mark (video still)
Rituals of Emboidied Knowing, Chapman & Bailey, Abbotsford, VIC, 2023
For this 3 channel installation I researched the deep history of representation and the first deliberate marks made by humans. The oldest, recorded, deliberate mark made by a human for its own sake is a zigzag etched into a mussel shell found at a dig in Trinil, eastern Java, (dated to between 540,000 and 430,000 years old). By comparison, the famous cave paintings of Spain and France are 20-30000 years old.I have considered mark making because it is of deep significance to the history of both art and symbolic language. Over the course of the Templeton project for which this exhbition was a celebration I considered and discussed ritual as a means of negotiating the unknown. As attempts at meaning making, language and art provide means to create exograms – external renderings of that which is otherwise internal, they navigate and delineate the division between the known and the unknown. In my work, mark, I have used digital distortion techniques and fragmentation to evoke the emergence of language and representation out of the noise of a pre-linguistic state.
mark (Installation View)
Rituals of Emboidied Knowing, Chapman & Bailey, Abbotsford, VIC, 2023
Photo by Emma Byrnes