Subtile Matter brings together three years of work by Luisa-Maria MacCormack alongside a new body of sculpture and installation. Moving across watercolour, pastel, ceramic, latex and glass, the exhibition brings together an unruly collection of objects, artefacts, bodies and beings, preserved in the form of a speculative collection.
Subtile Matter takes the form of a kind of Wunderkammer. A looming anatomical specimen of an unidentifiable body unfolds across a totemic watercolour; a handmade reliquary contains a fragment of something that might still be alive; votive offerings from a culture that may never have existed sit alongside snapshots of bodies arrested in time, and beings or entities glimpsed through microscopes, spied through a glass darkly. Botanical forms multiply and slip into unstable extra-human anatomies; leaves grow mouths and attempt to speak, nipples proliferate on twisting vines, microscopic plant structures become difficult to tell apart from structures inside your own body. The boundaries between bodies, and between taxa, begin to loosen, allowing space for something stranger to slip through the cracks.
The exhibition takes its title from seventeenth-century ideas around matter and consciousness, and draws particularly on the work of writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish. Writing at a moment when scientific knowledge was being radically remade, Cavendish challenged Descartes and other dominant philosophical traditions, and imagined matter as active, perceptive and self-knowing. Her unprecedented 1666 text, ‘The Blazing World’, published alongside one of her philosophical treatises, created an entire speculative universe populated by hybrid beings with their own ways of observing and understanding the world.
Taking its cue from the radical call to arms at the end of Cavendish’s Blazing World, Subtile Matter imagines a collection from a world that might have happened — one where the boundaries between categories remain porous, where one thing might become another when you turn your back on it, where the specimen is never pinned down, and knowledge is bodily, interspecies, never quite the same twice. The exhibition asks what might happen if human systems of knowledge were allowed to remain provisional, collaborative, non-hierarchical and alive: if imagination, dreaming, empathy and awe were understood as part of the process of knowing; if knowledge could be made with the nonhuman world rather than extracted from it.
Artist: Luisa Maria MacCormack
Curator: Ellie Lace
Presented by: The Feminist Lecture Program