This project takes shape across three consecutive exhibitions, conceived as chapters within a single inquiry into matter, extraction, transformation, and site. Each exhibition approaches these questions differently, yet all are grounded in a shared investigation: what if matter is not inert substrate, but active participant? What if landscapes, infrastructures, roots, minerals, pulp, clay, cables, and wreckage exert forces of their own?

The project draws from contemporary vital materialist thought, particularly the work of Jane Bennett, whose conception of vibrant matter proposes that agency is distributed across human and nonhuman assemblages. Matter does not only receive form. It impedes, exceeds, collaborates. This thinking resonates with earlier philosophies of nature in which matter is understood as duration and spontaneous generation rather than static substance.

At the same time, the project remains attentive to political economy. In dialogue with Joshua Simon’s writing on neomaterialism, the exhibitions consider how materials circulate through regimes of extraction, production, and value. Timber becomes pulp. Pulp becomes paper. Clay becomes surface. Infrastructure becomes spectacle. Submarine cables become invisible architecture. Commodities and ruins alike accumulate historical force.

Across the three exhibitions, material transformation is understood as a structuring force, shaping landscapes, infrastructures, and forms through ongoing processes of extraction, decay, circulation, and renewal.

— Lucie Loy

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Image | Brett Eloff, University of the Witwatersrand. The Makapansgat cobble, a jasperite pebble excavated in 1925 from the Makapan Valley, South Africa. Its nearest geological source is approximately 32km from where it was found, suggesting it was carried there by an Australopithecus africanus individual between 2 and 3 million years ago, making it one of the oldest known manuports.

A manuport is a natural object whose only transformation is displacement. No extraction, no processing, just a decision by someone to pick something up and move it somewhere else. Because manuports are unmodified, archaeologists have concluded that many must have been chosen for their beauty , making them some of the earliest known recognitions of aesthetic character, and possibly some of the earliest examples of (found) art.

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Pulp,
Angus Brown

4 March – 18 April

In Pulp, Angus treats the photograph both as an image and as an object shaped by the same material forces it depicts. For this body of work, Angus travelled through the ancestral lands of the Gunditjmara peoples, now known by some as the Green Triangle - a region of south-west Victoria centred around Hamilton and Portland, and the largest wood fibre producing region in Australia. Across approximately 130,000 hectares, Tasmanian blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) is grown, harvested, and processed on a 10-15 year rotation cycle, valued for its short, high-quality fibres and high pulp yield. At processing facilities near Myamyn and the Port of Portland, woodchip is accumulated, loaded and shipped to China and Japan for use in paper and rayon textile manufacturing.

Angus returned from the region with photographic documentation of vast monocultures, open-air stockpiles and the continuous movement of timber through 24-hour pulping terminals. These landscapes feel engineered and otherworldly, shaped by extraction, repetition and scale. Scrap limbs salvaged from recently flattened plantations have been pulped into sawdust, introduced into the exhibition space as a sculptural element, tangible image surface and paper toning method. The image-based works become inseparable from the resource they depict.

There is something in this that speaks directly to the logic of the Green Triangle itself - raw material extracted from farmland, exported unrefined, transformed elsewhere, and returned in another form. The exhibition stages a version of this same movement (tree to pulp, pulp to paper, paper to image) collapsing the distance between landscape and representation. Matter circulates. This movement is represented in the photographs themselves, and also materially embedded within them. 

What emerges is a kind of circular return. The tree becomes pulp, pulp becomes paper, paper becomes image, and the image carries the residue of its origin. There is something quietly alchemical in this shift of states, where matter changes form yet retains a trace of what it has been. The material does not disappear into representation. It persists within it.

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Strange Powers,
Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, Leon Rice-Whetton

29 April – 13 June

The second chapter of Matter & Spirit gathers three practices around the network (electrical, mycorrhizal, logistical) as material condition and active force. Where the opening exhibition traced the life cycle of a single resource, this exhibition moves outward. Into contested river systems, industrial dead zones, and the underground life of soil. All three artists are attentive to what Jane Bennett calls thing-power - the capacity of nonhuman matter to impede, exceed, or redirect human intention. But none of the works exist outside of capital either. A river shaped by five thousand years of mining and the British company that industrialised it; a tree felled to service power lines; a portside landscape restructured around the movement of freight. They are also grounded, then, in the political question Joshua Simon poses: who extracts, who profits, and what gets left behind. The works in this exhibition follow matter as it organises itself; across, beneath, and often in spite of the systems imposed on it.

Nicholas Burridge's installation enters the Río Tinto Mining Basin in southwestern Spain, where the river runs red. A network of electrical cables and junction boxes house vignettes of this other worldly place; photographic works printed in the river's hyper-acidic waters, stories of scientists working in the field and a sample from Tasmania, the regions geologic twin. At the core of the work is a question that scientists, corporations, and communities still contest. Is the river's extreme acidity a natural phenomenon, the ancient metabolic signature of subterranean organisms feeding on one of the world's largest sulphide ore deposits? Or is it primarily the consequence of mining, and in particular the industrial devastation that followed 1873, when the British-owned Río Tinto Company Limited took control and scaled extraction? The answer determines everything. What the river is, who is responsible for it, and what, if anything, should be done. Nic does not attempt to resolve this. His work inhabits the contradiction, making visible a matter that is, all at once, geology, microbiology, industrial ruin, and living system.

Kym Maxwell arrives at similar terrain from a different excavation. Following the involuntary removal of an Australian Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) to make way for power lines in her garden, Kym turned the act of uprooting into a durational encounter with the mycorrhizal networks below ground. Where the logic of infrastructure saw only an obstacle to be removed, Kym found a dense, interconnected world beneath. A root system more complex and beautiful than anticipated, one that continued to generate new growth from each severed point. The resulting sculptures and drawing carry the weight of this specific loss but also register forces beyond grief. A tree conducts an electrical current through the human body when touched. Soil decomposes and regenerates. Oil transforms under pressure, whether geological or industrial. This last material pulls the work outward. A large drawing traces the ecology and science of the oil industry, moving through one manmade crisis after another, from the exploitation of natural resources to what Kym describes as petro-masculinity. Through what she calls a fem-based petroscape, Kym educates herself on her own terms, unearthing a history of extraction that mirrors the one she began with in her own garden. The drawing is accompanied by a sculptural assemblage. A male form on a plaster table, surrounded by buckets of engine oil, food fat, water, and cooking oils. Materials of modernity and monocultural collapse, sitting together as paradox. Like Nic, Kym is working with matter that refuses to be passive.

Leon Rice-Whetton's video work, you are passing another…, turns to the networks that circulate above ground and on the surface. The work moves across truck routes, port infrastructure, freeway bypasses and the waterways of West Melbourne. Hanging over this all is the ever-stationary Melbourne Star, a $100 million observation wheel that opened two years late, closed after 40 days due to structural failure, took five years to rebuild, never turned a profit, and shut permanently in 2021.[^] The Star promised to transform this landscape into a destination, and to produce spectacle value from a place that otherwise very much resists it. A monument to engineered experience that barely functioned, the Star is perhaps the most literal example of thing-power in the exhibition. An object of spectacle that failed spectacularly but remains as a permanent fixture on the landscape. Drawn to this area through an ongoing preoccupation with the Star, recent infrastructure developments such as the West Gate tunnel and their own experience as a commuter cyclist, Leon looks to the density of competing networks that cross over one another if you stay still long enough to notice. Freight logistics, failed entertainment infrastructure, bird populations, tidal waterways and the occasional pedestrian all present in the same frame. Through methods of extended duration, stretching and stitching footage to subtly dilate time they apply pressure to the habit of passing through. Birdsong cuts across the hum of trucks. Leon directs our attention towards the details, and finds a site that is layered with competing forces, none of them still.

Together, these three artists form a loose but resonant argument. They are dealing with networks that organise matter and life in ways that exceed, predate, or operate indifferently to the human interests that claim to govern them. All three are embedded in the political economy of extraction, and are informed by a vital materialist instinct - that matter is not merely acted upon but acts also.

[^] Though recent news of a completed ‘creditor deal’ has teased the reopening of the star sometime in 2026.

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Rachel Rovira, Katie Paine
24 June – 15 August
Opening Thursday 25 June

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Images | (1-6) Angus Brown, Pulp. 4 March – 18 April. Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.