We the Ecosystem

2020–2021

We the Ecosystem formed as a declarative bridge between my early work with microbial and material intelligence and the wider ecological field that the practice was moving toward. It sits at the point where the body, the environment, and time could no longer be treated as separate domains of experience.

At this point in the work I was thinking deeply about convergence. River mouths shifting. Land masses moving. Bodies living inside complex systems of pattern, chemistry, climate and force. I was no longer interested in representation of environment as scene or symbol. I was interested in how bodies and landscapes already move through one another.

The work grew from daily dual-handed sensorimotor drawing and fingertip mark making with 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, rhythm and sensory response. At times they were digitally collated into layered composite fields, allowing non-verbal pattern recognition to guide the form.

During this period I was reading deeply into microbial life, horizontal gene transfer and endosymbiosis. At the same time, my own body was living the reality of distributed systems through illness and autonomic instability. These conditions were not theoretical. They were bodily. They shifted how I understood autonomy, agency, and belonging.

We the Ecosystem names this shift. It is not a metaphor. It is a statement of condition. Humans appear not as isolated individuals but as shifting collectives of cells, microbes, waters, minerals, histories, migrations and atmospheres. The work holds the body as a temporary convergence of many lives moving together.

The silk banner works from this series were digitally collated from layered sensorimotor drawings made on Country with local plant and bacterial inks. Though printed in black and white, the images retain the visible logic of convergence. Bodies, terrains, movements and residue blur into one another without collapsing into abstraction. The work holds figures and environments as 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 small verge of forest, damaged by fire, forestry operations and colonial land management, was visibly struggling to regenerate. Remnant Bunya, Silky Oak and Quandong carried long memory amid heavy disturbance. The work was installed as a quiet act of relation within this tense ecological condition.

Through this project, independence as a dominant cultural narrative began to unravel. What emerged instead was a sense of existence as shared labour. Regeneration as collective. Damage as distributed. Repair as neither immediate nor guaranteed.

We the Ecosystem does not resolve these conditions. It holds them in tension. It marks the point in the practice where the idea of the individual gives way to the lived reality of interdependence.