Artist Statement

I am an Australian artist working on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. My research connects lens-based practices with other fields invested in the polemics of intersubjective and multi-species encounters, such as ethnography, material culture and performance studies. Broadly speaking, my research addresses the dialectic between the camera and the subjects it transforms through representational processes—an apparatus engaged as a creative tool through practice and as an object of art historical inquiry. My research method uses fieldwork to create works that press at the limits of the documentary form, where the analytic and poetic are folded together. In studying entanglements between humans, non-human animals, technology, and their ecosystems, I render their material and somatic realities beyond their ideological articulations and discursive inscriptions. In this crisscrossing between meaning and matter, subjectivities are co-produced in worlds that no longer belong only to humans.

Working in video installation, film and photography, my art practice involves long-term engagements with small communities of practitioners who have strong connections to the natural world. Examples include, flower arrangement masters in Japan, surveyors and Aboriginal custodians in Australia, farmers in Thailand, and hunters in America’s Northeast. My work integrates ethnographic method with performative and cinematic genres, where my subjects are not simply observed via the camera, but cast as ‘actors’ playing versions of themselves. Thus, rather than recording ‘reality’ as it is given or simply manufacturing fictions, my work provokes an alternative reality—one that is then documented. Quotidian rituals, both scripted and unscripted, are the portal through which we witness the work’s subjects making sense of their world in order to better cope within it.

While the camera is my tool, the social body is my primary medium, and the artwork is that which congeals in the wake of transformative encounters. While collaboration generates each work’s concepts on a project-by-project basis, individual projects are connected thematically via a softening of boundaries between the living/dead, the human/non-human, and the organic/inorganic—where what we think of as alive becomes thing-like, and where spectres from the past come to animate the present.

My research and practice bring me into contact with communities radically different from my own, and as such, the philosophy of recognition, and critical theory connecting Otherness with aesthetics and site-specific practice underscores my research. Furthermore, while my work is connected to traditions of shared anthropology and ethnofiction, it is unlike the social sciences for the way fact and fiction are kept in play as a method for not only engaging with, but also parodying the discipline’s realist aspirations. However, rather than advocating whimsical transformations of reality exempt from ethical answerability, this technique keeps perception and representation in play to preserve the tension between incomplete and complete knowing.