist engagement with colonial artefacts contained in the Miegunyah Collection at the Ian Potter Museum of Art . It was presented at the Museum in November 2018.

The work examines storied and agentic matter, specifically in relation to the tensions between colonial Australian ideologies, and the more-than-human ecologies on which they were inscribed.

Utilising the specimens in the Eucalypt Cabinet crafted by Grimwade in 1919, Ecologies of Silence aims to view each of them as ‘a site of narrativity, a storied matter, a corporeal palimpsest in which stories are inscribed’[1] – responding to the form of the specimens through ekphrastic prose, interwoven with critical text. The work explores how more-than-human worlds and agencies might be foregrounded and articulated to demonstrate an ‘embodied narrative’, as opposed to the traditional taxonomic presentation exemplified by ‘disembodied’ specimens in the Grimwade collection.

The video reanimated photographs of Eucalypt specimens featured in Grimwade’s The Anthography of the Eucalypt, projecting their speculative movement over a tentacular and spectral figure, caught between worlds, temporalities and articulations.

This project was the first of the New Materialist archival work, making visible the bodies, communities and ecologies of the living worlds contained in institutional collections. This interrogation was continued in 202 in Place Unknown: A speculative Taxonomy commissioned by the Powerhouse Museum of Applied art and Science for the Eucalyptusdom exhibition.

You can read an extended report of this inquiry here.

[1]Opperman S, Iovino S, Material Ecocriticism, Indiana University Press, 2014, p 451

Single channel video, 4 mins

Artists Luna Mrozik Gawler, Jake Steele

Ian Potter Museum of Art