Critical Mass

The genesis of Critical Mass is an installation by Julia Christey of one hundred birds’ nests. This work, titled Being and Non-being, draws on writer Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past. We can think of the composition of our everyday lives as non-being, in contrast with moments of being when we experience a shock, discovery or revelation. 

These memorable, yet mysterious, moments of being are often tied to the natural world – Woolf recalls hearing a hum of bees while walking the beach as a girl.  We can get closer to life by paying attention to those everyday moments that we might otherwise overlook.

In Critical Mass, each artist focuses on fragments of the natural world to document, express concern and celebrate. If we shift and elevate the shared materiality of all things we will be reconciled in our orientation to nature and the material world – a revelation indeed.

One way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as ‘natural resource’ is to class them as fellow beings – kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonise, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.  

Ursula K.Le Guin 

The catalogue features an essay by architect Matthew Grant. 

Curated by Megan Lyon and Julia Christey, hosted by Ramp Gallery, Wintec.