Introduction - Visual Compost
My art practice, centred around acts of paying embodied attention to my personal domestic food garden (ie gardening), is situated within an eco-feminist world view that seeks to nurture ways of art-making alongside and in partnership with the natural world, in cognition of my non-hierarchical human beingness within an entangled and systemic web of life.
In the selection of artworks and inspirations referenced below, I track a possible path through the conceptual, ideological and material influences which bring diversity to the thematic compost which is now informing my own art practice. From Jean Dubuffet’s iconic Texturologies , which illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of synaesthetic perception and highlight the power of our attention to the “innermost textures… which…constitute the force that inhabits the core of things” (and I find this force in Tacita Dean’s work too) through the pioneering early photographic works of gardener Charles Jones, who championed the commonplace vegetables and flowers he cultivated with an originative attention to light and framing (to reference Anna Tsing’s ‘Arts of noticing’) all the way to recent Sydney National Art School graduate Samantha Jade, who employs cameraless techniques to literally and figurately hot compost film negatives with striking results.
Artists working in this space tend to methods that are inquisitive and collaborative, and they are willing to enter into artistic partnerships whose outcomes are by their very nature unpredictable and which are as fascinating as they are seemingly capricious. In a field increasingly referred to as the ‘Bioarts’, these artists are cognisant of the infinite animacies of life on earth and seek to give voice to experiences of life both human and more-than-human, with methodologies that are embedded in, and inseparable from, material and practice. The elements of time and biological process are actively invited to participate in a highly embodied experience of art-making, which reveals itself in continuous making and unmaking. This invites me to challenge traditional notions of creation and completion, release value judgements, and surrender to process (another appealing feature of Dean’s work).
Many of the contemporary artists I have referenced work in varying alternative photographic modalities, but have in common their interest in exploring new ways of working intuitively with their non-human surroundings, minimising their use of extractive and destructive technologies and materials, and acknowledging the complexities, and embracing the real challenges, of living in Alexis Shotwell’s ‘Compromised Times’.
Finally, I found it difficult in my wanderings about the world wide web to compartmentalise certain types of making within or without the boundaries of what we might decide to denote as ‘Art’, so I have included some references that might sit at the edges of the categorisation: an introductory interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge which contextualises the act of thinking and making locally in light of the great risks (not to mention lie) of globalisation, the creation of a community garden on historically compromised land, a group exhibition centred around soil, and an online academic thinktank exercise which investigates composting as a methodology, which perfectly sums up this collection of works that has informed my own investigations this semester.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dubuffet, J 1995, Prospectus et Tous Ecrits Suivants, H Damisch (ed.), Gallimard, Paris.
Duffy, J 2021, Perceiving Dubuffet, Liverpool University Press.
Kafka, G 2024, ‘Noticing is my way of opposing’ - Future Observatory Journal, Future Observatory Journal, viewed 21 March 2025, <https://fojournal.org/interview/anna-tsing-noticing-is-my-way-of-opposing/>.
Merleau-Ponty, M 1945, Phenomenology of Perception, Forgotten Books, London.
Shotwell, A 2016, Against Purity : Living Ethically in Compromised Times, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Mn.