Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemA Bat’s End: The Christmas Island Pipistrelle and Extinction in Australia, by John Woinarski, CSIRO Publishing, 2018.(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2020)This is a favourable review of Woinkarski's 'A Bat's End', using the book's message of conservation of endangered species to underline the plight of many animals after the bushfire season.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDigesting Gut Feelings - A Conversation(Unlikely, COVA, University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, 2020)This is a discussion between artist Andrew Goodman and critic Tessa Laird about his work 'Gut Feelings' in the exhibition Translating Ambiance curated by Jordan Lacey. Lacey curated a number of sound artists looking at ambiance and the natural world in relation to the urban environment. Rather than imagining nature 'out there', Goodman turned to nature inside his own body - the millions of microbes dwelling in his gut, and made recordings of those noises. These sounds were then made not just audible but palpable through a vibrating speaker that viewers could feel as they listened. This raised pertinent questions around interactivity, ecological art practices, and how we can better attune to the environment.
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ItemThe Congress Woman(Artspace, Auckland, 2021)This short text places Ann Shelton’s The Congresswoman in the context of her ongoing series jane says in which ikebana-inspired floral arrangements are photographed against eye-popping colours. These botanical portraits may be ravishingly retro chic, but they hold secrets – symbolic languages which can be read like code. Shelton’s artfully gathered plants possess medicinal qualities and speak to herstories of other artful gathering, by herbalists, wise women, and witches. Here, the “Dinner Plate Peony”, is an acknowledgement of Judy Chicago’s epic The Dinner Party (1979), while the mini-series which includes The Congresswoman and two other peony works, The Three Sisters, takes its title from the First Nations agriculture of Turtle Island. Pottawatomi botanist Robin Kimmerer sees the Three Sisters as a metaphor for “an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science”. Through Shelton’s rose-tinted lens, we see the many shades of feminism as complementary rather than antagonistic.
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Itemwrapped in flowers, listening to frogs(Art + Australia, 2021)Multinaturalism proposes ways in which contemporary artists, writers and thinkers are doing the urgent work of decentring the human. Yet, if multinaturalism posits all of nature to be human, isn’t it just another form of anthropocentrism? We consider the risks of ‘strategic anthropomorphism’; before Descartes declared that animals were mere automata without soul, and Western scientific paradigms favouring separation over relation invaded every corner of the globe, animals, plants, rocks, winds and waters were ascribed human-like capacities. In an animate world, where everything has the ability to think and feel, decisions about who to eat and where to excrete are made with a good deal of consideration. Poetry erupts from every crevice of Multinaturalism. Writers are compelled towards a kind of song in an effort to connect with life forces that surpass quotidian speech. How we use language is crucial, for ‘It matters what stories tell stories’. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of the difficulty of learning her native Potawatomi because what we consider in the West to be nouns (inert objects) are verbs in her mother tongue, entities in a constant state of relational becoming: ‘To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive’. In such a lively, mobile and relational world, language must also be pliant enough to do justice to justice.
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ItemVertiginous Viriditas: for a Planthropscene, not a Plantationocene(Art + Publishing, University of Melbourne, 2021)
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ItemPretty Polyglot: Parrotisation as the Difference in Repetition(Art Monthly Australasia, 2021-12-20)Pretty polyglot: parrotization as the difference in repetition. In the hall of mirrors that is mimesis, Paul Carter suggests that parrots reflect our human propensity for mimicry. In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig writes of the colourful bodies of dead parrots being used in rituals where the mastery of a foreign language is desired. Mimesis longs to become other, and Carter notes that in the foundation stories of many cultures, parrots introduce and protect those key markers of difference: language and colour. While Jack Halberstam invokes Monty Python’s dead parrot as emblematic of our zombified relations with animals, artist Sergio Vega proposes “Parrot Theory” which sees “the rise of a global, postcolonial avant-garde forever changing the world into words, mirrors, and colours, as we speak...” For Vega, the days of the hierarchical and lonely eagle are over, and the era of the parrot has begun. He compares parrots to “flocks of immigrants from the warm regions of the world” who bring with them spices and colours, and are communal and communicative. Information technology has created a “parrotization of culture”: not banal chatter but a cultural commons. This paper proposes to investigate the parrot as emblem for preserving difference within relationality in a changing world.
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Item[Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp.(University of Wollongong Library, 2021-01-01)Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp.
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ItemZoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral. Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, and the Politics of Predation.(University of Wollongong Library, 2021-01-01)This paper proposes a creative neologism: zoognosis, with an added g, to indicate that knowledges can be transmitted virally from animals to humans. If so, what are the animals trying to tell us? Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) provides an opportunity to find out. Mackay’s prescient novel was written before, but published during, the COVID-19 pandemic, and is about a ‘zooflu’ that enables the infected to understand animals. The author has forged a poetic language based on animal sensory perceptions, what ethologist Jakob von Uexküll termed Umwelten. In doing so Mackay effects a ‘becoming-animal’ of the text, reintroducing readers to their own animality. Mackay’s ‘perspectivism’ enables us to see from the point-of-view of non-human animals, forcing a reckoning with animal abuse and extractive lifeways. While her speculative fiction is bleak, it offers tools for attunement and thinking-with non-human others.
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ItemBeastly Beauty: ecological entanglement via colour separation(National Gallery of Victoria, 2020)This chapter is a fictocritical response to the work Extinction, 2020, by the Italian Design duo Carnovsky. The article draws both on my background with colour studies (A Rainbow Reader, 2013), and animal studies (Bat, 2018). Responding to each colour Carnovsky has used in their installation (RGB - Red Green Blue) in relation to the IUCN red list of extinct and endangered animals, I weave a conversational text that is both about aesthetics and ecological politics. The text is deliberately poetic in order to evoke the beauty of the natural world, and of the work itself. But it also, like the work, hopes to engender reflection on the reality of the 6th Major Extinction Event.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableKeep New Zealand Green(McCahon House Trust, 2020)This special publication marks the 100th anniversary of Colin McCahon's birth. To celebrate, over the course of a year, 66 authors, critics, and cultural commentators within New Zealand and beyond, reflect on the cultural legacy of McCahon via engagement with the McCahon artwork of their choice. Originally published online, this book consolidates all the texts in print form. My own contribution discusses McCahon's Keep New Zealand Green variations, a suite of paintings with environmental themes, through the lens of contemporary eco-feminism.