Bundanon

The Tellus Art Project 2022-23 is a collaboration between UNSW Art and Design, the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens Herbarium, Bundanon and Open Humanities Press. It is the result of an Australian Research Council grant and aims to re-value the plant collection of the Herbarium through the mediation of art, film and story-telling.

In residence at Bundanon

The Tellus Art Project’s Curator, Marie Sierra, selected two artists to represent the vision of plant-human connections. The artworks will be exhibited at Bundanon in late 2022.

Artist Erica Seccombe has worked with the Royal Botanic Gardens and Campbelltown Gallery and her art has investigated immersive projected stereoscopic digital installations. For the Tellus Project at Bundanon, her installation “Planting New Persepctives” will focus on how humans view and experience natural systems in animal and plant life, particularly through the visual language of science, such as microscopy and microCT-X-ray.

Artist Rebecca Mayo will use her hand-dyeing machine insitu, allowing participants to witness local plants being translated into colours, words and images on cloth. Rebecca will work with poet, Lisa Gorton and connect with local voices and local knowledge, to create a collaborative exhibition of textiles.

Rebecca Mayo 

Rebecca Mayo is an Australian artist. She is a Lecturer in the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop at the School of Art & Design, Australian National University. Mayo principally examines relations and interactions between urban ecologically significant sites and people. Most recently she has been reactivating superseded printing and dyeing techniques using dye extracted from plants gathered at urban restoration sites (such as her local creek, The Merri, in Melbourne’s north). The resulting textiles are installed in situ or are re-introduced to the sites via her walking body or via the bodies of fellow restoration volunteers.

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton has a PhD on the poetry of John Donne from the University of Oxford. She is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection Press Release won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; her second, Hotel Hyperion was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal; and her third, Empirical, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry. Her novel The Life of Houses was the co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction. She is the author of Cloudland, a novel for children.