Groundwork

An iterative touring exhibition co-commissioned by UTS Gallery & Art Collection and La Trobe Art Institute, All That is Alive brought together twelve Australian artists and collectives working with living systems.

Drawing on ancient kinships and ancestral knowledge, mycelial intelligence and fermentation, non-hierarchical and interspecies relations, machine desire and collective agency, the artworks in the exhibition engage with the interconnected practices that sustain and define life—human and otherwise.

All That is Alive brings together diverse practices to reflect on life in its many forms, evoking the entangled relations that sustain us and imagining new ways of living together.

Groundwork revolves around Banyard and Van Pagee Anderson sharing an attentivness to the enigmatic world of plants. Working together as settlers on Djaara Country, this installation emerged from a process of collaborative intergenerational practice-led research made in response to this place and the vegetal beings that inhabit it.

Conceived of as an immersive soft sculpture garden, the work celebrates sustained research into plant dyed textiles and vegetal forms. Shaped by the unfolding of lively material relationality, Groundwork invites gallery visitors into a space of sensuous texture and colour - a world of tactile visual play. Groundwork explores the wonder that arises through purposeful coexistence with the world of plants and questions what we might learn about other ways of living and learning through careful time spent contemplating the lives of these enigmatic keepers of place.