A delicate, straw-colored waxworm eats its way through a plastic bag. A termite population continues to thrive in Hamburg after arriving in wood imported from Namibia in the early 20th century. The giant fungi Armillaria ostoyae, 2,400 years old, occupies 965 hectares of soil in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. Octochaetus multiporus, a large earthworm native to Aotearoa, silently produces a bioluminescent mucus.
From worms to fungi, slime to forest leaf-fall, these materials and entities work on their own timescales, accreting and accumulating matter until they reach points of collapse. Whether organic, crystalline, or telluric, they tunnel underneath the ground, build idiosyncratic landscapes, clog bathroom drains, open up cracks and fall into fissures.
wiggling together, falling apart is an investigation into the contiguities between the human and the more-than-human and how these points of contact can be unacknowledged at the same time they are ubiquitous. What are the different residues that collect on and in these complicated relations?
Excess and entropy construct and disassemble formations as large as the mycelium networks that stretch underground like massive underground constellations. Thick, treacle-like tar and crude oil is the product of alchemical transformations of prehistoric zooplankton and algae. Beneath our feet, the rigid shells of great tectonic plates slide over the surface of the planet, shift, creak and sigh…
Organised by Lucy Meyle & Victoria Wynne-Jones, featuring artworks by: Hany Armanious, Dan Arps, Emerita Baik, Renée Bevan, Wendelien Bakker, Heidi Brickell, Xin Cheng, Stella Corkery, Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye, Claudia Dunes, Erika Holm, Yukari Kaihori, Lucy Lord Campana, Nicholas Mangan, Lucy Meyle, Te Ara Minhinnick, Kate Newby and Jenny Palmer.
With thanks to: Season, Tāmaki Makaurau; Robert Heald, Wellington and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.
Press release courtesy Michael Lett.
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