`Into the Cryptosphere`

`please go here for images of work in progress`

Artist Residency and Exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society, London 2007 - 2008

Opening: Friday 4 April 2008, 6-9pm; --- Exhibition: 5 April – 9 May 2008

funded by the Arts Council England, the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Hertfordshire

http://www.rgs.org/HomePage.htm
http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/Exhibitions/Exhibition.htm
http://www.parabolatrust.org/residencies/cryptosphere.html
http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Issues.php

Mapping could be seen as the most important metaphor and device in my work. My work maps the interaction of cultural and natural systems within the landscape; physical/mental processes and patterns on macro and micro scales including the carbon chemistry of neurotransmitters, the outer suburban street patterns of western cities and the anatomy of animals and plants. By combining these disparate mappings into multi-layered objects and installations I am attempting to question the underlying conventions of such representations and propose a synthesis that amongst other things attempts to map knowledge itself.

My interest in geography goes back to childhood; I have always felt sensitive to the interactions of city and nature. The Sydney suburb I grew up in was in the last throes of transformation from rural/bush area to suburbia. I played on the cement slabs and plumbing of new houses appearing on what had been the last rose farm in the valley.

I am as interested in the map as much as the territory. On trips into town I would examine the street directory as much as look out the window of my parents car. The way land use is represented in maps is as interesting a subject to me as the land use itself. I have a particular interest in changing conceptions of the geography of the world from the medieval or Dantean era, where Paradise, Purgatory and Hell had literal locations within the earthy sphere, through to the gradual triumph of empiricism and science, to a contemporary world embedded with diagnostic sensors and satellites where the human sphere dominates the natural, and our experience of the world is global and panoptic, though mediated and distorted by the very technology that allows such scrutiny.


	`Into the Cryptosphere` `please go here for images of work in progress` Artist Residency and Exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society, London 2007 - 2008 Opening: Friday 4 April 2008, 6-9pm; --- Exhibition: 5 April – 9 May 2008 funded by the Arts Council England, the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Hertfordshire Press Release Poster http://www.rgs.org/HomePage.htm http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/Exhibitions/Exhibition.htm http://www.parabolatrust.org/residencies/cryptosphere.html http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Issues.php Mapping could be seen as the most important metaphor and device in my work. My work maps the interaction of cultural and natural systems within the landscape; physical/mental processes and patterns on macro and micro scales including the carbon chemistry of neurotransmitters, the outer suburban street patterns of western cities and the anatomy of animals and plants. By combining these disparate mappings into multi-layered objects and installations I am attempting to question the underlying conventions of such representations and propose a synthesis that amongst other things attempts to map knowledge itself. My interest in geography goes back to childhood; I have always felt sensitive to the interactions of city and nature. The Sydney suburb I grew up in was in the last throes of transformation from rural/bush area to suburbia. I played on the cement slabs and plumbing of new houses appearing on what had been the last rose farm in the valley. I am as interested in the map as much as the territory. On trips into town I would examine the street directory as much as look out the window of my parents car. The way land use is represented in maps is as interesting a subject to me as the land use itself. I have a particular interest in changing conceptions of the geography of the world from the medieval or Dantean era, where Paradise, Purgatory and Hell had literal locations within the earthy sphere, through to the gradual triumph of empiricism and science, to a contemporary world embedded with diagnostic sensors and satellites where the human sphere dominates the natural, and our experience of the world is global and panoptic, though mediated and distorted by the very technology that allows such scrutiny.

		My title – Cryptosphere should be seen in the context of other ‘spheres including: -The Mechanosphere - Deleuze and Guattari's "notion of the whole sum of machines, automatas, prothesis and engineering processes... conceived through the prism of their dynamic, permanently evolutive relationships with organisms and nature. The “mechanosphere” is not just the “ technosphere”, which would be the totality of machines and sciences on their own. In effect the “mechanosphere” is the critical collusion between machines and organisms, engineering and flesh" ¹ -The Noosphere: Tielhard de Chardin's notion of the sphere of sentience or sum of all the operations and interactions of human (and non-human?) minds. -The Biosphere: James Lovelocks notion of the sum of all the interactions of organisms and environment. The drawing on this page conflates the human with the natural, the anatomical with the geographical. A landscape drainage system and a human vascular system are intertwined into a singlular circulation system. It proposes that we are too deeply implicated in nature to be seen as separate entities. As David Bohm says “unity in the individual and between human and nature, as well as between human and human, can arise only in a form of action that does not attempt to fragment the whole of reality.”² 1. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1992. A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press. 2. Bohm, David. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. p 30, London: Routledge.