Much of my practice unfolds through durational bodies of work, shaped by lived conditions of disability and uncertainty. The works develop as ways of sensing, listening, and becoming familial with materials, place, and bodily change over time. Bilateral drawing, weather translations, spectral photography, microbial and material processes, ecological recording, and the untangling of sensory overwhelm become records of these interactions.

My practice began in the body, before language. Pattern was my first way of orienting, as overwhelm, people, place and tension 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, patterns, and atmospheres as they move through place.

My body registers shifts I cannot always readily process. So the work requires places where signals can remain tangled while I try to resolve them.

So I build campsites for sensory latency, holding patterns where unfinished sentences, partial impressions, and overloaded presences and absences can stay active without needing to cohere. When overwhelm or insurmountability interrupt linear time, these structures hold open a space where alternatives can gather. What I once understood only as a mess of signals, I now also recognise as a sortitious, adaptive movement through possibilities: a way of thinking that makes room for speculation.

Photography lets me hold what I cannot quite see all at once. I work with long exposures, spectral and multispectral cameras, movement and overlays, allowing light, weather and duration to direct what appears. Bilateral drawing begins with two hands moving across a page: a form of notation that records the space between my body and place. These processes often meet on silk or other bodily fabrics, and sometimes paper. Photographs and drawn marks become layered temporalities of geographical, atmospheric and bodily experience. The chimerical nature of the works lets time, light and perception interrupt what becomes visible, giving adaptive, speculative thinking a place to live and unfold, and perhaps making some of those signals comprehensible.

The materials I work with hold memory across many scales. Wind-fallen plants, mistletoe haustoria, chamber lye/urine, lichen, wood grain, minerals, textiles, and frequencies and light beyond human perception carry their own information, their own ways of being with a place.

Lichen and mistletoe continue to teach me about adaptation and interdependence. Working with them has helped me consider co-temporality and the different scales on which organisms may hold and express time. This is helping me understand my own continued experience of layered time.

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.

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.