PRESS RELEASE
IO MAKANDAL: Terra Visions
Oct 8 – Oct 29, 2020
In this exhibition of recent works by Io Makandal, she gestures towards enabling further entanglements with non-human things. Over the period of two years Makandal has been tending lovingly to a hot compost pile in a corner of her home garden, though with more frequency during the recent lockdown due to the Covid19 pandemic. This practice of generating soil with dense and complex interspecies relations has been a call to action to mitigate the deadening of ground and to ruminate over ideas of regeneration through dying and decay.
Following on from her previous solo show Life in the Entropics (2019), Terra Visions is a further play on words and has its focus in the ground, on terra, in the microcosmic systems of compost. Soil is the immune system of the earth. Without healthy diverse in organisms and mineral soil, the earth is barren, off balance and ill. Dr Christine Jones, as a researcher in soil biochemistry, says it is the things in the soil that we cannot see - on a microscopic scale - that make up the health of soil. This diversity in biomass is what is imperative to making life on terra thrive. Today, we see an increasing depletion of soil health on a mass scale with mono-crop agriculture to satisfy the demand of increasing populations and corporate agendas. This in turn grows ‘empty’, nutrient-deficient food, which further jeopardises immune system health in bodies of all kinds.
Observing, documenting and experimenting with this process of decomposition and soil making Makandal takes her cue from feminist writers Donna J. Haraway and Anna Tsing, who both write about the urgent need to fabulate possible futures on a damaged earth in the time of capitalist chaos and environmental shift.
Makandal’s drawings, paintings and installations invent abstracted visions of relational entanglements to these issues, and reflect upon the conditions of being human during this time, encouraging one to live and die well.
ARTIST WALK-ABOUTS:
9th & 14th OCTOBER AT 13:00 - 14:00
10th & 17th OCTOBER AT 11:00 - 12:00
PLEASE ENQURE HERE AS SPACES FOR THE WALK-ABOUTS ARE LIMITED
*Face masks are required and must be worn when visiting the gallery
