bread clock

Time seemed to pass more slowly without a phone at Arteles and I made some new clocks to measure this slower progress. In late summer the fields around the residency were full of ripening grain and I used the ancient technology of fermentation to make a bread clock to give structure to the day. Wash while the dough rises – punch down – prepare…

DIY location dot

I began to make my own version of a Google location dot soon after beginning a device-free residency at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland. It filled my empty hands and helped me process the intense sensations of connecting to the new environment. I selected a crochet hook and yarns in the colours of the landscape from the local supermarket. I was surrounded by circles…

location doona

Thinking about how Google Maps becomes a safety blanket that both helps me get around but also makes me disengage with the physical landscape, I made a location doona. Photo Brenton McGeachie

parallel universes

In Oaxaca I was struck by the difference between the city presented to me by Google, and the one that surrounded me. One was my own personal kingdom, everything smooth and blandly safe in faded blues, greys and yellows. The other was a sensory and emotional overload of colour, scents, people, decisions. One operated in English, the other in Spanish, one familiar, the other…

SCI ART CBR zine April 2018, including a detail from my Merz work installation (2015 - ), photographed by Brenton McGeachie. Image @sciartcbr

SCI-ART Canberra

There’s a new group in Canberra – SCI ART CBR – that’s bringing together researchers and creatives to share ideas and build networks across disciplines. The group’s founders saw my installation at Prompt Gallery earlier in the year and invited me to speak about my experiences working in science and visual arts. It was an opportunity to reflect on common threads that have persisted…

personal data goes public

After growing up in the Prompt Gallery , my digital’s #D shadow is colonizing space outside the Federal Department of Communications and the Arts in New Acton during Art Not Apart in March. At the end of the festival it will remain in place for another couple of months. The work is responding to the festival theme of ‘climax’ by inviting viewers to consider the…

thinking through making

I’m taking fragments of my personal data and translating them into objects I can manipulate as I would pieces for collage or assemblage. I’m working in the Prompt Gallery Space at Australian National University and building the work in the gallery over the next 10 weeks. It’s an opportunity for audiences to watch the work grow, talk with the artist, and perhaps think about…

thinking through movement

I’ve been thinking about the experience of being continually online through working on a project with artists and designers Kate McCambridge Williams and Alison Moeller. We used performance to explore an invented world consisting only of images, described by author Alan Lightman in his novel Einstein’s Dreams. For me, this fragmented timeless world was a metaphor for the massive collections of images and other…

thinking with collage

I like to start projects by thinking through ideas with collage. It seems even more apt with this project, as its responding to the experience of being heavily online. All the fragments of webpages, platforms and notifications forming some kind of ‘persona’. What agency do we have in this process? I also like the link collage has with artists responding to other times of…