[-empyre-] Preternatural

[Celina Jeffery]

Preternatural (2011-2012) – a multi venue exhibition series in Ottawa, Canada drew from the idea that art itself is a form of preternatural pursuit which questions a world that understands itself as accessible, reachable and ‘knowable’. This exhibition called for a consideration of the habitual ways by which nature is known to us through the scientifically informed colonial lens, a questioning that unfolds the limits of the sub-sensible imagination. Here twelve artists across three venues resituated nature as a heterogeneous network of organic and synthetic materials constantly interacting.
At the Canadian Museum of Nature, one of the participating artists, Marie-Jeanne Musiol (Quebec, Canada) created an electromagnetic herbarium, a collection of images which register the energy of plants as light uses a quasi-quantifiable and systematic method, but with an intuitive, artistic and philosophical aim rather than a scientific one. Musiol’s herbarium is a botanical collection of plants, specifically of the Eastern Forests of Canada, but their taxonomic structure is that of energy. The notion of a classificatory system is present therefore, but the idea of an energy botany is speculative, explorative and poetic. Musiol’s images suggest that plants do have sensitivities, they are extremely fragile, responding to atmospheric weather - heat and cold, the sun and moon, as well as the emotions of human beings surrounding them.
More recently, I have been interested in situating such ideas within the context of the environmental crises and specifically within concepts of material agency. In the exhibition, These Waters Have Stories To Tell (2018) at Glynn Vivian Gallery, UK, a series of video and performance based installations invite audiences to consider and empathize with oceanic properties. Amongst them were Julia Davis’ immersive video installation which gestures at how the cracking of icebergs in the Antarctic Peninsula can be heard in low-frequency underwater sound 5000km away; while Christian Sardet and The Macronauts visualize the molecular, aquatic life of plankton and its relationship with plastic, reminding us that the ocean is co-constituted by more-than-human elements. This exhibition along with many others in the Ephemeral Coast series consider how art can create dialogue with such rapidly depleting blue ecosystems and, specifically, in what ways we might bear witness to ecological loss.

We are now past both prophetic futures and the mourning of the past, but this new age of the Anthropocene can perhaps be recast by Aquarius  - bringing with it a significant ethical premise, a new way of thinking with as opposed to talking to.


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