Forest Telephonists

Tara Gilbee and Karla Pringle

AIRSPACE Projects, Marrickville NSW

3–19 November 2023

Forest Telephonists is a collaborative work between Tara Gilbee and Karla Pringle. The artists chose to act as a kind of message bank to several environments. Their bodies, negotiating the space of long-term illness, became readers of nuanced atmospheric phenomena. They traced and processed a deeper temporal register for themselves. A connected sensuous proxy for what is absent as much as what may be present.

They messaged each other not with words, but with affects sent from their respective umwelten. They worked with the distance between their sites and the differences in scale between their environments, hoping that something within those transmissions might become legible.

Gathering notes dense with information that they may or may not understand, Tara and Karla witnessed themselves moving and making with the knowledge of their deep interrelatedness and the whisperings of their endosymbiotic bodies. This language was not theirs. It belonged to biomes, deep time, space and place. Their behaviours transcribed biotal interfaces into acts, and they moved into the work as open switchboards for their environments.

They had hoped they would overhear themselves and understand something new. Instead, they came to believe that their interoceptive relationships with place, a convergence of signs and languages from an array of beings, may not be speaking to their consciousness at all. These entangled languages moved them. They began to see they were not the operators, but the signals themselves.

Forest Telephonists (video), 2023

Collaborative video by Tara Gilbee and Karla Pringle

14 minutes, two-channel installation

Not for sale

Slow-motion transmissions of time, site and movement sent and received between Tara and Karla from their respective environments. The work holds the delay between sending and reception as part of its substance.

Karla Pringle

Mystic Radio, 2023

Silk and wool, sustainable natural fabrics, non-toxic reactive dye

165 x 137 cm

Edition of 6 + AP

Printed with the cellular structure of a mistletoe haustorium (Amyema cambagei) and its host, a She-Oak (Casuarina cunninghamiana). Mistletoe is a forest connector and ecosystem builder, a plant that redistributes energy, water and nutrients across species.

Overlaid on this cellular structure is the artist’s daily bilateral topo-somatic drawing practice. This practice draws together sensorimotor drawing, automatic drawing, proprioceptive attention and trauma-based movement therapies. It is used as a means of recording intersections between body and environment, and as a way of maintaining physical and mental balance.

Karla Pringle

This is the sound of me holding your hand loving you, 2023

Cast polyurethane, natural clay, silicon mould, plasticine layer

Dimensions variable

Not for sale

This work is a cast of the artist’s hand holding natural clay from a waterhole near her home, made with the intention of care and love. When held to the ear, the form acts as a resonance chamber, similar to a shell, amplifying inner bodily sound. The plasticine layer on the surface records the haptic traces of those who hold it. The work accumulates touch.

Tara Gilbee

Shield, 2023

Hand-moulded beeswax, approx 5 x 3 cm

Eye-shield offered to visitors to place on the body, where warmth softens the wax and collects fingerprints and environmental material.

Murmur, 2023

Digital print on cotton rag

594 x 841 mm approx

Developed from proxy photographic devices placed for months within a pine forest. The paper weathered in place, accumulating visual and material traces through duration.

Forest Telephonists holds a shared sensory field across distance. It stays with partial transmission, misreading, overlap and delay. The work does not resolve what is received. It allows the signal to remain unstable, distributed, unfinished.