Articulations of the Unknown
Articulations of the Unknown
The sky is heavy with rain clouds, the roads are flooded, and we have the wussiest car in the Parachilna parking lot. One map tells us the trip will take us 8 hours, another says 3. The ranger at Rawnsley Park Station reports that the road to the east is open. The lady at the Blinman shop says the road marked “open” is unpassable. The man at the Copley caravan park smirks and tells us the road marked “4WD only” will be passable if we are not silly. We hesitate, face our fears and travel on. Our plan for extended night sky research is continually thwarted by the weather. The satellite dish that provides internet access has blown down and they need to send a helicopter to repair it. We are well out of mobile phone range. But we take our time. We take in our surroundings. We adjust.
Our week is one of slow walks and conversations. We ask ourselves how we can make sense of our experiences and how the idea of the unknown influences our perception. We consider how maps serve as both truths and fictions, and how we can approach translating our observations. As we proceed we bear in mind the histories of translating personal experiences of place into something transferable to others.
Articulations of the Unknown is an exhibition of photographs, drawings, prints, and video that document the process of traveling to, and finding ways to connect with, a remote and unfamiliar environment. The exhibition presents the results of a multi-phase collaborative investigation that began with a research field trip to Arkaroola Wilderness Reserve in the northern Flinders Ranges SA and continued as Artists in Residence at the Megalo Printmaking Studios in Canberra.
Presented as a series of images, Articulations of the Unknown will invite viewers to explore darkness as both an inner and outer phenomenon. Capitalizing on the complexities of night and a shared interest in the outer limits of perception, Hutch and Anderson have applied an embodied art practice towards an investigative series of works on paper.
Ellis Hutch and Jessica Brooke Anderson
Ellis Hutch and Jessica Anderson had their first conversation on a snow-covered road in rural Finland. As they walked they discovered mutual interests in mindfulness, embodied practice and practice-based research. Since that meeting at the Arteles Creative Centre where they were both undertaking artist residencies around the theme of Silence, Awareness, Existence; Ellis and Jessica have continued their dialogue and are keen to investigate their intersecting interests through a process-based collaboration.
Jessica Brooke Anderson, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
As an artist, researcher, and performer, Jessica Brooke Anderson synthesizes scientific and medical research with experiential art. By interpreting invisible elements (such as illness, memory, or meditation) into tangible objects, Jessica’s work poses self-reflexive questions that purposely avoid straightforward answers.
Toeing the line of belief, Jessica recontextualizes cultural wellness practices into neutral environments of investigation. Most recently, she embarked on the 1,000 km pilgrimage across the Camino de Santiago, walking from the Pyrenees mountains in France to the western coastline of Spain. Other projects include choreographed movement exercises; meditation line drawings; and reframed mechanisms of health, such as a detoxing footbath or chi activation machine. By repositioning these conversations into the context of a gallery, information begins to transcend ratiocination and calls upon the convergence of mind, body, and personal experience.
Jessica’s work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions in Turin, Italy; Berlin, Germany; London, England; Toronto, Canada; Tornio, Finland; and throughout the United States. She has been an artist in residence at the Arteles Creative Center in Haukijärvi, Finland; Sparkbox Studios in Picton, Ontario Canada; Fusion Gallery in Turin, Italy; Megalo Print Studio in Canberra, Australia; and an upcoming residency at the Kunstnarhuset Messen in Alvik, Norway.
Ellis Hutch
Ellis Hutch takes a lively experimental approach to creating works of contemporary performance and visual art informed by her fascination with how people establish social relationships and construct the places they inhabit. Her current PhD research is grounded in an obsession with Antarctic and lunar exploration. Hutch is fascinated with the photographs, diaries and memoirs created in remote and extreme environments, and by how it is possible to visit those inaccessible places vicariously through the images and writings of astronauts and explorers.
Ellis’ sense adventure has led her to undertake residencies on a cruise ship in Norway, a village in Northern Thailand and a winter month in Finland. In both Thailand and Finland, Ellis created works responding to the unique natural environments and paying attention to the ways they had been transformed by human activity.
Focusing her practice around research, Ellis also draws on specific histories and archival collections as starting points for projects that evolve into video and sculptural installations. Her most recent exhibition work, Last light for All that fall at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in 2015 was a poetic response to the story of Theodora Cowan’s cenotaph, designed as a WWI memorial, but never completed.
Ellis has worked on a diverse range of collaborative and solo projects since completing her Masters Degree in Sculpture at the Australian National University School of Art in 2000. She is currently undertaking a PhD in the Photography and Media Arts Workshop at the ANU and has taught in the school’s Centre for Art History and Theory.