“I work with the strangeness of everything else besides us, the beings whose vegetal, fungal, algal, lichen and insect ways of sensing remain unknown to me. That unknowing feels like a kind of hope.”

Everything else besides us…

Much of my practice unfolds through durational bodies of work, shaped by lived conditions and uncertainty. The works develop as ways of sensing, listening, and staying familiar with materials, place, and bodily change over time. Media and contexts shift, but practices remain. Bilateral drawing, weather translations, microbial and material processes, ecological listening, and the untangling of sensory overwhelm cross-pollinate, expanding and contracting across years.

I work through the conditions of endosymbiosis, climate, body chemistry, and material duration, using drawing, sound, film, photography, sculpture, and textiles as they are needed. Spectral photographs, data bands, layered drawings, wood bending, weathered images, and plant ferments become records of these crossings.

My practice began in the body, before language. Pattern was my first way of orienting, as weather, people, landforms, tension and silence imprinted themselves on my nervous system. These sensitivities formed within a weathered history of systemic and intimate violence, where vigilance was a way of staying alert to harm. That adaptation remains, now working as a way of noticing land, time, beings and atmospheres as they move through place.

My body registers shifts in light, air, mood, and the currents moving between beings, often beyond what I can readily process. So the work requires places where signals can remain without resolution. These registrations are not stable or singular. Translating them into the work is a methodological act, one way of staying connected to what is moving through me and through the places I live.

So I build campsites for latency, holding structures where unfinished sentences, partial impressions, and overloaded absences can stay active without needing to cohere. These ‘outcomes’ do not hold meaning in themselves. They are structures that allow sense to arise, or not, alongside materials that carry their own sortitious agency. I keep daily records within these structures, in languages that develop within my environment, to hold provisional spaces where signals can remain porous. When overwhelm or insurmountability interrupt linear movement, these layered structures allow a multiplicity of gathered arrangements to remain available for speculation.

Parts of the work move through areas of a place that remain unknown yet still influence perception across sight, sound, and other sensory registers. Absence, mistranslation, and incoherence move through the materials, which carry forms of agency I cannot direct. Ways of being hold sense beyond my understanding.

The materials I work with hold memory across many scales. Wind-fallen plants, mistletoe haustoria, chamber lye, lichen pigments, grain, minerals, and frequencies beyond human hearing carry their own ways of knowing place. Working with them means moving alongside those intelligences rather than directing them.

Lichen and mistletoe have taught me that individuality is a shared expression. Working with them helped me understand co-temporality as a lived condition, where different organisms hold and express time at once, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in exchange. This experience of layered time informs how the work holds multiple processes together.

My pace is shaped by disability and by the tuition of these materials. The work unfolds as it needs to, guided by what my body can hold and by the timings embedded in material processes.

What began as bodily adaptation has become a way of reading land, time, and bodies together, tracing how subtle movements pass between them.

Everything I make grows from the understanding that my body is not outside the systems that shape it. The work stays with the seen and unseen, the present and the absent, following how patterns collapse and reform over time.

Much of this work develops in ongoing conversation with my partner, Ross Annels. Our thinking, making, and ways of sensing place shape the studio we build together.

Karla Pringle lives and works on Wadawurrung Country, Victoria, after relocating from Kabi Kabi Country, Queensland, in 2024.

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