Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemPink Data: Tiamaterialism and the Female Gnosis of Desire(re.press, 2016)
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ItemDaily Demons and Fabulous Animals(World Crafts Council - Australia, 2018)Tessa Laird’s Quarterly Essay is a quest to find the maker of the marvellous alebrija that she bought last time in Mexico. These alebrijas are elaborately carved animals that reflect the Indigenous belief in the nahual, or animal spirit. Laird has just published a book on bats for the Reaction series. Her interest in the fluid relationship between humans and animals finds so much to share in the rich crafts and beliefs of southern Mexico.
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ItemSpores from Space: Becoming the Alien(Punctum Books, 2018-09-11)The masterpiece of pseudo-science, The Secret Life of Plants (1973) features a chapter on plants’ communication with space. Over a decade ago, the artist Frances Stark penned a love letter to this book in Art / Text, but, she drew the line at this chapter, unable to assimilate the idea that plants, who predate human beings on this planet by hundreds of millions of years, might have developed technologies more sophisticated than those we have managed to create within the last 100 years. This paper proposes that, not only might plants be communicating with space, but that we too might be communing with extraterrestrial life forms via the arcane networked technologies of our chlorophiliac friends, if only we knew it. If neither of these proposals can be conclusively proven, tropes in art, literature, and above all popular culture, frequently feature plants as analogies for alien others. This paper proposes three ways in which we think with plants (and, to be fair, plants think with us): inversion, hybridity, and contagion. Fabulated vegetal worlds feature radically inverted colours and scales; hybrid creatures embody and flout anxieties about racial and species boundaries; contagious plants infect their human hosts with alchemical arsenals, leading to death, or ecstasy, or both. Science fictions of plant sentience and human-plant hybridity divest anthropocentric control, imagining worlds where senses are heightened and interconnectivities flourish. Focusing on an episode of original series Star Trek “This Side of Paradise”, featuring alien flowers which spray the Enterprise’s crew with psychedelic spores, I wish to examine the role of plants and science fiction as mutually compatible vehicles for altered consciousness. Cross-pollinating the spore-infected writings of magic mushroom guru Terence McKenna and anthropologist Anna Tsing this paper propounds vegetalismo (curing with psychoactive plants) in order to “become the alien”.
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ItemVertiginous Viriditas: for a Planthropscene, not a Plantationocene(Art + Publishing, University of Melbourne, 2021)
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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.