UMWELTEN
Umwelten is a multidisciplinary installation inspired by a phenomenological engagement with the wetland ecosystems of the Perth Great Lakes region. It is comprised of sound, video, natural materials, watercolour, drawing, and print-media works. This engagement with wetlands drives an aesthetic response that is practice led, allowing for the works to develop through an intuitive rather than conceptual approach.
These disparate works are arranged as an installation, but with care taken not to impose a unity or order on any inherent messiness or seeming disjunction across the works. The project is intended not as a work about nature, but as a collaboration with nature, and that messiness, if it exists, is embraced as a true account of nature participating in the work. ‘Nature’ is included as an active participant in the process – soaking fabric in the water of wetlands, dragging paper across the branches of burnt trees, utilising found objects like bark and branches within the gallery space – allowing for what Val Plumwood calls nature in the ‘active voice’.
Though the project is inspired by wetlands, it is not about wetlands. It is aimed instead at the construction of an atmospheric, affective space. The goal is not representation but aesthesis. I do not wish to overdetermine the response to the work, but this aesthesis is intended as a rethinking of the aesthetics of nature founded in traditional representations of landscape. Through this rethinking I wish to be part of a larger artistic and theoretical movement fostering a greater appreciation for the interconnection and entanglement of human and non-human worlds.
Photographs by Bo Wong.