Into the Ether: Mother
Umwelt Collective
25 September — 9 October 2020
Online Exhibition
Sensorial agents Umwelt Collective invite you to be enveloped in an intimate audio- visual, olfactory experience that takes you out of the digital ether and lands you back in your body. Drawing on shared childhood memories of finding identities and boundaries through the natural environment, Mother asks us to find ways to communicate with place. Set 100 years from today, Umwelt Collective imagine a world that has been suspended, allowing the earth time to heal without human intervention. In this world sensorial agents are trained in interspecies empathy, communication and sensing techniques.
Umwelt Collective is a collaboration between artists and sisters Merinda and Lowana Davies. Umwelt is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. Every individual’s umwelten is a unique view of the world. Lowana and Merinda create work that sits at the cross section of installation, dance, physical theatre and digital art. Their work is informed by embodying different perspectives and research into emotional and physical states in our internal and external worlds. Their collaboration seeks to disrupt passivity and inspire human connection with the environment. Merinda and Lowana first started making art together as kids using their collective imagination to navigate new forms of play and creativity, from this base they grew and continued to collaborate, within larger performance ensembles and testing their individual ideas. In 2018 they formalised their collaboration under Umwelt Collective, through a month-long residency at The Farm. Across all of their work they regularly collaborate with composer Tom Lyons. Since 2018 they have developed ‘Re:membering’ a live performance work supported by Home of the Arts and Gold Coast City Council (2018 - 2019), ‘Stormwater’ single channel video work commissioned as part of Subjective Spectacle at Sidesault Festival, Melbourne (November 2019), and ‘In Sync’ a single channel video work and ‘Disintegration’ a live performance work commissioned as part of Young Heroines II, at Mavericks Art Space (August 2018).
This exhibition was part of the online ‘Into the Ether’ program.
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This program is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding advisory body. |
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