“Connections: Part One”, Megalo Print Studio +
Gallery, Kingston, until August 25. Reviewed by CAREN FLORANCE
NATIONAL Science Week has inspired many science-related exhibitions
around town, and Megalo is participating, presenting five science-printmaking
collaborations. As the title suggests, these five clusters are just a beginning
point, the start of some very interesting conversations between artists and
scientists.
When Ingeborg Hansen began working at Megalo, she fell in
love with traditional four-colour dot-screen screenprinting. She is also
passionate about her garden and the bee-hives hosted in it. She is collaborating
with the Australian National Insect collection at the CSIRO’s Discovery Centre,
and her work transforms small to large: gorgeous furry bees (at first whole,
and then pinned) and poignant broken butterflies, each image built from swarms
of CMYK dots.
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| UK Frederick, Starscape3 |
UK Frederick is a hybrid artist-archaeologist who loves to
work with contemporary material artefacts like cassette tapes and photographic
slides. She’s been working with archived glass plate negatives of space from Mt
Stromlo, and her series of prints is called “The Search”. They combine
screenprint and chemigrams (direct chemical photography without a negative), tapping
into her fascination with the role that photography has played in the
exploration of space, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Her hand-made
images are covered in the kind of scrawling notation that astronomers make when
comparing star clusters, looking for change and discovery.
Nicci Haynes continues her own exploration of sound and
language by collaborating with ANU’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of
Language. Dr Julia Miller, from the Centre, shared some sound files from tribal
Papua New Guinea and Haynes experimented with making dynamic prints. She
positioned a speaker under her etching plates and let the recorded sound
vibrations move salt over a layer of touch-sensitive printmaking ground. The
early results are labelled as ‘salt vibration’ prints, and are properly notated to
record her scientific methodology.
Erica Seccombe has long worked in collaboration with ANU
mathematicians and scientists, adapting cutting edge visual processes for art
purposes, and she has curated this exhibition concept. Her work here is a
series of prints responding to a single question: how to map a sphere using
lines that don’t touch each other? The results are like puzzle pieces, squiggly
like brain patterning, and arranged in a layered sequence that packs and
unpacks, depending on the way you approach them. They are computer generated,
but transferred to paper via screenprint, which showcases Seccombe’s skill with
a squeegee.
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| Anna Madeleine,“Pranatamangsa” |
And finally, Anna Madeleine gives us “Pranatamangsa”, a heady mix of high tech and low tech, an augmented reality artwork based on traditional Indonesian farming calendars. The low tech is a simply stitched paper zine to accompany a line of prints along the wall. Each print is a circle scribed with line symbols – a star chart – and a short text about seasonal observations and crop growth. This in itself makes for interesting reading, but there is also a small tablet that holds an app which, when held in front of each print, activate a hand-drawn animation showing plants germinating, growing, being harvested, bringing each text to life.
Madeleine’s work is the only one that feels resolved, and
this is because it was produced on an Asialink Arts residency in 2017.
Everything else is freshly-minted, at the start of a quest to forge
relationships and search for new, shared understandings of the world around us.
All the artists involved are excited about the coming year’s experimentation
with these new ideas. During next year’s Science Week, we will be able to make
our own observations about their progress.
