Terra Culture
Exploring agency and culture beyond the human experience
Terra Culture is an exploration of terra-biomes — symbiotic bodies of flora and microfauna, intimately connected by underground fungal networks.
Audiences will encounter an immersive space, where interaction with living sculptures invites sensual encounter with the artist’s terra-biomes to reveal our parallel and synergetic existences. The exhibition will also provoke a visceral self-identification, uncovering the human state as its own multi-species biome.
Over two years, this project has evolved through collaborations with ecologists and computing researchers in conjunction with sculptors and fabricators, ultimately leading Tainsh to create portals connecting us with more-than-human intelligence.
“My new series of terra-biomes will reveal the interspecies relationships integral to all life, including our own bodies. This perspective poses the question: What can these systems of mutuality and diversity teach us about living as cohesive beings, deeply interconnected with the biosphere and the other beings
we share it with?”
– Bianca Tainsh
Interested in Bianca’s artistic process leading up to this exhibition and want to learn more?
Exhibition Documentation
A glimpse into the creative development of Terra Culture:
Bianca Tainsh
Bianca Tainsh is a multi-artform artist, based in Meanjin Brisbane and on Lake Weyba, Kabi Kabi Country. Through a hybrid practice of contemporary art and fluid forms of ecological activities Tainsh explores issues such as the
cyber-saturated human’s disconnect from the natural world and the search for spirituality in the epoch of digital culture. In Tainsh’s current work, Neo-animism forms the trope for artefacts and rituals that unveil new forms of coexistence and being.
Tainsh’s work takes the form of video, digital and semi-traditional media, assemblages, installation and live art. Organic imagery, materials and processes find new meaning as they meet the aesthetics of digital production. Tainsh considers the more-than-human organisms she works with to be collaborators in her artmaking.
This project was supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and generous donors through the Australian Cultural Fund.
With special thanks to the project’s collaborators – Jarred Wright for hand-blown glass works, Jason Kahl of Crafted Bespoke Fabrications for steel fabrication, Perides Art Foundry, Dr Janet Wiles of Human Centered Computing at University of Queensland and Finley Wegener for sound composition Sounding Myc-a.
Images courtesy of the artist.
