Dear All
Happy New Year! I hope you are well and rested after the festive season. It’s been great hearing of everybody’s adventures over the last few weeks and this has inspired me to recount mine:
Works
The year began with the solo residency and exhibition fast|slow|complex at Spectrum Project Space in Perth, Western Australia. 20 years in the making it was based on trying to connect personal waste and possessions with processes at the levels of local ecosystems and global climates.
Amongst the group shows around the world, the Cusp sound work went off touring with the Adaptation show and I was included in the Bunbury Biennale with The burden of an action that now appears unwise. The shy (dissolution + exchange) conceptual mail art project is also still going (but currently the albatross has been lost, twice, in Sydney in December and we are still waiting fingers crossed for it to materialise again).
A major highlight was the P A A mini residency about Little Penguins, Sydney Harbour and Japanese minisubs at The Cross Arts Project in Sydney for the Novel Ecologies exhibition (curated by Jasmin Stephens). I created two works, the .–. / .- / .- (penguin anticipatory archive) and doing so that (tie a knot in it, the world is a handkerchief, a pile of promises). So far potentials for 2014 include collaborating on a pollen project and participating in a show called Canopy about Western Australia forests.
Writing
I continue to write monthly reports on the art scene in Western Australia for Art Monthly. Publications finalised in 2013 included Perdita Phillips – Sounding and thinking like an ecosystem (co-author Merle Patchett) in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 27 114-128 and Observing across scales: Broome Bird Observatory as a site of multiple exchanges in the Animal Studies Journal, 2(1), 2013, 74-81
My thoughts about art and sustainability, urban ecology and zombie environmentalism were presented at the fabulous Future Nature, Future Culture[s] 2013 Balance-Unbalance Conference (May 31 to June 2, Noosa, Queensland) where I met up with other members of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology, the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference (1-4 July, The University of Western Australia) and at The Aesthetics of Sustainability (3-4 October, Curtin University). Let’s hope these writings get published at some point too.
Travels
The Field_Notes – Deep Time workshop at Kilpisjärvi in northern Finland was organised by the Finnish Society of Bioart. This was a life-changing opportunity to work further with walking and landscapes. Afterwards in Helsinki I talked about living time at the associated symposium. Apart from the quick trips to Sydney and Finland (+ Norway and Estonia) I also travelled to Suzhou in China to research Scholar’s Stones, ending the year with $30 in my bank account.
Easy e-vites
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South Georgia Islands in 2014
Finally, thanks to the generosity of 21 amazing friends and supporters, I only have 790 dollars left of the $2500 I’ve been asked to raise to support The Clipperton Project’s expedition to the South Georgia Islands in March. That’s only 16 more people donating $50 (or more) by 12 January. This expedition combines art and science and will be surveying wandering albatross populations and levels of plastic in ecosystems. I’d dearly love to go and do some drawing and sound recording! Please donate here http://clippertonproject.causevox.com/perditaphillips (further details here http://www.clippertonproject.com/expeditions/south-georgia-2014/).
I love hearing news from you all — may your own life travels be both tender and richly rewarding and your friends and family be safe and well in 2014
best wishes
Perdy