Marian Tubbs: And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with figures
Photo credit: Tricia King
On display 14 October - 14 January, each night from 5.00pm – 11.00pm
And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with figures, is a new immersive video work by Marian Tubbs, developed through fieldwork across rainforest fragments (Booyong Nature Reserve, Bundjalung), everglades (Kabi Kabi) and a sandy island (K'Gari).
Field recordings, photography and video are transformed into a high-definition, large-scale animation as an invitation to consider how vision technologies can serve as tools for creative environmental research. Drawing on emerging technologies, biosphere animal characters and surrealist modes of composition, the work reflects on children’s books and the role of visual language in learning about land from a young age. It imagines alternative and co-designed futures by listening to stories of ecological care held within these sites before colonisation and renewed through contemporary collaborations and learning.
Marian Tubbs is an artist whose assemblage-focused practice explores her broad research interests in digital and vision technologies, materiality, language and ecologies. She conflates material juxtapositions between body and object, high and low culture, analogue and digital, physical and virtual, natural and artificial, to transform the everyday into a space of interrogation. Often constructed from the physical and digital detritus of contemporary life – from found photos and surveillance footage to scavenged disposable items – her works position objects, images and text in new or unexpected combinations to question traditional notions of value.
Tubbs lives and works between Bundjalung (Lismore) and Kabi Kabi (Sunshine Coast). She holds a PhD from UNSW Art & Design and is course coordinator and senior lecturer in Art and Design at Southern Cross University. Her work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australian National University, and the University of New South Wales collection.
Research and development of this work was funded by The Refinery's Noosa Natural Ecologies residency, an initiative delivered by SCCA in partnership with the Creative Ecologies Research Cluster at UniSC and Noosa Council. Supported by Major Partners; Sunshine Coast Council and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. The work has been further developed for the Lismore Quad Projection Series.
