A L C H E M I C A L W O R L D SAGNIESZKA GOLDA | MARTIN JOHNSON | JO LAW

W O L L O N G O N G A R T G A L L E R Y

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The artists and scientists involvedin this project live and work on Country in the Illawarra. We acknowledge the custodianship of the Aboriginal people of this place and their continued connection to Country.

We would like to thank our collaborators, artist Martin Johnson, Dr Sepidar Sayyar at the Australian National Fabrication Facilities and Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, UOW, Associate Professor Helen McGregor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, UOW, Dr Aaron Burton at the School of the Arts, English and Media, UOW, Dr Nigel Helyer (sonicobjects.com), Jay-Dea Lopez (soundslikenoise.org), and @fungi_of_the_illawarra. We would like to extend our thanks to Jo Stirling, Dr Redmond Bridgeman, Dr Boni Cairncross, John Harris, Stacie Simms, and Mat Wall-Smith for their assistance.

REFERENCES: Bennett, J 2001, The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Graham, L 1968, Marcel Duchamp: Conversations with The Grand Master, Handmade Press.

King, A 2017, ‘Artist Olafur Eliasson on art, science and environmental consciousness’, Euro Scientists, Art And Science Special Issue, viewed 7 October 2018 <http://www.euroscientist.com/Artist-Olafur-Eliasson-Art-Science-Environmental-Consciousness/>

Front cover image: Alchemy: dinosaur trees/Wollemi Pines after the bushfires, 2021, ink and electronics on Ahimsa (peace) silk, 230cm x 235cm. Inside left page - top image: Untitled (alchemical healers:Cymatoderma elgans), 2021, acrylic on linen, 165cm x 165cmInside right page - top image detail: Alchemy: Great Basin Bristle-cone Pine/Pinus Longaeva) and brain coral (Diploria labyrinthiformis) after more than 5,000 years, 2021, ink and electronics on Ahimsa (peace) silk, 230cm x 235cm.Inside right page - bottom image: Untitled (on Country, Mt Keira), 2021, acrylic on Belgium linen, 165cm x 165cm Back page - top image: Alchemy: bioarchivists filling in the gaps |, 2021, screen-printing ink, graphene and electronics on Ahimsa (peace) silk, 112cm x 500cm.

They believed that the practice of turning base metals such as lead into gold, or formulating the elixir of life, a substance for rejuvenation and immortality, enabled individual self-awareness, bodily transformation, and spiritual transcendence. The material and immaterial worlds were not separate spheres but necessarily interconnected as a unified whole. Alchemists deployed imagination, experimentation, and speculation to envision chemical and cosmic structures of a vibrantly animate universe. In alchemy, the practical, creative, scientific, philosophical, spiritual, and personal realms were intimately connected and mutually informed. This practice synthesises

Alchemy the precursor of modern chemistry was a heady mix of magic, superstition and what would one day become science. Alchemists were at the cutting edge between imagining, artifice, and truth.

In the exhibition Alchemical Worlds artists Agnieszka Golda and Jo Law with Martin Johnson are working at the intersection between art and science, at the creative edge between what can be imagined and what can be made real.

Their work in Alchemical Worlds takes us into previously unchartered waters exploring new ideas and using innovative materials and technologies to create ‘magic’ through new interactive, immersive, and sophisticated approaches to art making. That their art is grounded in contemporary issues surrounding climate and the environment provides another deeper layer to their work beyond the artifice of something that is just merely novel or new.

Alchemical Worlds asks the viewer to go beyond the normally accepted passive role of the visitor and take a more active part when visiting the exhibition. Like those early Alchemists searching and reaching for the impossible but creating a new way of looking at the world along the way. This exhibition gives us a hint of the exciting and unknowable possibilities to come.

We would like to thank the artists for sharing their unique work and vision with us and we hope you will be intrigued by art and ideas and immerse yourselves in the experience.

John MonteleoneGallery Program Director

the senses and offers different ways of being and acting in the world.

The histories of alchemy and art are entangled. Alchemists’ efforts to transform materials have an enduring impact on artistic practices, such as the development of colour pigments, chemical baths, dyes, inks, and metal alloys that shaped the world of art. Like these practices of the past, this exhibition brings together the fields of art, design, materials science, paleoclimatology, and filmmaking to envision the dynamism and interconnectedness of Earth’s ecosystems. Art leads the collaboration and intersection of these disciplines, in transforming and transmuting materials such as silk,

linen, wood, graphene, electronic circuits, silver wire, digital screens, and climate data into artworks. In this exhibition, wall hangings, sculptures, paintings, animations, textile designs, and films present shared narratives of diverse alchemical worlds.

In these worlds, undeciphered images from ancient alchemical journals are transformed through the slow process of hand-stencilling and layering of ink on ‘peace silk’ made by the unharmed domestic silk moth (Bombyx mori). Combined with sustainably recycled silver and electronics, the silk wall hangings saturated with colour explore the intimate mycorrhizal relationship between plants and fungi. Here, the audience also encounters bushfire survivors: the only known indigenous stand of critically endangered Wollemi Pine (Wollemia noblis) in a secret location in New South Wales. These so-called ‘dinosaur trees’ are an Australian ancient living species that dates back 200 million years. The memory of local fig trees in the Illawarra region is enlivened with the fluttering of animated forms to suggest invisible exhalations of the living species and otherworldly entities. Climate science research is transformed through experimentation with gold and ochre colours on linen to capture tales of the ancient bioarchivists: together the coral and the tree can hold climate records for millions of years. A soft lump of silvery grey substance is transmuted into conductive graphene screen-printing paste. The paste is then used to transform images of the oldest tree in existence, the 5,000 year-old Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva), and the 2000 year-old brain coral (Diploria labyrinthiformis)into a repeat pattern on ‘peace silk’. As audiences’ hands hover above the graphene prints a series of animated carbon rings tumble across the fabric length.

Alchemical Worlds unfolds these

stories from an ecological perspective. Framed within Jane Bennett’s theory of enchantment materialism, the exhibition attests to aesthetics’ critical role in attending to the world of things. Paying attention to what is around us, Bennett claims, has the capacity to lead to ethics of generosity (Bennett, 2001). The making of artworks enacts this ethics by bringing forth the ecology of things – not as categories or isolated entities – but as a vast interconnected community. An ecological perspective, therefore, places great emphasis on the relations between entities and their environments composed of living and non-living things, on a multitude of spatial and temporal scales. By attending to the ecologies of things, art draws out the liveliness of things within spaces of enchantment, returning us from the fragmented glimpses of scientific reductionism to a place of connections.

The constellation of artworks in this exhibition attends to these strong yet delicate connections to explore encounters with the ‘more than human’ and to move from ethical codes to ethical actions.

Olalfur Eliasson tenders, “Art can offer people direct experiences of phenomena… an important step towards motivating people not just to know something but also to respond to it, to feel the urgency of it and to take action” (King, 2017). Artistic and scientific practices as alchemy share the potential to transform knowledge and shift perceptions and perspectives on human, non-human, and non-living

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.Marcel Duchamp (Graham, 1968, p. 3)

WORLD HISTORY HAS SPAWNED NUMEROUS ALCHEMISTS.Alchemy as a discipline of thinking and making was born

out of the intersections between philosophical, proto-scientific (as the forerunner to chemistry), and spiritual traditions. It involved experimental and speculative approaches. Alchemists across time and diverse cultures pursued knowledge of the material and immaterial realms through transformation and transmutation of matter.

connections that make up our world. Alchemical Worlds is the result of this synthesis. It tells stories of fantastical worlds immersed with living things, inanimate things, and all that is in-between. In creating the artworks, we activate new connections between the eco-politics of slow textiles methods with sustainable materials and technologies, to discover environmentally sensitive responses and ecologically sustainable processes through experimentation. Cascading from these art-science collaborations are many stories of our material ecologies, our changing climate, and ways that we can make a difference. It is our hope that Alchemical Worlds opens up a space for rediscovering and feeling the intimate connections of the animate universe.

Dr Agnieszka Golda & Dr Jo Law