Dani Andree
Tethering Now
Tethering now critiques a Western mode of relating to plant-life founded on the reductive, calculative predetermination of living beings through their usefulness as resources. With destructive material outcomes, the exploitative practices promoted by such worldviews compromise relations between living beings. Principles of extraction, cultivation, speed, and supersedence exemplified in the industrial production of textiles and clothing provide a context for understanding why and how the forms in Tethering now have been made.
At the centre of Tethering now is an ongoing practice called the nourishment ritual, undertaken since 2021 in the gardens of the artist and a Tagetes lucida plant’s changing residences. Observations and contemplations transmitted within this nourishment ritual are starting points for the mixed-media and time-lapse pieces in the exhibition. Here, the textile form is reclaimed as a palimpsest; tracing, tracking, and shaping the development of the plant-human relationship depicted in the nourishment ritual. These emergent material outcomes foreground the ontological difference embedded in such relations.
The requisition of the artist’s focus and movements necessitated by the nourishment ritual has been central to the cultivation of a disposition where meditative-contemplative thinking and its potentialities can be realised. A kind of vegetal training of human movement and thinking is realised through the repetition, duration, and location set apart from everyday demands placed on the technologically immersed body. The inverted plant-human relations of cultivation implicit in this training imagines a holding of the artist and viewer in place, on call for the Tagetes lucida.
Dani Andrée is an artist and research candidate at RMIT University, Naarm (Melbourne). She has an interest in the way that functional, everyday spaces enter our conscious awareness. Spatiotemporal manipulations, bodily endurance, and breakdowns in function are employed to examine ontological qualities of and relations between matter and bodies in space.
Past projects have included the phenomenal experience of time slippages while walking through city spaces and the domestic as a perpetual point of return. An overarching sensibility throughout her practice is a preoccupation with progression, forward or outward movement.
Her current research posits encounters with plants that consider the tension between their role within artworks as matter and their existence as intelligent, self-determining subjects. Artworks creating the conditions for dialogical relations between plants, the artist and the viewer provide a counterpoint to instrumentalist ways of interacting with plant life.
This exhibition follows Perennial series shown