/stāj/ 2.1 (2021-2023)

This writing is a window into my mind and the meandering thoughts behind a series of sculptural experiments and installations I have made from compostable materials. The work explores the porosity of bodies as entities and the symbiosis that becomes possible with permeability. Thinking through a critical discourse of ecologies, I (re)imagine and “propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows” through a materially emergent and ecological, situated practice (Haraway 2016, 136). I work with the embedded ideas by moving between 3 different lenses. I begin with Introweaving, my research as a network of pathways that a worm might meander through in a compost pile, opening the various spaces and materials that I use throughout my experiments. Bodies as microworlds probes notions of the body and its porous boundaries; ingesting and regurgitating become critical and generative metaphors for processing ingestible biomaterials made from food refuse. In/Between embraces the active process of borrowing and mutating processes and methodologies from distinct spaces and bodies of knowledge. (Un)Becoming zooms outwards to the cyclical aspects of life and time – exploring animacy, decay and regeneration as expressive processes. Complementing the initial Introweaving is a final section Interleaving, where I pause and gesture towards future experiments. I view this project and thinking as a become-with (ref. symbiosis/ the more-than-human/ land) is an ongoing process. These ideas are need to continuously percolating… my writing and my project are eternally compos(t)ing…