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Overlapping Magisteria Exhibition Kit

Isadora Vaughan, Ogives 2020, installation view, Overlapping Magisteria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
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Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions, is a group exhibition comprising 5 Australian and international artists whose practices and artworks explore overlapping ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and interacting with the world. The exhibition presents ambitious new works by artists’ Robert Andrew, Mimosa Echard (FR), Sidney McMahon, Sam Petersen and Isadora Vaughan, and was curated by Max Delany and Miriam Kelly. 

The exhibition title, Overlapping Magisteria, counters the phrase ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, coined by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Overlapping Magisteria emphasises a position against historical desires to separate science and religion as distinct fields of inquiry into the human relationship with the natural world. The works in the exhibition defy dualistic thinking. They bring together material facts and immaterial values, rational and irrational thinking, animate and inanimate forms. The exhibiting artists reflect on language, culture, land use, bodies, architecture and practices that have historically been marginalised.

How to use this kit

This exhibition kit has been written by ACCA Education to support learning alongside Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions. Three key artists and artworks from the exhibition have been highlighted, with discussion questions to prompt thinking with students. Primary and Secondary activities, are mapped to the Victorian and Australian Curriculum, and can be found in the section For Teachers. VCE students and teachers can view Support Material for further reading and teaching notes from ACCA’s VCE Programs.

List of works »

  1. Introduction
  2. About the Artists
  3. Key artworks
    1. Robert Andrew, Tracing inscriptions 2020
    2. Isadora Vaughan, Ogives 2020
    3. Sam Petersen, I’m still feeling it 2020
  4. Support Material
  5. For Teachers

About the artists

Feature Artists

 

Robert Andrew

Born 1965, Perth. Lives and works in Meanjin/Brisbane

Robert Andrew is a Brisbane-based artist who creates sculptural installations that explore tensions between old and new cultural and material forms. Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people from the Broome area of the Kimberley, Western Australia, and also holds European and Filipino heritage. Through his works he reflects upon his personal relationship to land, culture and language, as well as wider narratives related to the encounter between Indigenous and settler colonial cultural heritages. In many of his works Andrew combines Yawuru language with highly refined, programmable technologies and raw materials and mineral resources – including pigments, ochres, rocks and soil – to allude to cultural politics associated with colonial extraction economies such as archaeology and mining.

Robert Andrew is a PhD candidate at Griffith University, Meanjin/Brisbane, where his practice-led research is investigating denied and forgotten personal and family histories. He has exhibited his artwork widely, in Australia and internationally, including The National 2019, Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney; and Data Stratification, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

 

Sam Petersen

Born 1984, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne

Sam Petersen’s interdisciplinary art practice explores identity and access in relation to space, connections between the mind and body, experiences of tactility and flexibility, sensuality and sexuality. 

“My work is from the self and stuff that is close to me. I’m interested in what can be done with one’s identity and the space around it. Both my body and mind, touching the everyday with feelings between the rational, the playful and the political. Of course my work is often to do with my disability and my sexuality. This has been focused on access, and the lack of it, to places, people’s minds and opportunities – all the time shaping my work. I hope that my work touches people in small ways and makes them rethink their perceptions about disability and sexuality.”

Sam Petersen graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. And since then has presented numerous solo exhibitions and performances; exhibited work in curated and group exhibitions; and has been the recipient of a number of awards, including an Australia Council for the Arts Project Grant in 2019.

 

Isadora Vaughan

Born 1987, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne

Isadora Vaughan is a Melbourne-based visual artist whose sculptural works are characterised by the tension between materiality and form. Vaughan’s research is driven by a curiosity to understand material intelligence, and how matter can shift and escape human control. Vaughan’s work sits somewhere between the formal and the alchemical. She is interested in the ability of materials to transform and transition from one state to another, and how to convey this artistically through both ephemeral and static sculptural installations that engage multiple bodily senses.

 Vaughan was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary from 2018-20 and is represented by STATION Gallery, Australia. She has exhibited extensively in Australia including: The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton; TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

 

Key Artworks

Robert Andrew, Tracing inscriptions 2020, installation view, Overlapping Magisteria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Robert Andrew Tracing inscriptions 2020

Burnt and ochre-dipped branches, string, aluminium, electromechanical components dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Robert Andrew is an artist who is interested in the intersection of Indigenous and settler colonial histories, organic materials and robotic mechanisms, and the relationship between land, culture and language. For Overlapping Magisteria, Andrew has created his most elaborate sculptural installation to date. Tracing inscriptions 2020 consists of a robotic mechanism connected to 100 strings which are tied to charcoal branches gathered after local bushfires. 

The robotic mechanism sits at one side of the gallery space, the parts of which are designed, developed and manufactured by Robert Andrew himself, who has an engineering background and specialty equipment in his studio. The electro-mechanical device drives a grid and coordinates-based plotting system, which is programmed to transcribe words in Yawuru – the language of the Indigenous people from the Broome area of the Kimberley, in Western Australia. The system directs the movement of the 100 strings, which travel from the device and up along one wall, across the ceiling, spreading out to create a grid formation across the opposite wall, where the burnt branches, some of which are dipped in ochre or oxide, inscribe a large scale drawing on the gallery walls. The branches are permitted to move freely, and the Yawuru words plotted in the mechanical system are translated into gestural marks, and are no longer recognisable as text on the white walls of the gallery. 

Andrew has explained that he could have easily ensured the Yawuru words could be inscribed in a recognisable manner on the wall. However, he is more interested in allowing the branches to move freely and break away from the technological device to dictate their own pathways. Tracing inscriptions 2020 is at once about the impossibility of translating certain Yawuru words into English, and a metaphor for releasing Indigenous heritage, people and Country from the destructive force of colonialism and its technologies.

 

Discussion questions

  • How does the artist use technology to tell a story? 
  • Can you think of other examples where technology is used to tell stories? 
  • Stop, look and listen, what can you hear?
Isadora Vaughan, Ogives 2020, installation view, Overlapping Magisteria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Isadora Vaughan Ogives 2020

(airlock) hand blown glass, modified dutch flower trolley, beeswax, aged Italian plastic food safe vat, stainless steel cook pot, iron hammer heads, aluminium pot with iron fillings; (ceramics) midfire clay; (feeder) papier-mâché, glass scrim, natural rubber latex, wire mesh, Hardy Street bamboo, pine shavings and wood dust; (fence) finished hardwood, tie wire; (field-ground) re-purposed builders plastic, crushed rock road base, pine shavings and wood dust, kangaroo grass, lucerne hay, pea straw, casuarina branchlets, seed pods, grass hay, lang lang pea gravel, wallaloo park unrefined unfired clay, unfired terracotta, fish oil, vegetable oil, swimming pool salt, moving blanket, bulka bag, hessian sacks, bale twine, Hardenbergia vine; (hexagons) Carr Street pitch; (logs) coir fibre, thread; (manure) plastic, sheep poo; (mycelium trolley) steel trolley, turkey tail mycelium, wire; (props) royal steel; (rubble pile) various fired clay; (shed) bio-plastic, galvanised steel, crushed rock road base, oil, misting system; (sieve) re-purposed galvanised steel, casuarina branchlets, crushed limestone; (sunrake) cast gypsum and glass fibre, steel, fixings; (tanks) fiberglass and plastic, chlorinated water dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne.

Isadora Vaughan works with an enormous array of organic and inorganic materials to create immersive environments populated with sculptural forms. Vaughan invites her audience to walk amongst the elements of Ogives 2020 to experience the rich sensory qualities of organic and inorganic matter that comprises the work – including the smell of damp soil, the crunch of gravel, and the sight of growing mycelium fungus. The artist wants her audience to appreciate the matter embedded in her work as materials for fine art, both productive and resourceful, but with their own inherent sculptural qualities. Some of these materials are given form in the artist’s studio, where Vaughan works with processes such as firing clay, wax casting, and papier-mâché. Other materials are found objects: a hessian sack, steel trolleys, a galvanised steel greenhouse structure, and fibreglass tanks. Vaughan has also included sculptural forms that she designed and then outsourced their construction: a set of hand blown glass forms based on the aerating vessels used in viticulture (the science of winemaking); and a large, bright yellow steel form inspired by agricultural hay rake machines, the details of which Vaughan casted and reshaped into wax.

Ogives 2020 considers the complex ways that art and creative expressions are interconnected with the industrial and agricultural environments on which our society relies. The installation encompasses forms at scales ranging from the granular to the molecular, the handheld to the industrial,  and invites us to think about the ways we relate to the world around us. Vaughan chose to avoid creating a ‘beautiful’, tightly composed installation, as she wanted to present an artwork in progress, ever-evolving and dependent on the presence of its audience to carve new forms and generate new relationships. 

 

Discussion questions:

  • Do you think farm machinery can be art? why/why not?
  • Close your eyes, what can you experience of the installation Ogives using your sense of smell? Does the smell match what you expect in an art gallery?
  • Isadora Vaughan has titled her large and diverse installation Ogives. Look up the definition of the word and interpret how you think the title relates to the installation.

 

Sam Petersen, I'm still feeling it 2020, installation view, Overlapping Magisteria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Sam Petersen I’m still feeling it 2020

Plasticine, cling wrap dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist.

During the artist’s site-visit to ACCA, Sam Petersen was immediately drawn to the linear gaps between the corten steel panels in the interior of ACCA’s foyer, at the entrance to the galleries. For Overlapping Magisteria, Petersen has filled these gaps with flesh coloured plasticine:

“I find plasticine as a material a great subverter of space, and therefore potentially of people’s minds. The continuous fixability of plasticine is something I am really enjoying. Covering or filling up gaps and playing with crevices is a strategy I use a lot in my practice. Plasticine also works best when it has been handled; it takes on body heat and reflects it back to us. It’s me and itself and it’s my body all at once … It is tactile and has life and vitality. It becomes this stuff on the edge of being alive, I feel.” 

Because of the oily residue of plasticine, Petersen decided to create a plastic film barrier to protect the porous and oxidised surface of the entrance wall to the gallery space. Petersen also thinks of these flesh-coloured linear forms as metaphoric of Petersen’s relationship to galleries, and buildings more widely. As a person who uses a wheelchair Sam Petersen encounters many structures which are inaccessible. In response, Petersen has developed an approach to artmaking that is inherently critical of the access barriers the artist  encounters that involves often making use of the liminal (meaning something that sits at the boundary or threshold) spaces of galleries. Petersen is often excluded from entering spaces, and so makes art that refuses to be in those spaces – like in this artwork, where the plasticine dominates the entryway to the galleries but refuses to enter inside.

 

 Discussion questions:

  • Have you seen an artwork made on a building before? How do you think it changes the ‘feeling’ of the space?
  • What associations do you have with plasticine? What layers of meaning does Peterson’s choice of material bring to the artwork?
  • Sam Petersen has said ‘I find plasticine as a material a great subverter of space, and therefore potentially of people’s minds.’ How do you interpret this statement in relation to Petersen’s artwork I’m still feeling it?

Support Material

Robert Andrew:

Article about how Robert Andrew references relationships to family, history and technology through his art: https://www.art-almanac.com.au/robert-andrew-mutable-histories/

Mimosa Echard: 

Mimosa Echard’s Hello From the Studio video: https://www.facebook.com/acca.melbourne/videos/hello-from-the-studio-mimosa-echard/411427346939005/

Sidney McMahon: 

Video documentation of Sidney McMahon performing iterations of their spatial practice within a digital render of the Golbourn Regional Gallery, originally broadcast on social media throughout May-June 2020: https://vimeo.com/434260183

Sam Petersen:

Sam Petersen’s artist website: https://vimeo.com/275936565

Isadora Vaughan:

Isadora Vaughan’s Art Kitchen video, explaining wax casting techniques and creative concepts: https://acca.melbourne/education-art-kitchen-isadora-vaughan/ 

Sam Petersen & Isadora Vaughan Artist Talks:

Sam Petersen and Isadora Vaughan discussing their respective contributions to Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions

 https://www.facebook.com/acca.melbourne/videos/322209945879222/

 

For Teachers

Primary activities

 

Found Object Plaster Casting

This activity responds to Isadora Vaughan’s use of clay to cast impressions of found objects. Students search for a found object – an old rope, a shell, a textured rock – that has an interesting form. Students knead a clump of clay and press to 3cm thick, and push their object into the clay to create a negative space.  Students then prepare a cup of plaster according to directions, in a reusable cup, which they then carefully pour to fill the clay mould. Once dry, gently peel the clay away from your plaster cast gathering the clay together for reuse later. Investigate the plaster positives  observing textural variation, and compare between classmates. Were you able to cast the entire object? If your cast wasn’t successful, what could you do differently next time? How could you use this cast to make another sculpture – what materials would you use and where would you display it?

Call & Response with Indigenous Language

This activity is inspired by Robert Andrew’s use of Yawuru language, engineering and natural materials to create artworks that translate Indigenous language into abstract drawings. Students should first learn the spelling, pronunciation and meaning of three words belonging to an Indigenous language group local to their school. They then gather natural materials from outdoors to draw with – dirt, charcoal, or anything that can make a mark. Next they create a ‘string telephone’ using twine and two paper cups. One student will speak the newly learned words into the string telephone and the other will make a drawing in response to what they hear.. The student drawing can respond to the meaning or the sound of the language. Drawings can be abstract interpretations – shapes and lines that feel right for the words and sounds. Swap so both students have a turn drawing and speaking.

Australian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Years F-6

Use materials, techniques and processes to explore visual conventions when making artworks (ACAVAM107) (ACAVAM111) (ACAVAM115)

Explore ideas and artworks from different cultures and times, including artwork by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, to use as inspiration for their own representations (ACAVAM106) (ACAVAM110) (ACAVAM114)

Victorian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Levels F-6

Explore and express ideas: (VCAVAE017)(VCAVAE021) (VCAVAE025) (VCAVAE029)

Visual arts practices: (VCAVAV018)(VCAVAV022) (VCAVAV026) (VCAVAV030)

Curriculum Interpretation

These primary activities are inspired by Isadora Vaughan and Robert Andrew’s innovative artistic processes. The activities are intended to build students’ capacity to consider and utilise experimental methods for creating sculptures and drawings.

By undertaking these activities, students:

  • Experiment with using clay moulds and plaster to recreate forms to use in sculptural artworks.
  • Construct a non-conventional drawing apparatus.
  • Consider Isadora Vaughan’s practice and ideas as inspiration for their own art making.
  • Consider how language and text can become content for artworks, especially Indigenous languages. 
  • Experience collaborative artmaking.

Secondary activities

Architectural Interventions

This activity responds to Sam Petersen’s use of plasticine to intervene in architectural forms. After exploring the architecture of their school’s local area, students will use scrap cardboard to build an architectural form adding plasticine to attach a feature, or fill a gap in the structure. Step 1: collect scrap cardboard, boxes, toilet rolls, etc, and plasticine – two small balls per student. Step 2: Students explore the local built landscape, thinking about how they could intervene in the buildings.  Students create an architectural form using cardboard and plasticine, to make a new kind of building that has both soft and hard surfaces Step 4: Students reflect on their artworks as a group – what architecture inspired your design? What form did you create with plasticine and how did it support or add form to your  structure? What effect does the combination of soft plasticine and hard cardboard have on the structure, and how would it feel on a life-sized scale?

Layer, Laminate & Combine

This activity responds to Mimosa Echard’s multi layered wall-based works with a wide array of materials. Step 1: Collect scrap materials, objects and images – fabric, textured paper, magazine images, old photos, and small found objects such as jar lids, beads, and trinkets. Step 2: Gather adhesives and layering materials – these could include spray adhesive, glue,  needle and thread, plastic film, or lace. Step 3: Find a strong backing layer such as card, cardboard or canvas. Step 4: Experiment with your materials, objects and images – what interesting layered arrangements can you create? In which ways will you affix and intertwine the arrangements to create one complex composition? Step 5: secure all layers and objects with adhesive, staples or thread. Step 6: Trim the edges (optional) and install by hanging in the classroom or at home. How does gravity affect your composition? Which elements are most opaque and translucent? What does this artwork tell the viewer about the artist?

Australian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Years 7-10

Develop ways to enhance their intentions as artists through exploration of how artists use materials, techniques, technologies and processes (ACAVAM119) (ACAVAM126)

Practise techniques and processes to enhance representation of ideas in their art-making (ACAVAM121) (ACAVAM128)

Victorian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Levels 7-10

Explore and express ideas (VCAVAE033) (VCAVAE04o)

Visual art practices (VCAVAV035) (VCAVAV042)

Respond and interpret (VCAVAR038)(VCAVAR045)

Curriculum Interpretation

These activities are inspired by Sam Petersen’s use of plasticine to create sculptural interventions into architectural forms, and Mimosa Echard’s use of multiple materials and everyday objects to create layered wall-based artworks. These activities are intended to get students thinking about making art embedded in existing structures, using scrap materials to create artworks, exploring opacity and translucency, and experimenting with layering two- and three-dimensional materials and objects. 

By undertaking these activities, students:

  • Explore the relationship between art and architecture.
  • Consider the use of recycled and waste materials as fine art materials.
  • Experiment with layering and affixing a variety of materials to form an artwork to hang on the wall.

Terms of Use

This education resource has been produced by ACCA Education to provide information and classroom support material for education visits to the exhibition Feedback Loops. The reproduction and communication of this resource is permitted for educational purposes only.

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