In 2017 Kathryn Cowan put up a show in SLOT titled #otherworlds. In her eerie sci-fi landscape, bathed in UV light, a gentleman calls on a young woman - a fairytale - where they both are wearing the fish bowl style space helmets of comic-book astronauts. It’s a tale, like all good sci-fi tales that begins in whimsy and ends with the bite of reality – a fairytale no more.
For Kathryn that painting was a door. It opened to possibilities leading to, as she put it “away from the element of taste”. She began making assemblage works in styrofoam, bent wire, plastic tubing - the simple materials that become the stuff of wonder in the hands of a prop maker working on a B grade sci-fi movie. On that score Kathryn’s inventiveness doesn’t disappoint. Her inventions appear organic, possibly from the ocean's depths? No, they are “Biomorphs- hybrid organisms made with a combination of organic and synthetic materials” she insists.
These assemblages are a sci-fi speculation on Future Nature where an artificial intelligence has reconfigured the idea of a plant to more precisely cater to the needs of a post human world. Some #otherworld - where gentle-he-bots call on young-she-bots in a never ending cycle kicked off by Elon Musk when he launched his first colonisation of Mars - perhaps.
Gareth and Kathryn began working together when she asked him to provide a sound work in response to her piece, #otherworld2. Now Gareth has provided a sound track that can be accessed by scanning the QR code with a mobile phone (with this post, click on the QR code to access the sound). Seemingly already science fiction, Gareth’s poetry has evolved into sound at his site, Apothecary Archive where he describes the watery landscape of Future Nature.
Of course it’s a fantasy - but it stands uncomfortably on a few toes as we watch yet another flood wash through, this time down the Namoi to Gunnedah and wonder at Pakistan where “floods were caused by heavier than usual monsoon rains and melting glaciers that followed a severe heat wave, all of which are linked to climate change. It is the world's deadliest flood since the 2017 South Asian floods and described as the worst in the country's history. On 25 August, Pakistan declared a state of emergency because of the flooding. By 29 August, Pakistan's minister of climate change said around "one-third" of the country was under water, affecting 33 million people'' Wikipedia.
Tony Twigg
