“Future Farming continues my investigations into the patterns and codes used to represent and ‘map’ the natural world. It also draws on an interest in the relationship between prints – both traditional and digital – and scientific thought. The works reference the historical role prints have held in circulating and controlling information about the natural world. The works also refer to contemporary projects in mapping nature such as genetic profiling and Dolly the sheep. By using techniques such as conventional collage, I draw attention to nature as a construct that is open to change, manipulation or reinterpretation.”
Left: Al Munro, ‘Future Fruit 10’ 2007, digital prints on found maps, cut and collaged, 35 x 28cm
Right: Al Munro, ‘Sugar Diffraction’ 2012, pencil and pigment marker on paper, 35 x 35cm
“I am interesting in using drawing-based media to examine processes of inscription and translation in relation to scientific representations of the natural world. The work in this exhibition stems from research in crystallographic image collections in Australia and the UK. Crystallography is the field of science which studies and maps the arrangement of atoms within a solid. My attraction to crystallographic diagrams has been due to their translation of the natural world into the visual and mathematical language of geometry and pattern; the endlessly repeating grids of complex symmetries which map the molecular structure of all organic and inorganic matter hold an endless fascination for me. The drawings in the series Patterns from the invisible world take a number of complex crystallographic grids as their starting point. By using the intersections of the grid lines as a template I map a random series of points in space to create new maps of an undiscovered invisible world.”
The film progresses to a dissection of the fruit that echoes the look and feel of a gory surgical scene. Sarah Field’s quaint tea set includes human hair and fur which recalls the surrealist Méret Oppenheim sculpture of a fur-covered tea set, ‘Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)’ made in 1936.
