The Charge That Binds | Exhibition Kit

Key ideas/concepts: First Nations perspectives, Country, collaboration, contemporary landscape drawing

biiknganjinu ngangudji – see our Country was derived from drone footage capturing a 360-degree view of the horizon line at View Hill, a site that was once a pastoral run extending between the present-day township sites of Yarra Glen and Healesville. The horizon lines, replete with networks of mountain ranges, captures an entire vista of wurundjeri biik, connecting Nations beyond the horizon.

In this new iteration, Cope’s illustration wraps around the upper ridge of three walls at the entrance of ACCA’s main gallery and is drawn over rich golden ochre sourced from Coranderrk, an important cultural, ecological and political site for peoples of the Kulin Nation. The illustration only becomes visible once visitors have travelled through Brooke Wandin’s sound piece biiknganjinu ngangudji – hear our Country 2023, which annunciates Woiwurrung place names across the breadth of Wurundjeri Country. 

Cope explains, ‘A sense of disorientation is the first sensation, followed by a process of locating oneself to place and people. Voices of the land speak to the mountains.’ Situated high in the vaulted space, the line drawing evokes both the landscape and soundwaves, casting Wurundjeri language, practice and relations to Country as dynamic forces whose true power is only returning to visibility.

Wandin explains, ‘100 years after Coranderrk closed as a mission, we as a nation continue to grapple with the truth of our brutal and violent past. Changes and modification to Country remind us of the ravenous hunger for land, from the early settlers and pastoralists, and currently with large scale developments. Sharing knowledge of Country and stories of the community that once lived here continues the legacy and amplifies those voices of the past.

Discussion questions:

• Do you know where the ochre (which is a natural pigment called ‘Coranderrk Yellow’) is found?
• What are the differences between this type of landscape painting compared to a historical painting of the landscape?
• Find Coranderrk on a map and research its history.

Key ideas/concepts: Photography, installation, ocean ecology, coral bleaching, climate change

In Like folds in water (caustic network) 2024, Pluta draws from the embodied experience of diving to disrupt traditional photographic vision, exploring ways of seeing that might destabilise terrestrial-based knowledge. She also draws parallels between the immersive and spatial experiences of diving and those akin to working in a darkroom. Building on fieldwork undertaken at the Heron Island Research Station, Pluta is concerned with what it feels like to see, as well as how the physical and mental processes of seeing occur through investigating how light behaves underwater. The immersive, multi-faceted installation takes the extraordinary spectral vision of a Mantis Shrimp as its cue, with the artist manipulating the light spectrum to push the boundaries of what can be seen and understood.

Caustic Network incorporates a moving image of the Azure Window debris, filmed underwater in Gozo, Malta, alongside black-and-white images of coral debris created by photocopying fragments collected on Heron Island. Large C-type photographs are the result of darkroom processes involving principles of photographic solarisation, combining negative and positive images. Derived from scientific transect data* post-bleaching coral events on the East Coast of Australia earlier this year, the pictorial qualities of the images are bent and expanded. Through non-traditional processes where light behaves unpredictably, refracted and scattered, the works symbolise the spectral qualities of light as experienced beyond human perception. The photographic film cascading from the ceiling references coloured markers used by scientists to map the health of coral in the Great Barrier Reef, but Pluta’s use of the material generates an optical interaction in which the light is simultaneously softened, shimmering and alive.

Caustic Network fosters an awareness of multispecies relations and the ongoing planetary ecological crisis. Emphasising relationality** and connection, the work explores a series of interactions with the natural world, inviting a deeper engagement with the complexities of our shared ecological landscape. The installation questions how photography filters our relationship with the world, speaking to the complexities of seeing, perceiving and representing fragile ecosystems. It suggests that this ecology is not something that we can view from the outside but something we are inherently enmeshed within.

Discussion questions:

• What type of artwork is this? What is your understanding of expanded photography?
• Imagine yourself inside this artwork, how do you feel, and what does it remind you of? 
• In this artwork the artist is pushing the boundaries of photography, in what ways has Pluta done this?

Definitions:
*Transect data: Transects are the building blocks of field observations. They help measure, make observations, and record data across all monitoring plots.
** Relationality refers to connectedness, a view of the world that underlines how no person or thing exists in isolation, because existence necessarily means being ‘in relationship’.

Key ideas/concepts: Space, micro and macro, cosmos, emergency, sculpture, installation

Feather starshade 2024 builds on Frankovich’s response to The Blue Marble, the 1972 photograph of the Earth taken by NASA astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 mission to the moon. For the artist, the photo represents, ‘a way of thinking of Earth or nature as separate to humans, as over ‘there.’ Her expanded, artistic engagement, seeks to ‘unpack a separatist, binary separation in thinking which has been devastating for lands, peoples and the myriad of non-human species, which also queer nature through indeterminacy* and becoming.’

Feather starshade is a new sculptural installation in which Frankovich intersects references to advanced astronautical technology with organic life. In this work, a model of a NASA starshade is grafted with exploratory sculptural FDM 3D prints (which also read as drawings) evoking an underwater invertebrate known as a Crinoid or feather star, an ancient marine creature whose rhythmic movement through the ocean resembles a kinetic unfurling of plumage.

The starshade is an apparatus designed to help view yet unseen exoplanets** and stars. It shades light to enable these planetary environments to appear. Feather starshade propels us from the depths of the ocean through to the outer limits of the known universe, linking some of the oldest life forms on Earth with futuristic explorations of the galaxy and reminding us of the wonder, depths and great mysteries of the cosmos we inhabit. Frankovich’s speculative*** merging of a technological apparatus with organic life expands possibilities for being and knowing. The work critiques the separatist logic of ‘Big Tech’, including plans to colonise other planets as a way to escape the destruction of climate change.

Discussion questions:

• What does this sculpture look like to you? Does it remind you of anything?
• What do you think of when you think about space? How does it make you feel?
• What are the most dominant art elements and principles in this artwork? How do they create a strong emotion in you, the viewer?

Definitions:
* Indeterminacy: The indeterminacy of something is its quality of being uncertain or vague.
** Exoplanets: A planet that orbits a star outside the solar system.
*** Speculative: An educated guess rather than based on knowledge or fact.