This project unfolds 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 simply 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.

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Angus Brown
4 March – 18 April
Opening Wednesday 4 March, 6–8pm

Leon Rice-Whetton, Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge
29 April – 13 June
Opening Wednesday 29 April, 6–8pm

Rachel Rovira, Katie Paine
24 June – 15 August
Opening Wednesday 24 June, 6–8pm

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Pulp,
Angus Brown

This body of work treats the photograph both as an image, and as an object shaped by the same material forces it depicts. Working in Western Victoria, Angus has created large-format images of blue gum plantations and the industrial sites where these trees are processed into pulp. The images document 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 mass.

Offsite, the project follows the life cycle of the blue gum from plantation to pulp, tracing the transformation of tree into paper. This movement is represented in the photographs themselves, and also materially embedded within them. Timber collected from the plantations is pulped into sawdust and introduced into the exhibition as a sculptural element. The same material is used to dye the paper onto which some of  the photographs have been printed, and is also incorporated into the screen-printing process itself. The image surface is therefore inseparable from the resource it depicts.

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.

In this way, the work approaches photography through a materialist lens. The photograph is not treated as a neutral window onto landscape, but as a physical site of contact and exchange. The wood fibre that once stood in rows across Western Victoria reappears as pulp, as pigment, as residue within the print. Matter circulates. It is extracted, processed, transported, returned. The image does not sit outside this movement. It becomes another stage within it.

At the same time, the project does not overlook the tensions embedded in these systems. Industrial forestry and large-scale pulping are tied to questions of land use, export economies and environmental management. The rotation of planting, harvesting and processing can feel relentless, producing landscapes marked by uniformity and erasure. Yet within this cycle there are also moments of strange intensity: immense piles of woodchip, compressed fibres, surfaces stripped to their raw state. These sites generate highly textural and unfamiliar topographies.

Rather than aestheticising industry from a distance, Angus works from within these impressions. The tangible reproduction methods used in the exhibition attempt to register the density and movement of this material world. Fibre, dust and stain enter the gallery space, shifting the work beyond documentation toward a more empirical engagement with process and structure. In doing so, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the blue gum plantations of Victoria’s west as part of a wider cycle of resource extraction that shapes both landscape and image.