entwined as others| Helen Hardess + Tiana Jefferies
22 -30 January 2022
'entwined as others' is a collaboration between Helen Hardess and Tiana Jefferies, combining their shared art practices of casting, collecting, assembling and collaborative action. It will focus on the affective registers of objects, bodies and architecture of The Old Lock Up site. Through material histories and the sensorial, the project explores the ungraspable forces of our destabilised biosphere, and recognises that humanity cannot survive without non-human others.
As a point of departure, they reference the Old Lock Up’s history as a space of transition, marginalised bodies, punitive architecture and unequal power relations. Hardess and Jefferies aim to centralise the affective forces of these histories as well as the agency of their materials. Interested in alternative and irreverent forms of ecocriticism, the artists reject traditional conceptions of ‘nature’ which have been wielded to validate harm against vulnerable populations, human and non-human.
The installation’s materials have been sourced from marginalised or transitional spaces - recycling bins, skips, kerbside collections, and domestic waste. Compositions of these objects engage with physical qualities such as balance, tension, precarity, dependency and synchronicity. In this way, compositions reflect the qualities of ecosystems and an understanding that they are assemblages of human and non-human actors. The exhibition includes a casting workshop, after which, participants will have the opportunity to place their works among the installation.
Opening Event | Performance from Enjoy Our Last Century On Earth (more info below) | 22 January 2022
Workshop | Saturday 29 January 2022
HELEN HARDESS
www.helenhardess.com | IG: @helen.hardess
The artist acknowledges a white settler heritage, and that she lives and works on Jagera and Turrbul country. Their lands were stolen, and sovereignty was never ceded.
Helen Hardess (she/her) is a Meanjin based multidisciplinary artist, whose work is most often realised through installation. She works across audio, stop motion animation, welded and cast forms, found and waste materials, and expanded drawing. Studio and field methodologies foreground the vital agencies of other-than-human worlds, in an interrogation of what it means to be living in a colonised country and in “the age of humans”.
With these concerns in mind, her practice takes two approaches. One approach is ecocritical commentary through irreverence and playfulness. The second focus is participation in an ongoing re-mapping and re-storying project based around the Maranoa River, Queensland. Initiated in 2017, the community-based project is co-directed by visual artist Jude Roberts and Gunggari artist and academic Dr Vicki Saunders. There is a further iteration of this project planned for 2023-24.
Helen’s work has been shown in BLINDSIDE (Naarm), Sydney University, and Meanjin’s STABLE, Redland Art Gallery, Springhill Reservoir, House Conspiracy, and POP, Webb and Project Galleries, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She has a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) Queensland College of Art (2022).
TIANA JEFFRIES
www.tianajefferies.com | IG: @tianajefferies
Tiana Jefferies is a Meanjin based, spatial practitioner using casting, digital modelling, and installation processes to offer an ecocentric perspective of materiality and relationality. Her interdisciplinary practice aims to engage with the visceral forces and feelings provoked by the current ecological crisis. To frame the ungraspable and complex relationships between humans, architectures and non-human lifeforms, Jefferies develops site-responsive, improvised installations using found and discarded materials. Through performative processes, she seeks to reveal materials as co-collaborators, transcending their ordinariness. Moreover, intersecting interests in queer theory and irreverent ecocriticism have guided her practice to more deeply consider questions of disposition, feeling and affect. She desires to promote the vibrancy of relationships between art objects and audiences and the subtle but potent affective capacities that mediate these encounters.
Jefferies graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art in 2018, during which, she participated in a study exchange at Edinburgh College of Art learning traditional casting processes. In 2021, she completed a Master of Philosophy in Creative Practice at the Queensland University of Technology, receiving the Dorothy Birt Memorial Prize for Experimental Practice. Recent exhibitions include those at The Old Lock Up, Wreckers Art Space, Metro Arts, The Walls and the accompanying exhibition to Sydney College of Arts’ Birds and Language conference. She is currently artist in residence at the Hope Street Studio in South Brisbane, facilitated by the Griffith University Art Museum.
E.O.L.C.O.E.(2019) | Opening Night Performance
After releasing a compilation of previous recordings on local cassette imprint Minimal Impact in September 2021 (catalogue no. MI27), Enjoy Our Last Century on Earth present their first retro-action since December 2019. With an invitation to perform at entwined as others, the industrial-noise duo counter the power imbalances inherent in many collaborative processes. Their set incorporates sounds extracted from audio work Mimesis and the wee-loo (Jefferies and Hardess, 2021).
