Nascent Network
Nascent Network is an installation that consists of various media, materials and mechanisms. The work investigates the Rhizome as both a subject and a methodology for thinking about our relationship with and understanding of nature.
In botany, a rhizome is a subterranean plant stem. The term is developed as a philosophical concept in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s text “A thousand plateaus” as an antidote to the over emphasis western society places on linearity and binary logic.
The exhibition space features a large intervention in the form of a carved image of the invasive plant species Japanese knotweed. Knotweed’s invasiveness is due to its rhizomatic growth. This troublesome, nonlinear nature of the plant is instrumentalised as a methodology to form various inter-reliant works that the comprise the installation.
The work questions binaries surrounding our understanding of nature, as seemingly divergent forms of matter are allowed to exist in a form of co-constitution. Barbed wire is braided into a length of grass. Sleek matte screens revel a rhizome slowly being uprooted, their wires dangling like the root systems they have come to depict. Light sensitive chlorophyll is used as an intervention upon glass screens and windows within the space. The chlorophyll will age and disintegrate within the space of a week, while the moving image works play on loop and the image of knotweed will remain fixed-carved into the space.
The tension between the fixed and the fluid is further explored through the presence of screens, frames and other display mechanisms which play an active role in the installation. The role these devices play in the work draws attention to how any understanding of nature is partial, supported or informed by ways of perceiving.