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.

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Image | Brett Eloff, courtesy 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. Capturing the substance and significance of industry across South Western Victoria, Angus has produced physically embodied images of the blue gum plantations across the region, as well as the industrial sites where these trees are processed into pulp. The photographs 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 scale.

In the gallery 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. Scrap limbs salvaged from recently flattened plantations have been pulped into sawdust; to be introduced into the exhibition space as a sculptural element, tangible image surface and paper toning method. Strengthening the connection to process and place, these material links help to make the image-based works inseparable from the resource they depict.

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
Opening Wednesday 29 April, 6–8pm

The second chapter of Matter & Spirit gathers three practices around the network (dendritic, 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.

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