Life-Extending Breadcrumbs Facilitating Morphosis and Collaborative Sculptural Practice through Posthuman Ethics This project has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Jessica Hsi-Ming Tan Bachelor of Fine Art (First Class Honours) RMIT University Bachelor of Contemporary Arts Edith Cowan University School of Art College of Design and Social Context RMIT University July 2021 Life-Extending Breadcrumbs Facilitating Morphosis and Collaborative Sculptural Practice through Posthuman Ethics Jessica Hsi-Ming Tan i I, Jessica Hsi-Ming Tan certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the project is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. I acknowledge and express gratitude for the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Signed: Jessica Tan 18 November 2021 ii Acknowledgements I respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands that I live and work on, and that this research has taken place, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples of the eastern Kulin nation and the Whadjuk Boodjar peoples of the Noongar nation. I pay my respects to their Elders, past present and emerging.
I acknowledge that on a daily basis I am granted settler-colonial privileges as an uninvited guest on these stolen lands. Deepest thanks to Associate Prof. Mikala Dwyer for your warmth, openness and always unwavering support and confidence in my practice over the years. Deepest thanks to Dr.
Laresa Kosloff and Dr. Drew Pettifer for both your rigorous and critical analysis of my dissertation, of which would have not taken its trajectory without your generous contributions and challenges to my thinking. Thank you to my parents, Catherine Tan Hwee Kian and Peter Tan Ngee Huat for the sacrifices you have made in order to privilege my life. Thank you: Audrey Tan, James Cooper and Sebastian Temple for your various manifestations of care and emotional support, encouragement, feedback and openness to talk about art and doubt throughout this extended period of time.
Thank you for connection, Jemi Gale, Victoria Jost, Chris Doyle and Robyn Tran. Eternal gratitude to the ocean in its enigmatic and emotional vastness, for bestowing upon me the power to feel reborn each time I am immersed, wherever and whenever that is and has been. Thank you Andre Liew, Ceri Hann and Raph Buttonshaw for technical support and RMIT for financial support throughout this period. iii Table of Contents Life-Extending Breadcrumbs: Facilitating Morphosis and Collaborative Sculptural Practice through Posthuman Ethics……………………….………………………………………………i Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………… iii Table of Contents………………………….iv List of Figures………………………………….2 Chapter One: Morphosis……………………………………………………………………….20 Site-specific Installation Practice and Affective Potential………………………………………23 Chapter Two: Morphosis as an Ethico-Political Methodology Material Ethics of Morphosis………………………………………………………………………27 Potential is Political……………………………………………………………………………….31 Chapter Three: Redefinitions………………………………………………………………….35 The Decentered Subject………………………………………………………………………….40 Conclusion: Practicing Mindfulness………………………………………………………….47 List of References…………………………………………………………….53 iv List of Figures Figure 1.
SSSSS cherry seeds string. Cherry and Mandarin Seeds and used wire. A failed rice paper support structure experiment. Fish bones, broken bus stop glass, found stick and soy wax.
‘Ta-da! Flower’ for Insect Logic (with James Cooper). November 2019 at KINGS Artist Run……………………………………………………………………………………………15 Figure 5. November 2019 at KINGS Artist Run. Image courtesy of Chris Bowes……….
Dimmey’s carpet with accumulated detritus; glitter, hair, dust, stickers and dried leaves………………………………………………………………………………………………. Upcycled wood that has been reused in various projects from 2018-2021……. Upcycled wood that has been reused in various projects from 2018-2021………. Longan Taxi Seat.
Macrame Longan seed beads, dried lemons, dog collar and my hair from 2016-2019. Collaborative work with unknown dog, tennis ball and cabbage figurine. The Stink Inside My Soul is Coming to Get Me (detail). Dremelled found wood and tinted beeswax.
September 2019 at Mailbox Art Space……………………………………. Sad Spell butterfly. Found butterfly figurine, used ribbon, dried lambs ear leaves, box thorn branch, found star hair comb, pipecleaner and ceramics. A vignette of relations.
Sea snail shells, found copper, blu-tack, chewed beeswax, dried buffalo grass, chewing gum, PVA glue and lattice. Snail latte art collaboration. Water colour pencil on paper, garden snail teeth marks and upholstery tacks.44 v Abstract This practice-led research project considers human agency in relation to matter and materialism. Seeking to unlearn human assertions of agency as dominant, this project fosters relational and collaborative exchanges with matter that manifest as installations and sculptural interventions.
Informed by new materialist and posthuman frameworks, it recognises that material hierarchies are held in place by what we choose to prioritise in human worlds. This is practiced through open and responsive sculptural installations which form in relation to Other matter in order to speak with, think with, learn and unlearn, rather than overwrite the emergence of other agential capacities. Site-specific installations emerge through studio-based research, where I engage with, respond to and configure accumulated matter that I have collected from everyday material encounters. The material engagements affectively respond to an ethics of care where accountability is sought within material practice, enacted through the use of found and organic matter, slow accumulation, reuse and regeneration.
The installations synthesise my associative and intuitive drawing practice with sculptural assemblages, each working in dialogue to form embodied encounters. Enactments of undoing and rebuilding seek to decentre and disperse the personal codification of language across ongoing bodies of work which become self-generative in nature. The installations undergo endless reconfigurations which explore the materials potential to ‘become Other’, or ‘multiple’, through various iterations which alter the forms and presentation of the material combinations. This pushes matter beyond singular cultural contextualisation as it undergoes a transformative process of morphosis.
1 Introduction Life-Extending Breadcrumbs explores the transformation of materials as they evolve through process-based research. What I call a ‘morphosis methodology’ traces my encounters and engagements with materials in the context of the everyday and the studio. ‘Morphosis’ is a slow accumulation of matter and ‘pottering’; which is an unfocused and slowed productivity where I intuitively respond to matter. The series of installations drawn from this research are considered material iterations of morphosis, ongoing in their constant shifts through studio and exhibition contexts.
These move in a feedback loop from being made in the studio to exhibition sites then back to the studio in a continual process of alteration and reconfiguration. Sculptural installations are assembled from an accumulation of organic matter such as fruit pips and skins, dried corn cobs, sticks, eggshells and objects such as repurposed broken ceramics, discarded pieces of broken mirror and hand-built clay forms and water colour pencil drawings left outside to collect the markings of rain and garden snails as a collaboration of forces. I explore the non-fixity and reuse of individual material components. These comprise intimate, hand built sculptural matter, often combining an accumulation of found and organic matter that has been collected and reformed.
The sculptural matter collected has often already been made by forces in the world, for example; an uprooted plant that has been dried out by the sun; dried glue scraped off the pavement from another person’s project; or mummified lemons plucked from a tree that has become shriveled as a result of being under watered. It is also comprised of drawings and paintings that depict biomorphic forms. These intuitively respond to mark-making and take pictorial form through a tacit knowledge that reveals itself through the spontaneity of associative memory. This leads to a straying from any initial perceived outcome; a morphosis.
Rather than as separate practices, these are considered as material components that integrate with other sculptural matter to comprise my installations. Through site-specific installation methods these works seek to embody the site they inhabit, existing in dialogue with each other to form affective and transformative installations. By transformative, I mean that the viewers’ experience of the work seeks to be Other; what the viewer cannot comprehend in verbal or written language, yet there is a logic that can be felt in terms of navigating the space and experiencing the material qualities of the work. The material approaches and forms resulting from morphosis are not predetermined; however, they operate within set parameters.
The practical research follows the idea of new materialist possibility to generate new understandings and redefinitions of matter, but within the confines of ecological concerns around sustainability. Here I seek to be accountable for my material outputs through discerning what materials to engage with. These are affectively 2 informed and driven by an ethical inclination of revising how we engage with our surroundings in order to rethink our role as humans living with and amongst nonhumans. This leads to a posthuman enquiry of decentering anthropocentric notions of selfhood in order to prompt a more embodied and open engagement relationally with matter.
I liken the research to a circulating process of slow digestion, regurgitation, indigestion and redigestion as I have navigated various stages of learning and unlearning to arrive at revised posthuman understandings surrounding morphosis, subjectivity, agency, affective potential and becoming Other. Chapter One elaborates on a series of practice-led studio approaches that constitute a morphosis methodology. This aligns with a ‘Tumbleweed Methodology’ (Akira 2013), something that gains its own momentum and becomes a self-sustaining body of work. Morphosis spirals beyond any original intention to represent anything.
It explores the fluid nature of outcomes within studio research and installation practice through practical approaches, which often overlap when encountering and handling materials. ‘Coordinations’ (Gan and Tsing 2019) suggest that encounters with matter are more complex and meaningful in their engagements beyond what is conceived of as coincidental and accidental in human classificatory logics. Pottering describes a slowed and meandering production process in the studio that shares an affinity with artist Sarah crowEST’s studio methodologies (2013). Pottering is theorised as an alternative model of production within capitalism, through slowed and accumulative labour.
I locate the origins and formation of intuition at the intersection of historical knowledge and affect (Berlant 2011). The conditionality that informs the morphosis methodology is determined by the occurrence of shifts and sensitivity to conditions (Jeppesen 2019, p. Within this, I discuss my return to drawing practice under the conditionality of the COVID-19 pandemic and trauma. Reconfiguration explains the eventual loss of representation through the continuous reuse and regeneration of materials through an example of wooden structures which are remade each time they move through studio and exhibition space.
Reconfiguration speaks to the redefinition of the material beyond how it is culturally recognised (Butler 2005). This runs parallel to exploring how material can exceed singular understanding through multiple iterations and reworkings; the material becomes Other. I examine various encounters with unconventional art materials in everyday life and the treatments that specific materials undergo in order to arrive at an outcome. These outcomes are not concrete and are able to be altered and reconfigured later.
Sculptural forms and matter undergo a process of morphosis that is generative and accumulative. These transformations are explored through material potentiality and site- specific installation practice. Morphosis can be understood through the idea of becoming 3 multiple. This engages new materialist understandings of agency (Bennett 2001) through the idea of the singular material and the singular (human) subject always located within a state of continuous becoming (Grosz 2010); being made and remade again.
Subjectivity reaches further redefinition through a turn towards posthuman notions of human agency (Braidotti 1994) evidenced in the concept of Becoming Cockroach (Tontey 2019) and my own reconsiderations towards matter. In my practice, unforeseeable material encounters and unknowable exchanges across material agencies locate the human as a relation within a set of relations. Multiplicity occurs in site-specific installation practice through an engagement with affective potential (Seigworth 2010, p.1, Massumi 2002) and generates nuanced shifts in perception (Sharp 2017) through materials exceeding their familiar contexts.