degree show | Uselessdoughnuts

Collaborative degree show with Maya Ronchetti /

ongoing research

Welcome

this space is an inter-sensory mixtape of our explorations into thinking and making. The playful environment has been woven together where new ways of knowing can emerge.

COMPOST

through cooking together scraps accumulated in the compost wheel; the food-form relics of conversations, gestures and thoughts which begin to ferment, decompose attract beings who arrive in the mould to regenerate and repurpose the leftovers. Here we can speculate possibilities, trajectories for ways of being, the states and forms of things, the volatile or changeable nature of things over time. Compost offers hopeful thoughts surrounding waste, community, coexistence. Worms in the soil rejiggle and rewrite histories. New life is germinated from the discarded.

video still

compost wheel was filled with organic remains of meals cooked together

conversations are like linguistic compost bins – fermenting linguistics. Sharing microbes that decompose ideas in both our brains.

It returns to the soil where it becomes a part of history, stratified, moved around by worms and then nutrients for new life

volcanic rock and its 3D print

table artefacts

two ceramic snakes

mouldy celeriac, celeriac, potato with sprouts, nails and wire, wood shavings from spoon, 3D print of celeriac, soil, terracotta and ceramic hoops, tourmaline, ceramic thumb-pot, star anise, ceramic bird of paradise, beetles, wood with reptiles

kombucha

conductivity

Sparks and zest contained within stuff; like dormant volcanoes. How to perceive the (quiet?) dynamism of rocks, soil, swedes, potatoes? Imagining ways to listen and tune into these things.

mining waste suspended by ribbons

ways of attempting to understand certain materials.

Their properties beyond the realm of functionality,

exploring non-functionality,

kinship and friendship between materials, objects and textures. (why?)

why arranging and placing feel good for the (soul?)

projecting human ideas onto objects;

how can they exist for themselves.

Things for things.

things without things.

stuff on its own terms.

tricky, slippery

fragile, robust

changing and shape shifting

thinking about conductivity and the ways it manifests.

how things seem inert or dormant (like rocks, tables)

and other seem full of life (a boiling kettle, shole of fish)

thoughts around activation, deactivation,

how things react when they come into contact with one another,

the weirdness of both observing and causing things to happen all of the time.

conductivity branching out like power lines

creating links between objects, beings, minerals, ether,

much like synaptic gaps,

electrically conductive material, searching and spreading.

a place to explore ways of being and reimagining preconceived ideas about the properties/nature(s) of things.

weaving

Weaving is within the DNA of us all and within all places of interconnectivity. Whether that’s the weaving of voices in a conversation, the weaving of sounds in the street, the weaving of ideas and story when watching a film, it’s the process happening at all moments in all states of energy, the weaving is the interlayering, blending and linking of things, like the weaving of people and cultures. Weaving is the repetition or cycle of life allowing for order as one thing sinks beneath one surface and the other rises over it, weaving is present throughout the cosmos, the sun and moon weave above and under from day to night.

The piecing together of finer details, weaving is part of an array of associations and due to the landscape of the woven, it leaves an essence that exceeds and deepens portrayal of texture compared to the unrealistic liminal surface we sliding around. “The modern logic of inversion” (Ingold) The connecting of strands or loose ends to form intertwined environments like the one we live in and stand in, a multifaceted environment with realms and layers we can’t necessarily see or sense, places more complex, more simple, more linear, chaotic than what we expect or know or just places that are different.

spoon

Amplifying small scale activities.

Valuing the preparations, chatter, smells and sounds when cooking.

Rhythmic, performative body and extended limbs causing the change of state on substances, the pounding and grinding down of substance, dispersing, sensorial interference.

Unifying, collective; cooking and creating together gives rise to thoughts around the performative and collaborative nature of cooking; we drink and conversations arrive. We film and record the activities. We salvage scraps of food from the process and they accumulate in the compost wheel.

thoughts of scraps, waste, repurposing,

thoughts of the meals eaten, conversations and ideas prompted by food.

thoughts of nutrition, hierarchies, exploitation/ethics of food industries.

thoughts of pathways travelled by food stuffs and places crossed.

turntable

Archeoacoustics is a method by which the acoustic behaviours of archeological sites and artefacts are observed and investigated, and in which researchers speculate how new information may be unearthed from the sonic characteristics of the sites and artefacts in review. For example, the grooves in a piece of hand spun pottery, with the right tools/equipment may be able to play-back sounds similarly to how a vinyl record would, and reveal hidden information.

visual representations of the sounds of dogs barking (blue) and radio interference (orange)

sculptures

Pieced together by fragments from other stories, times and place. Our objects are limbs to the space and limbs have different muscles and purposes. We are made of pieces, rearranged we are already symbiotic beings, as the sculptures are. Overlaying and connecting disparate objects to create new being and stories, recycling, making new, reincarnation and relearning from what we already know, a lesson of life in these times, recognising the need to allow for new beings and stories to form, accepting differences and origins, connecting, gathering for the present and future.

SHELF

Tiny ceramic creatures who arrived from collaborative activities,

formed by the hands and tools of friends in response to sound and smells.

They have been through and may continue to go through and change states.

at one point, the clay was part of the ground.

then a bag,

then hands,

spices,

metal tools,

heat,

glaze,

more heat,

and now shelf.

Who knows what will happen next.

Small excerpts from the main video, which is 50 minutes long.

VIDEO/COLLAGE

Everything arrives from accumulated external info which filter through brain, through limbs or other tools into something else, along the way becoming tangled in interpretations, reinterpretations, rewiring. Thoughts and ideas come out jumbled, fragmented and wonky, but not necessarily in a bad way. Reinterpreted through material, form, language, senses… Things made are ultimately a sediment of a coalesce of ideas. Therefore it is something new now, and it can become re-tangled in somebody else’s thought jumble. Here lies territory for new ways of thinking, feeling, understanding. its kind of a place of otherness and becoming, open malleable and receptive.

appropriation through collage allows for the repurposing and reordering of, cultures, ideas, making connections and links and juxtapositions between these things.

For a moment, repurposing appropriation, collaging, allows for the repurposing of preconceived definitives around cultures and people and understandings, it rearranges preconceptions and blurs divisions between rules and learning, extending belief and teasing the brain to momentarily conceive what it witnesses.