We the Ecosystem
2020–2021
We the Ecosystem is a single body of work that tends to how bodies, environments, and time move together as interdependent systems.
This work formed during a tumultuous period when the separation between body, environment and time collapsed, and convergences became a common occurance through shifting river mouths, moving land masses, and bodies living inside overlapping patterns of chemistry, climate, and force. Attention moved toward how bodies and landscapes already pass through one another.
The work grew from daily dual-handed sensorimotor drawing and fingertip mark making using plant inks, bacterial inks, charcoals, and pigments gathered from site. These drawings were not studies of place. They were ways of entering it through movement, pressure, pattern, and sensory response. Some were digitally collated into layered composite fields, allowing non-verbal pattern recognition to guide form.
During this period, sustained reading into microbial life, horizontal transfer, and endosymbiosis unfolded alongside lived experience of illness and autonomic instability. These were not separate lines of inquiry. They informed one another, shifting how autonomy, agency, and belonging could be understood.
We the Ecosystem names this realisation. Humans appear as shifting collectives of cells, microbes, waters, minerals, histories, migrations, and atmospheres. The body is held as a temporary convergence of many lives moving together.
The silk banner from this work was digitally collated from layered sensorimotor drawings made on Country with local plant and bacterial inks. Though printed in black and white, the image retains the logic of convergence. Body, terrain, movement, and residue blur without dissolving. Figure and environment remain braided rather than opposed.
A site-specific installation of We the Ecosystem was realised in 2021 in Jimna State Forest, at a meeting point of Kabi Kabi, Jinabara, and Wakka Wakka Country. This forest verge, damaged by fire, forestry operations, and colonial land management, was under visible pressure. Remnant Bunya, Silky Oak, and Quandong carried long memory amid disturbance. The work entered the site quietly, as an act of relation within an unsettled ecological condition.
Through this work, independence loosened as a dominant frame. What became perceptible instead were shared labour, distributed damage, and uneven regeneration. Repair remained uncertain and ongoing.
We the Ecosystem marks a moment in the practice where the individual gives way to interdependence as lived experience.
'We the ecosystem’. (Jimna, at a meeting point of Kabi Kabi, Jinibara, Wakka Wakka Country) After a fire devastated much of the area in late 2019, this small verge of forest in between state park and forestry operations, clambered to regenerate itself. The land around it is visibly traumatised: fire, misuse, machinery, lack of education of Country, defunct and brutal colonial land management systems. This little plot holds part of what would have been rainforest and has remnant Bunya, Silky Oaks, Quandongs etc. After the fires, the older trees left in these minute spaces dropped many seeds, waiting for the rain and for the creeks to flow again.
If in our ‘renewable’ forestry management we could just leave some old trees, to hold the ground, to leave a lineage, to hold the wisdom of the history of weather, disease, knowledge and patterns of the area, it would make a large difference to the resilience of the forest community. This is now science, but known by pre colonial communities for aeons. If you’ve held a 400 year old tree compared to holding a 40 year old tree there is a slowness and depth of feeling that is hard to explain. I wish we would acknowledge the sensory information that is all around us, the sensory information in our bodies, and the larger being we live with, this Country, this ecosystem, and our place in it. We are a convergence of life. We are not separate.
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River mouths change, land masses move, our bodies live within complex, living, systems of patterns. Sentient organisms deep within the ground communicate over many kilometres, spreading messages in embodied language.
Humans like small planets, filled with microfauna and flora, are moving patterns, like waves, light, wind. We are a convergence in currents of time, our microbial selves immigrating and migrating, we are never stationary or solid. Be moved.
