Azza Zein

Vicki West

Grace Pundyk

Rebekah Pryor

Rachel Joy

Lynne Gray

Vicki Couzens

Kate Campbell-Pope

Lauren Black

Lorraine Biggs

Ursula Betka

Ros Atkins

About

How can there be any sensory engagement that does not also involve a flow of materials within a wider field of forces?

Tim Ingold asks this question in relation to the concept of ‘meshwork’, a term he coined to describe the world we inhabit and its entangled lines of life, growth and movement.[1]

In Ingold’s meshwork, every one of these lines – every relation – is a path of flow, like the riverbed or the veins and capillaries of the body, and where living organisms are not limited by the idea of ‘skin’ (or surface) as an impermeable boundary but rather of skin as a permeable zone of intermingling.

Skin, as tissue, is itself a texture formed of a myriad of fine threads tightly interlaced. While it appears to a casual observer as a coherent, continuous surface, in reality it offers up a world of tangled and interlaced trails and traces, sometimes marked and scarred, continually ravelling here and unravelling there. This tangle, claims Ingold, is also the texture of the world where beings grow or ‘issue forth’ along the lines of their relationships and play a part in the very processes of the world’s ongoing generation and regeneration.

In this way, the exhibition ‘Meshwork’ is an intermingling of artists and ‘skin’. It sets out to explore this generativity and interconnectedness, tracing the multiple trails of becoming, wherever they lead, through a series of artworks created on, with or about parchment sourced largely from marsupial roadkill.

The project is the next iteration of a process that was itself generative: starting as an inherited and silenced familial wound originating in WW2 Poland, it became a process of discovery and revelation, of multiple lines travelled, crossed, transgressed, before emerging as a skin practice located along the silenced periphery of the road, the via rupta, in north west Tasmania. Through this evolving and untangling there came an understanding of the cyclical continuum between life and death, non-human and human animal, self and Other, location and dislocation.

As such, invited artists draw on their own practices, experiences and memories, using any medium and/or other materials, to incorporate and respond to the skins with a sensitivity to what it once was, where it lived and died, what it became, what it is now and how this speaks to them. In doing so, the intention is to build a relationship with the material from which work is created. That is, rather than taking for granted the material upon which we make art in order to make art (which in itself is a kind of hierarchical silencing), the artworks will grow out of this understanding of the surface as a boundary-less, tangled web of meandering complexity that empowers and affirms our intermingling.

[1] Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, Oxford 2011