Installation
Space 3 Gallery
Sydney, April 2003
Recreating a biotic community from an underground perspective, the installation includes over four hundred root systems hanging overhead in an interior space. Collected from the Mallee bioregion in central New South Wales, Australia, the root systems represent a diverse cross section of the Mallee understory, and include over thirty different species sampled from the forested woodlands and stabilized sand dunes. Two seperate channels of video are projected through the hanging root systems onto two adjacent walls of the space. Comprised of a combination of video footage and vector animation, the projections vacillate between narrative and non-narrative segments.
The work explores how an individual fits into a particular place, and how that place is defined by community. The piece explores these ideas from an ecological perspective in narrated segments on the Mallee community and the North American tree species, the Quaking Aspen. A clonal species, the quaking aspen is considered the most massive living organism on earth. What appears as thousands of individual trees are interconnected below ground by a massive root system, forming one massive plant. At times a single tree can occupy an entire forest thousands of kilometers wide.
Other segments of the work feature non-narrative animations which express the parallels between ecological and human ideas surrounding community and individual. Ideas of our connectedness, our dependence upon community, as well as the fractal patterns that emerge from that connectedness are expressed, underlining the natural relationship humans have with the biotic world.
Root Project was a collaboration with biologist Huw Morgan
Exhibited as part of the Under.Ground exhibit, and was featured on The Program, an initiative of the Australia Council for the Arts.
