“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.“

My practice began in the body, before language. Pattern was my first way of knowing. Weather, people, landforms, tension and silence settled into my nervous system long before they became part of a creative practice. These early sensitivities formed inside a culture shaped by systemic and intimate violence, and the hyper attention that once kept me alert to harm has become a way of noticing land, time, beings and the subtle atmospheres that move through a place.

My body registers the world like weather, picking up shifts in light, air, mood and the currents moving between beings. Translating these unfiltered signals helps me recognise the shapes forming through me and through the places I live in. It is one way I relearn what was taken and stay connected to what holds me. The work often begins in the strangeness of what exceeds human sense, the parts of a place that remain unknown but still influence perception. Absence, mistranslation and incoherence move through the materials, which carry a sortitious agency that I cannot direct. My sensing follows the shifts between inner weather, body chemistry and the weather of a place.

I work through drawing, sound, film, photography, sculpture, textiles and lichen and plant chemistries. These movements appear as spectral images, data bands, layered drawings and the slow changes held in plant ferments. The work becomes a record of these crossings.

This record often forms a kind of co terrain, a shared field shaped by symbiotic, vegetal, fungal, bacterial, atmospheric and bodily signals moving together across time. Working this way opens a co temporality, a meeting place where the rhythms of body and environment move alongside one another. It is a mutualistic space that sits slightly outside ordinary time or geography, holding an emergent logic that appears when different forms of sensing remain in relation.

Lichen and mistletoe have become two of the clearest teachers in this work. They offer slow lessons in resilience, reciprocity and the ways symbionts carry their own histories of place. Through them I began to understand co temporality as a lived condition, where different organisms hold and express time at once, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in exchange.

The materials I work with hold memory across many scales. Wind fallen plants, mistletoe haustoria, chamber lye, lichen pigments, grain, minerals and spectrums beyond human sight all carry their own ways of knowing place. They are not tools or metaphors. They are intelligences shaped by climate, soil, species entanglements and deep time. Working with them means moving alongside those intelligences rather than directing them, letting their shifting tempos and cycles shape the process.

My pace is shaped by disability and by the materials themselves. The process unfolds as it needs to, guided by what my body can hold and by the tempos embedded in the materials.

What began as bodily adaptation has become a way of reading land, time, bodies and the subtle movements that pass between them. My practice is shaped by ruptures in the culture I was born into and by wider patterns that taught my body to notice before it could speak. Making work is one way I re pair these breaks, not by smoothing their edges but by staying with complexity.

Everything I make grows from the understanding that my body is not outside the systems that shape it. My practice sits with the seen and unseen, the present and the absent, and the movements that fall outside human perception. It belongs to the places that make it and to the ongoing work of dismantling harm, re pairing ways of knowing and being with place, and tracing how patterns collapse and reform across time.

Much of this work grows 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 on Wadawurrung Country, Victoria, Australia, after relocating from Kabi Kabi Country, Queensland, in 2024.

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