SymbioticA 2006

I was lucky enough to be funded by the Australia Council for the Arts to undertake a six month residency at the SymbioticA art and science collaborative research laboratory at the University of Western Australia. As part of my residency I took on a Biomedical Engineering Honours student which meant that I extended my time in WA beyond the initial six months in order to be there for the duration of his project. This page is an overview of some of the work I undertook during my residency. Documentation of the research as it occured can be found on my blog under the SymbtioticA category.

I've called this 'My Year of Biomess', as one of the most enjoyable and different things about being at SymbioticA, compared to some of my previous work, was the messy materiality of the processes involved. The several different research trajectories that formed during my residency were born out of investigations of material transformation. I became interested in 'making strange' certain capacities and qualitites of biological materials. The transition from living to non-living, organism to product forms the core conceptual focus of the work.

As the primary raison d'etre of SymbioticA is research not production, there was no exhibition planned as part of the residency. However, there are several works that I am now putting together from my research outcomes.